Hello World
Welcome to Sibu's Fab-Academy page, where I'll be logging my activities during the Fab-Academy.
About me
I'm Sibu Saman, I have a Masters Degree in Physics from
UM-DAE CBS. During this time I gained experience in experimental physics, experimental design, computational electrodynamics and GPU computing.
Apart from that I taught myself some basic analogue and digital electronics. I'm good with Linux, computer hardware,programming in C and I also know little bit of networking.
I'm familiar with micro-controllers, Arduino, R-Pi etc. I also have some experience with assembly language.
I like to make things to solve my problems, or sometimes just for the fun. For example, during the Pre-Acadamy (what? keep reading!) I started building (with a friend,
Yadu)a soldering station (link at bottom of the page). I chose this project because there was only one soldering station for all of us, as someone burned the
other. This is how I learn most of the stuff, picking up as and when I need them.
Recently, I assembled a 3D printer and I have a sufficiently good knowledge about building, maintaining and troubleshooting the 3D-printer and similar machines. As for other machines; during the Pre-Academy course I learned how to use most of the machines available at Fablab. Pre-Academy was a course, may be the only one happened so far, at FabLabs in Kerala, India. The purpose was to bootstrap us for the Fab Academy. Since we wouldn't have a local instructor for the Fab-Academy, we are supposed to have some basics knowledge of the machines available and get familiar with the principles and work-flow of the Academy. For the Academy, we were supposed to learn from each other with the support of our remote instructor.
We (me and Yadu) are planning to setup a maker-space at our city of Kozhikode and the Fab-Academy will definitely help us do that.
My setup
Though I have a laptop (broken right now, need to change a blown capacitor), I don't usually carry it with me. I have a portable OS. A 250GB Samsung EVO 850 MSATA SSD in a USB 3.1 enclosure (which supports USB Attached SCSI, UAS for even faster access). I can just plug this to any available PC and boot from it, I'm ready to resume my work. I don't have to carry a bulky laptop with me to have my own personal desktop. And the performance is excellent as the SSDs are really fast, I get about 500 MB/S; booting speed and overall performance is a lot faster than what I get if I were to boot from an internal, old fashioned 'spinning' HDD.
I installed
Arch Linux, in the SSD. I like Arch mainly because of the simplicity, not in a general sense, for someone who may not be familiar with Linux internal may not appreciate
the simplicity, but that's the fact. The OS is configured via 'config' files rather than GUI tools for everything. Also the packages are as close as it can get to what
the upstream developers meant it to be. This is also a great way to learn Linux, just installing this is a great experience.
One important aspect of Arch Linux is that it follows a rolling release; what it means is that you don't get frequent releases like Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10, 15.04 ... etc.
You just install once and update the packages as and when it releases, there are no fresh releases hence there are no versions and no re-installations every now and
then.