LAOS Laser

Hi All,

I have a possible option to buy an ex-demo Chinese laser in uncertain condition with no support. It is a short trip away and I can power it up to test the laser tube. It would be priced at around US$600 which is half of what I would pay for a new unit with shipping, VAT and duty to get it here and then my support is in China to cope with oft reported shipping damage.

Having a small laser like that has been my dream for quite a while now.

Finding the LaOS group a month or so back seemed like a serendipitous event and made me start saving pennies. The project would offer me an alternative if I could not get the software or electronics on the unit to work. The group would let me give back a bit of my experience in adding a few bits of information to the Wiki and making corrections that would assist others newcomers like me to understand the wealth of information that is sometimes over my head when I first read it.

All good so far, and then came a small hitch, the wiki was converted to Redmine. Now I had never heard of Redmine so I had no opinion to start with. I had high hopes that the project would get the new wiki in place (turns out the project pages were the new wiki look) and I could do my little bit to further progress and learn for my future laser purchase. In the last month or so I have tried to get a bit of a feel for Redmine and found that it has some illustrious client sites and is no doubt very powerful I just cannot get personal satisfaction from it. I am older (45) so get set in my ways pretty easily and have enjoyed editing on Wikipedia and the RepRap site and a few others and even started a wiki of my one to see how the management side works so have become familiar with the MediaWiki engine, I expected others to be similar.

What I would like is to be able to add information and corrections to the wiki that I can navigate (I understand the content is being moved in stages so not expecting perfection yet) that I could recommend to others. However there is nothing more than a strange 1980's academic institution text style feel to it that looks like it is part of the back office of a project and not the face of a open hardware movement in need of visitors to achieve critical mass. I registered and am able to post these forum entries and bug reports so most of it seems to be working.

Each time I visit the Redmine part of the site I want to back away from my laser acquisition because I don't like to visit the new side of the site. I understand it is a rather irrationally extreme reaction and I should only be feeling a mild disquiet from the change in the look and feel. I cannot help myself. I spent 30 minutes trying to find a way to edit a wiki page, in the end I suppose I do not have permission or the pages are locked but could not find a user page or contact link for the site administrators on the Redmine site. I thought I could try to search for advice on Google on how to edit a page but there seemed to be little there. Some links got me through to the same help files that are linked from the help pages at LaOS. It hinted at how a new page could be started that I could not follow (like instructions for solving a Rubik's cube, degree required) and no mention of editing a page. It must be so obvious that it requires no mention in the docs and on the sites but I cannot fathom it.

My sincere apologies for the 'kind of' rant but I was having a hard time staying motivated in this project even though I am not a potential user just yet and hope there is a simple answer to feeling better about the new wiki system that I can get to grips with before I am driven away.

Regards

Kalle

P.S. If there is a way to only send one notification email for a page until one has visited it that would make for a lot less clutter from minor edits.