The Dublin Hackerspace
Software nerds will understand 🙂
Well the cake didn’t last long. What do you expect with a bunch of hungry hackers. Great to see everyone at our social evening tonight. Great to talk to some visitors too who are interested in joining up. Some interesting new ideas. Keep in touch with us as things are moving along steadily with TOG 3.0
http://www.meetup.com/Tog-Dublin-Hackerspace/
https://twitter.com/TOG_Dublin
Thanks to everyone who showed up to our meetup last night. We had a great mix of members and visitors…… great to see everybody. Things are moving along with our new space. We ordered our members individual keys this week. We have a number of other administrative tasks on the go which are progressing well. The builders are making great progress in the space too. Our neighbour upstairs is getting ready to move in.
We might do another social next week, so keep in touch with us here and on our other channels….
http://www.meetup.com/Tog-Dublin-Hackerspace/
https://twitter.com/TOG_Dublin
When we did the big move from Chancery Lane, it was a good chance to do a bit of a clear out. Certain things got earmarked for the skip. There was a question mark over Tog’s old sofa. It was a faithful old thing. So what if it was a bit rickety, with a few screws here, and a bit of board there to keep it together. Many a weary traveller was glad of it when they came to the space. So should we take it with us to TOG 3.0 or not?
This indecision was not helped by the fact that we were donated a swanky black leather sofa recently. Anyway the moving truck came and went, and the sofa was still there so it looks like the decision had been made. Into the skip with it! Now a sofa is a big old thing and would take up a lot of room in the skip. Enter sledgehammer. One of our members was a feeling a bit stressed lately, and he reckoned that a bit of sledgehammer therapy would do him good. Suffice to say it was Member 1, Sofa 0. It wasn’t pretty. You can see here.
When you move house, you get to move all of your stuff too. TOG is no different. You find things that you had long forgotten about. There’s been some pleasant surprises already. Like finding a tenner in an old pair of jeans that have been through the wash.
All good things come to an end, or so the saying goes. And so it is with TOG’s lease on Chancery Lane. It’s time to shut up shop. After 31st October, Chancery Lane will be no more. The place has been good to us. We will have great memories of the last 5+ years there. So we need to give the place a good ‘ol send off. We’ll be having our last open social there on Saturday 17th October from 19:00, and we want to make it a big bash. Come in and cook your last pizza. Drink your last beer and marvel at how much junk we’ve cleaned out of the place.
We have a new space all lined up and waiting. We have great plans and we’re very excited. Come along to the social and we’ll tell you more. If you’ve never been to the social, or even TOG itself, you’ll find it a great alternative Saturday evening in town. Look around….talk to members and visitors about projects or things you’d like to do. Talk about beer brewing to some of our brewer members or about locks to our lock pickers. Ask about joining as a full member. If you’ve been promising yourself that you must go to an open social one of these days, then this will be your last chance. There’ll never be another one in Chancery lane…… never, ever, never, never, ever ever again 🙂
The space stays open until the last member is left……usually the small hours of Sunday morning. The open social is free to attend for members and visitors alike. Our doors will be open from 7pm.
Take the TOG test by selecting the correct answer.
Q: Your washing machine dies and you get a new one. What do you do with the old one?
1. When your new one is delivered, let the delivery crew take the old one away.
2. Take the old one to your local WEEE recycling centre.
3. Take the old one apart to see how it works. Harvest all the useful parts and use the parts to make something else.
The correct answer of course is number 3, but you knew that anyway. That makes you the kind of person that would probably like TOG.
So the trusty washing machine from 1996 was getting a bit tired. The drum bearings needed replacing (a relatively straightforward job)…they were squealing louder and louder. The drain pump started to make a racket and wouldn’t empty after a wash…. maybe it was seized or something jammed in it. Looking inside, it was obvious that it was leaking a bit also, probably when it was spinning. Time for a new machine.
Taking apart the old one, there’s a lot of interesting and useful bits. There’s a nice AC motor and an electronic speed controller. There’s some pulleys and a drive belt. There are also assorted hoses, electrical bits and valves. There’s also the stainless steel drum. Removing the drum from its aluminium mounting, and adding a few steel legs….. we have instant patio heater. Who needs a chiminea! Being stainless steel, it wont rust either.
We gave the new heater a test run this week and it worked a treat. Come in and stand around it at the next open social. Lots of pics here