Author: jester

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Open Social – 1st July – Huge Success :-)

A big thanks to everyone who came to last nights social night. We discovered during the evening (Thanks Rob) that we have officially had the keys for our new home for 1 month and what better way to celebrate that by having a few drinks and watching a movie.

We watched Sneakers ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ ) last night with the projector on one of our newly painted walls and it worked quite well. We had 6 visitors to the space last night and it was great to show people around the space after so much hard work has gone into making it our new home.

Our Social nights are always great ways to check out the space as well as have a chat with a few of our members and get a feel for what we want to do with the space. As usual, we have events on in the space during the weeks ahead and the list is always growing. I even got a few ideas for some bi-weekly/monthly group nights and I’ll try ask about these on the list next week. RFID and/or lock picking anyone? 🙂

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epicenter 09

TOG are exhibiting at the Irish Software Show, epicenter 2009 which begins this Wednesday in Trinity College, Dublin so if you’re in the area please pop in to meet us.

epicenter 09
epicenter

epicenter is a 3-day event covering Open Source, Web, Java and Microsoft – there are 80 technology sessions with evangelists coming in from the US, Canada, Spain, Austria, England, Scotland and Ireland. In addition to the technology sessions, Jennifer Condon (Head of Enterprise Ireland’s Software Sector), Barry Smyth (founder and CEO of ChangingWorlds which recently sold for $60m) and Colm Mulcahy (Co-founder Sasspoint) will deliver the morning keynotes – See http://epicenter.ie for full details.

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TOG @ Epicenter 09

Barry at IrishDev.com has been kind enough to offer TOG a chance to show ourselves at the Irish Software Show Epicenter by offering us a stand so we can make people more informed about hackerspaces in Ireland. So between the 24th – 28th of August we will have a stand in the Hamilton Building in Trinity College (location), run by TOG members answering any question people may have about hackerspaces.

To coincide with this Rob have started on the first big project in the hackerspace and we are welcoming others to help. Given that we have a nice group of people within TOG interested in software and playing with LED’s he are starting to build a 8x8x32 LED cube (thats 2048 LED’s!!!!) that can programmed to display an interesting array of patterns and images. Software to make this structure do wonderful things will also be created in the future as a future show-case for the kind of things that can be done in hackerspaces.

We will also have Mousebots and a demo of the SpokePOV in action on the day. If you have any projects that you have completed, that show the type of thing us hackers like to do, get in contact as it would be great to show people the great things  that can be done in a hackerspace when we can put our minds to something.

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Canonical Visit

Yesterday was Microcontroller Monday and we had some visitors from Canonical pay our space a visit last night. Canonical are having their development meeting in Dublin this week and after a busy day of work, they popped in to have a look around and a chat. We also may have given a few of our visitors the hackerspace bug and we may have a new hackerspace in China some time soon. 🙂

Busy at TOG
Busy at TOG

Among our visitors we had Steve Conklin (sconklin to those of you in the interweb) who is a member of the Antitronics Hackerspace in Huntsville, Alabama and Hugh Blemings who, lucky for us, likes too play with arduinos and is in the process of co-authoring a book Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware. I can’t wait to read it when its finished.

Steve was good enough to post his pictures on his flickr which can be found here.

Antitronics

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Coding Wednesdays 7pm

Calling all web-monkeys and code-monkeys.

On Wednesdays I will be inviting anyone that wishes to be in an environment that is friendly to a coder to come along and make some progress or a start on a project of your choice.

We all have ideas and great intentions to work on some code whether its PHP, JAVA, C or one of the many programing languages that are known within TOG, but at home there can be alot of distractions. I want to provide a time where fellow programmers can come to the space and get some work done. With the added bonus of having other programmers around, you have the option to bounce ideas off a fellow coder.

Or maybe you’d like to learn a programming language and have been wondering how to go about it. We have a tonne of books in our library, so grab your laptop, grab a book and get going. I’d be happy to help you get started, as I’m sure others there on the night will also. Any questions, contact me directly.

So put it in your diaries, and see you Wednesday at 7pm

*EDIT* If you are not a member you are welcome to come to the night, I just ask you email me to let me know so I can keep track of numbers (contact form in full post)

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