Tog Hackerspace

The Oculus Rift is a Virtual Reality headset which enables the wearer to get full stereoscopic vision in a 3D environment along with real time head tracking. The manufacturer describes it as “a next-generation virtual reality headset designed for immersive gaming.”

Last night before the biweekly Lock Picking meet-up, I (Sean Nicholls) brought in my newly acquired Oculus Rift developer edition to Tog and offered anyone who wanted an opportunity to play with it.

I should also say that an invite was sent out on the Tog Mailing list, which if you’re not already subscribed to, you should be! or else who knows what kind of cool stuff you might be missing out on!

Enough of me blathering on, here’s some photos of it in-action:

We are delighted to be invited to this year’s Electric Picnic, taking place this weekend. The new and improved Bubble Bird House will be spreading bubbles all over the Midfield area.

Since the Dublin Mini Maker Faire, we have replaced the fans of the bird house with new more powerful ones. This should help the bubbles blow even further around the site. It turns out that bubble mixture and motors don’t mix . We had to replace all the motors due to corrosion. But never mind all that, with all the replacement parts now in place version 2.6 is better than ever.

To find us, look for the Science Gallery tent ( our hosts)  in the Mindfield area. Map Here

And now we have a (wonderfully detailed) guest post from Jon on what we got up to at GaelHack last June.

In January of this year discussion started on the Irish hackerspace mailing list about the feasibility of holding the first hackerspace conference in Ireland. Hacker camps and conferences around the world have become a great way for the community to exchange ideas through talks and workshops, usually over the course of a few days where attendees are encouraged to help create a hacker village through staying overnight within or around the conference, which helps to create a vibrant and fun atmosphere for all.

A few dates and venues were discussed online as well as deciding on a name for the conference. A few names were in the running but eventually the event was named GaelHack and after reconnaissance visits by some hackerspace members to potential venues Mount Melleray Scout centre County Waterford was eventually chosen. This venue checked quite a few boxes for the event. For one thing accommodation was exceptionally cheap both onsite and in the nearby hotel. Also the venue contains numerous rooms and hallways ideal for hosting different workshops. Finally with it being a scouting centre there was of course a campsite right beside it.

Continue reading “GaelHack recap”

This intermediate workshop will focus on teaching people to build a basic multi-threaded server and learning to work with data in a multi-threaded environment. This will be a very hand-on workshop with an open discussion throughout on different server models, sockets & IO, throughput, threads and data-management. The focus of the workshop is get people to build their own server in Java before the end of the session with help and demonstration provided. The workshop will require proficiency in Java and a solid understanding of OO-concepts.

Pre-requisites: The workshop will require proficiency in Java and a solid understanding of OO-concepts. Attendees must also bring a laptop with JDK & Eclipse IDE (optional) set up and configured.

Continue reading “Workshop: Multithreaded servers in Java”