Recently in announcements Category
Last week, I went and took Che's awesome Quahog and Crossbones image, ran it through Illustrator's trace function and popped out a halfway decent piece of line art. Then I added 'DC401' in American Typewriter and printed out a couple of copies on transparency film. Yesterday, I exposed a screen for an hour, rinsed out the unexposed part and printed up 10 shirts. The shirts are all men's large 50/50 cotton/poly super cheap-o shirts I got at Walgreens a while back for $2 each on which to practice screenprinting.
Of course, I have to keep one for myself, and one goes to Che, since it's his artwork. That leaves 8 shirts up for grabs. Two are super collectible "error prints". In my fine benevolent dictator way, I'll come up with some sort of random and completely unfair way to distribute the shirts. Come to the May meeting to see if you get one.
Bruce Wattendorf is a Rhode Island based RepRap maker. He and his son have working on their RepStrap (because it has non replicated parts) since January 2007. Bruce will be bringing his RepRap in to demo its capabilities and talk about the process of actually building one. For anyone who's dreamed of printing 3D objects, this talk is for you.
Date/Time: 7 May 2008 - 1730-1900
Location: AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence. Directions
Update: We made it to the Make: blog and there's interest from people who won't be able to make it to the meeting. Fear not! We take video of most of the talks and intend to do so with this one too. Subscribe to the RSS feed and you'll catch the video when it shows up (usually a week or two after the talk itself.)
Date/Time: 5 Mar 2008 - 1730-1900
Location: AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence. Directions
March 5th marks the start of our new night for DC401 meetings at AS220. From now on we'll be meeting on the First Wednesday of the month. This change will allow us to stick around at AS220 after the meeting and do our eating and drinking there, which should entice more people to stick around for the post talk discussion.
This month we have NickD and TylerW presenting "The Internet is Serious F&*%ing Business". We'll have to wait for the talk to see where the good hack is (bring your ShmooBalls in case one is lacking.) Knowing NickD's presentation style, this is guaranteed to be a laugh riot and should not be missed.
"The Internet is Serious F&*%ing Business will cover the social internet as it stands today. Covering all aspects of the Social Internet trend from businesses built around the Social Internet and Web 2.0 applications to how Social Internet trends have changed our personal internet experience and the way we communicate with people."
Come on down and lulz it up with NickD and TylerW on our new night.
No last minute trips to do on-site work for Dan this month; he's going to give the first in what will be a series of talks on Penetration Testing.
Please join us next Monday, Feb 11th at 1730 at AS220 for Dan King's talk on penetration testing. Dan is lucky enough to get paid to do penetration testing for a living at a leading managed security service provider.
Getting started with penetration testing can be a challenging task. Only by using a layered, structured approach can we deal with this mountain of data. Quite often new and complex vulnerabilities are daunted and difficult to wrap our brain around, but by taking things one step at a time, we can slowly pull the layers of the onion apart.
This talk hopes to provide people with a rough structure and a method of getting their feet wet. I hope can spark conversation and discussion.
As usual, we have the performance space from 1730-1900. The talk will start around 1800. Show up early, grab a beer and join in the pre-talk socializing.
Yesterday, I ordered the MiniPOV3 kits and the extra LEDs we'll need for the Trippy RGB light workshop with Mitch Altman at this month's meeting. We'll have 10 kits available. Currently, 3 of them are spoken for. If you want to get in on the fun, post a comment to the meeting announcement claiming your spot.
The cost for the kits will be $19 each.
Just to remind everyone, the meeting is Monday, Jan 14th at AS220 from 1700-1900.
Date/Time: 14 Jan 2008 - 1700-1900
Location: AS220, 115 Empire St, Providence. Directions
We totally lucked out! Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone, will be passing through RI and has agreed to come by and do a workshop and a talk. Big thanks go out to Brian Jepson for swinging Mitch in our direction.
The Trippy RGB Light is made from hacking a MiniPOV kit. It's quick to build, which is good given our short window at AS220. It's also versatile. When you take it home, you can re-hack it into a Brain Machine, a Solar Bug Bot or an open source TV-B-Gone.
Mitch gave us a variety of topics on which he could speak. We're getting our geek on with the workshop, so I figured something non-technical might be a nice foil. Mitch will be talking on Community Building, something we'll need to do a fair amount of if we want the hacker space to get off the ground and prosper.
Since we'll be doing a workshop, we'll need get started a little earlier, so be at AS220 at 1700 if you want to take part in the workshop. We'll get the talk going sometime around 1800, as usual. If you want to do the workshop, post a comment and include your email so I can send you a confirmation. I'll do a bulk buy of the MiniPOV kits and extra LEDs and you all can pay me back at the meeting.
Update: It would help if I enabled comments, eh?
As I announced at the December Meeting, NickD and I have started talks with the AS220 folks to include a Hacker Space in their plans for the Mercantile Block. AS220 has recently started the process of acquiring and planning the renovations of this building. They feel that having a hacker space as a tenant in the building would be good for everyone involved. It would give us a home for it downtown, rather than being stuck in an old warehouse somewhere. It would create a place where the artist community can interact with the hacker community, with the potential for incredible collaboration.
However, the renovation of the Mercantile Block is going to take some time. Based on their experience renovating the Dreyfus building, AS220 has said that they probably won't be ready for us to move into the hacker space until early 2010. This is both good and bad. It's bad because we're all impatient and live in an instant gratification society and would probably like to be able to move in right now. It's good in that it will give us a good amount of time to build the community that we'll need to support it.
The plan that we have in mind for the hacker space is similar to the way that other current hacker spaces are run. We will have an open membership model with dues that will be required to support the space. Based on some rough "back of a napkin" calculations, we'll probably need about $2500/month of income from member dues to support the space. That means we need at least 50 members contributing $50 per month. If we can get the membership up to 100 members, the dues could drop to $25/month.
You're probably asking "what kind of things would happen at this hacker space?" First off, we'd have a main open room for meetings and gatherings. We'll also have a small computer lab for classes and ad-hoc code hacking. We'd also like to have an electronics lab where people can work on hardware projects. These are just the beginning ideas for the space. Anything is possible with the support of the membership.
I know it's a ways off, but if you're interested in being involved with the hacker space, please comment on this post or join the DC401 mailing list and chime up there. We really need to know we have enough community support for this to be a long term sustainable space.
Please join us next Monday, Dec 10th at 1730 at "AS220":http://as220.org for Larry Pesce's Talk on Hiding Rogue APs. Larry spends his free time busting open embedded devices and bending them to his will with some a soldering iron and his twisted mind.
He'll be giving us a tongue in cheek/soldering iron in hand look at hiding rogue wireless access points. Expect to learn a thing or two and be entertained.
As usual, we have the performance space from 1730-1900. The talk will start around 1800. Show up early, grab a beer and join in the pre-talk socializing.
Please join us next Monday, Dec 10th at 1730 at AS220 for Dan King's talk on penetration testing. Dan is lucky enough to get paid to do penetration testing for a living at a leading managed security service provider.
Getting started with penetration testing can be a challenging task. Only by using a layered, structured approach can we deal with this mountain of data. Quite often new and complex vulnerabilities are daunted and difficult to wrap our brain around, but by taking things one step at a time, we can slowly pull the layers of the onion apart.
This talk hopes to provide people with a rough structure and a method of getting their feet wet. I hope can spark conversation and discussion.
As usual, we have the performance space from 1730-1900. The talk will start around 1800. Show up early, grab a beer and join in the pre-talk socializing.
