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?