As you can see from our time lapse of the NYCR stage and dance floor (actually just our workshop floor without tables) we had a great time. Thanks for being awesome friends of NYCR. Hope to do it again, bigger and better, soon.
Be prepared. The next one will be even more awesome.
Also search for tag NYCResistor on flickr for more awesome photos.
When you plug in, or join the wireless network at NYC Resistor, you are joining a very special network. We’re one of the first networks to join with Agora Link. The North American arm of a global Research network that is linking hackerspace’s internal networks together into one awesome collaborative mesh. We’re tied in with the ChaosVPN in Germany, and as of this past weekend we have 50 registered ( not necessarily active yet ) end points. Anyways, if you are interested in this sort of thing, you can read more about that here:
What does this get us? What’s the payoff? Well, we’re just starting to get to work on demonstrating that. First up on deck is a plan to host an international CTF competition using hackerspaces and other labs as the meeting points for teams. So look forward to more details on that in the near future. But, it won’t stop there. We’ve got a bunch of really great ideas that should be popping up over the next year.
Shuttle Atlantis just lifted off on its final voyage. There are 2 shuttle missions left before the end of the shuttle program. I suggest not missing a single launch, and if possible seeing them live. The shuttle program has to be the most inspirational scientific program currently operating. Nothing really makes me more proud to be a human being, or living in the times that we do than watching one of these rather good looking vehicles get launched into the heavens and far beyond.
Really looking forward to another more ambitious space program from anywhere at all, since it seems NASA won’t be pursuing constellation. =(
But let’s look at Atlantis’ rich history. This good ship has flown 32 missions ( 31 of which have completed successfully, with 32 looking beautiful ). She’s been in the shuttle fleet since her flight readiness firing Sept. 5, 1985. 25 years this shuttle has been in service, defying a decision to decommission it in 2008. Atlantis was intended to be relegated to a support role for Endeavor and Discovery, but Atlantis was born to fly and that’s just what she’s doing right now at 2500 mph.
Atlantis made history June 29 of 1995 when she was the first shuttle to dock with the Mir space station as part of STS-71. Before that during STS-30, Atlantis launched the first interplanetary probe launched from a shuttle. The Magellan probe was sent to explore Venus.
Many people have contributed to Atlantis’ successful missions over the years, but Rockwell International has the distinction of having built her. So to the engineers over there, I am sure today’s flight is especially gratifying.
Anyways, Atlantis, from all the folks at NYC Resistor. Thanks for being utterly amazing. Enjoy retirement, I hope you find a really great home.
Fun Fact, Atlantis has traveled 115,770,929 miles ( 186,315,250 km ) and counting…
Quoting an excerpt from Mitch seen on Make Blog:
Notacon was way wonderful this year. The Hardware Hacking Area was way bigger than last year (as is the case *everywhere*!), and it was totally hopping! More than a third of people at the con made something!
Me and Jimmie joined in on the Hardware Hacking Area set up by the new Makers Alliance hackerspace in Cleveland. We love giving these workshops at hacker conferences and hackerspaces around the world! It is just so incredibly gratifying to see so many people happily making cool things together! That’s why we do this! We actually don’t make any money from doing it — but we do break even, which means that we make enough from each workshop to allow us to pay for the overhead of the next one. And it works out really well! We love teaching people how to make cool things!
The only bummer about Notacon this year (besides for my train being canceled, necessitating me taking a Greyhound to NYC!) is that someone(s) stole a bunch of my kits and Jimmie Rodger’s kits. $585 worth of my kits were taken, including a pile of FTDI cables, a pile of MiniPOV3 kits, plus a bunch of other kits. Jimmie had 2 Arduino boards taken plus a few of his kits, which comes to about $250 of his stuff taken. Last year was my first Notacon, and though I loved it more than enough to come back this year, $690 of my kits were stolen there (again mostly FTDI cables and MiniPOV3 kits).
Out of all of the workshops I’ve given over the last few years, I’ve never had kits stolen from any of them — Notacon is the only place. That is so odd, because Notacon is such a great conference! It draws a great group of people, most of whom get to know one another over the weekend. The organizers do a great job of creating an intimate atmosphere with lots of interesting talks, demos, workshops, and way fun activities. I’d recommend it to anyone. I’d also love it if whoever has taken my kits would return them.
Cornfield Electronics
572 Hill St.
San Francisco, CA 94114
Mitch Altman [email protected]
Mitch is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He’s dedicated himself to going around the planet ( quite literally ) and getting people of all ages excited about making stuff. I helped Mitch run the hardware hacking space at Notacon the year before last, and it was amazing. This year was even better thanks to the local Cleveland hackerspace guys. And I’ve been pretty adamant about Notacon being one of my favorite conferences. It’s small, but it’s got great people, and one of the only demo scene events in the US. Hearing this really makes me feel horrible. I’ve been to almost every Notacon since Notacon 1, and I’ve never had an issue inside of the conference area. People tend to look out for each other. I can’t imagine what someone would be thinking when they took this stuff.
Anyways, if you have any idea where / what happened to Mitch’s stuff please step up and right the wrong.
I am not currently aware of any sort of formal effort to help get Mitch back on his feet with a supply of kits. But, I suppose the biggest issue here is time. Getting new boards, components, and kits put together for upcoming events could be tough if not impossible. Hoping whoever is responsible has a change of heart. Spreading this throughout the community hopefully will get their attention.
Anyways our thoughts are with Mitch right now.
I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.
It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.
As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.
The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.
To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.
Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.
So there’s been some news regarding Scrabble making some rule changes as of late. I’m not sure I hold with all those rules, but I figured if we’re looking at making scrabble better I’d toss my hat into the ring.
My new scrabble tile set provides game players with a fully international character set through the miracle of character set encoding standards. By using my entirely hexadecimal tile set you can deploy your scrabble words in full unicode, or simple ascii. I think however, I might need a bigger board. The memory space on this bit of antiquity is a bit on the small side.
More on My Flickr
Dear Parker Brothers, this is a parody. Please do not threaten litigation. I mean you no harm. In fact I am quite sure my suggestion of homebrew tile sets can only increase interest in scrabble and scrabble related paraphernalia. I am your friend. Love me as I have loved you. Please.
There’s a lot of discussion going around on the web about the controversial new device placed onto the free market by Apple Computers, the iPad. I was thinking about the app store approval process, and the potential for how shall we say, abuse that might occur through such a system. That’s when it occurred to me, Apple is right. Developers should be able to safeguard the experience of their users. So I opened up the terminal.
Here’s the php code that you might want to use on your web applications to let iPad users know that their device might not meet the user experience requirements that you feel are necessary for the full enjoyment of your applications. You know, requirements such as screws on the device, or the ability to multitask, or install software without an approval process controlled by some megalomaniac in Cupertino. I’ve modeled the response to be somewhat familiar in wording to apple developers. You know, just to show that I care. It can very well be inferred that websites and web pages are complicated and one needs to seek help only from experts when it comes to their design. Just so that are aware, if you are someone who is looking for great websites for small business enterprises, just follow the link given | small business web design perth
Anyways, if you like me feel that the iPad is ruining the web experience for users, and don’t want to see your web applications tainted by it’s inferior design choices use the code below to protect yourself and your work. You aren’t making a tool, you are creating an experience. Remember place the code such that it executes before your page data is displayed. If you have a header include or something that would be an awesome location.
The venerable and highly esteemed Mr Stabby. An orphan robot found upon the streets of new york, and eventually dropped off at NYC Resistor has found a home in our hearts. Luckily we’ve kept him thus far from plunging a knife into that home. We did however decide that since Mr Stabby means so much to all of us, that we’d celebrate his birthday. This year stabs got to take out a pinata shaped like a penguin.
Here’s a video of stabs showing us that even the surliest robots can sometimes find a home full of love, and support if hackerspaces are willing to open their doors to them.
Stabs… this one’s for you man.
(Updated: Photos from the event posted to Flickr)
From thenexthope.org:
2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.
Traditionally HOPE conferences have been more about the talks than the physical projects, but with the 2008 conference that started to change, and this time organizers are pushing for an even stronger showing of projects and tech art. This call for projects goes out to hackers, makers, technologists, artists, and free thinkers around the world. Come share your passions and ideas with 3,000+ of your soon-to-be closest friends.
If you want to pitch in and you don’t know what to do…
* Lounge/Hang-Out Spaces
o HOPE usually has work spaces, seminar spaces, and crash spaces. Can you organize more chill zones for simple conversation?
* Games
o You have 3,000+ people, three floors of a massive hotel, an RFID tracking system, and The City of New York. What can you do with that? Teach, play, explore.
* Art
o What’s your vision of the future? Show us using hardware, software, electricity and imagination.
* Night Life
o The talks usually stop around midnight. What else could be going on between midnight and 9am? Plan it, make it interesting, make it happen.
The main visual theme of the conference is visions of the future from the past, so things that reference The World’s Fairs, The Jetsons, flying cars, DaVinci, Asimov, and so forth would be very appropriate. However, projects are not required to carry the central theme in any way. Some projects, such as OpenAMD, are already being planned to be simply visions of the future from the present, rather than referencing any futurist thoughts from antiquity.
Some projects already in the works include…
* The Attendee Meta-Data Project (“OpenAMD”)
o An expansion of the RFID crowd tracking project from The Last Hope.
o Needs programmers and hardware hackers, and is prime for spinoff projects.
o Many possibilities exist for the development of games, data mining, and visualizations.
o Ask about the OpenAMD API.
o http://amd.hope.net/
o contact: [email protected]
* Radio Statler!
o Streaming 24 hours a day live from the expo floor.
o Needs people to do shows, experienced engineers, reporters, and people with interesting audio gear.
o Needs a large isolation booth.
o http://radio.hope.net/
o contact: [email protected]
* Installation Art
o The Next HOPE invites artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art.
o Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations, they can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field.
o This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and an online gallery with artist biographies will be set up for promotional purposes.
o What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements?
o contact the curator: [email protected]
* The Hackerspace and Hardware Hacking Village
o A 24 hour gathering point for the hackerspace community, a hardware hacking workshop area, and a supply post for hardware hacking tools and expendables.
o Are you involved with a hackerspace? Reserve a special area for your group to chill and show off projects!
o Looking for hardware hackers and hackerspaces from all around the world to come together and and share ideas.
o contact: [email protected]
If you need help with your project, you can find a lot of people on our forum before the conference starts, at talk.hope.net. The HOPE wiki is also available for your use, wiki.hope.net.
Contact the projects coordinator with a plan of action, along with your space, power, time, and data connection requirements: [email protected].
Sure it’s 3:20…. but fsck it!
Here’s my day 4 script. A c based script that will generate an NYCR logo… of sorts.
Anyways… it’s utterly horrendous code… but it’s 3 am so leave me alone about it… plz.