hacklab.to

Hacklab has an internal collection of quotes. I obtained permission from a number of people quoted so that I could publish some of the more awesome ones.

<_stillinbeta_>how do you function as a person without the page-up key?

<_stillinbeta_>I am not an IRL to IRC gateway!

Geordie: “Write documentation like a homicidal axe-wielding person is reading your code… Who knows where you live and is easily frustrated.”

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The third meetup of the Toronto RepRap User Group was a massive success!

We had about 20 people show up, with about 5 RepRaps. Socrates from the Singularity Weblog (who previously did a post on Hacklab) kindly filmed our talks and took pictures!

We had a few short talks by Lance, Adam, Chris, Matt, and Andre which you can watch online (part 1, part 2, part 3). The speakers and topics were:

• Lance: Using and sourcing glass build platforms for your RepRap
• Adam: Building a giant RepRap, his new extruder design, coatings for the build platform.
• Chris: Follow up on producing lenses with 3D printers.
• Matt: Questions for the community.
• Andre: Printing his parents house (watch it print! And another one!).
• Chris: A new programmatic CAD tool, ImplicitCAD (including some never before publicly seen features!)

Thanks again to hacklab for hosting us! Our next meetup will be on March 26th, again the last Monday of the month (can we make this a consistent thing? Maybe!). Since things were starting to get a bit cramped at hacklab, between all of us and the printers, Site 3 will generously be hosting the next meetup.

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone that you too can be a speaker at the next meeting of the Toronto RepRap User Group! It’s nothing formal: just get up and talk for five-ish minutes. No need to contact me in advance, just turn up and tell me before we start the talks! I will be very grateful for more speakers!

(Also, there is now a mailing list for organizing our meetings and discussing Toronto-RepRaping issues.)

There’s going to be a Toronto Haskell Users Meetup at hacklab on March 7th starting at 7pm. Come by and meet your fellow Haskellers!

This will be the first one. I’m really looking forward to meeting other Haskellers in person!

Haskell Users of Toronto, unite!

You may optionally sign up for this meetup on eventbrite.

Quantified Self is a really cool movement of people doing self tracking using technology — for example, one might use a device to monitor their heart data or when they’re at home, and then analyze it. One idea several people around the lab have been toying with is applying these ideas to organizations one is a part of. Just like individuals can benefit from Quantified Self by gaining objective information about themselves, organizations may be able to similarly benefit. (We admit, our motivations mostly boil down to: data  is cool and graphs are pretty.) The natural place to begin, of course, was with hacklab!

We (Sen and Chris) were really excited about this and have done some initial analysis. Hacklab (like, we think, most hackerspaces) had a lot of sources of data laying around, waiting to be analyzed:

• doorbot (in my opinion, our gold mine)
• Google Calendar
• IRC Traffic
• Twitter Traffic
• Mailing List Traffic
• Blog Hits
• Hacklab Public Computer Activity?

So far, we have only worked with the doorbot data.

Activity Levels

Unless the door has been unlocked, entering Hacklab requires one to use a small fob, unique to each member. The program responsible for processing these, doorbot, will unlock the door if it detects a member. It also logs the entry in a database. This is a valuable source of data about activity at the lab, but there are a number of ways in which it can be flawed. If a member works on a project on the side walk outside, they may enter and leave a number of times in a matter of minutes, but this doesn’t actually mean there was more activity. On the other hand, a member may enter along with another or on when the door is unlocked, making them invisible. Furthermore, Fob’s may be reassigned over time, and we have no way to know who the former owner was. The first concern is mitigated in the following data by considering only the number of entries by unique members each day.

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Mark your calendars: Monday the 27th will be Toronto’s third RepRap User Group Meetup! We’ll be meeting at hacklab (location info) at 7pm! Bring your RepRap/Makerbot/3D printing awesomeness!

Meet your fellow RepRap enthusiasts! Share knowledge, learn about the awesome things people are doing, and have a great time!

Everyone interested in 3D Printing is welcome. People who are being driven insane by their obsession with the awesomeness of 3D printing are strongly encouraged so that they can benefit from contact with the similarly afflicted.

I’m super excited to have this happen and am really looking forward to seeing you there!

You can read a post about the second TRUG meetup on digital crusader. You can optionally sign up at eventbrite (this will make it easier for people to get in touch with you after the event).

On Saturday Feb 11th, I’ll be teaching an Introduction to Python workshop. It will go from 10am to 4pm, with a break for lunch.

Python is a popular programming language, known for its simplicity, ease of use, and elegance. An excellent language to start programming in.

We’ll cover some basic programming concepts. What that will include will depend on how fast we go :)

Please RSVP — we have limited space!

We just has hacklab’s first Burrito Night. It was a massive success.

Yay Burritos!

I organized vegetarian ingredients, Eric organized chicken, Nick brought Jalapeno peppers and Daniel lent us his grill/press. Our expenses were 40 dollars for generic ingredients and 6 dollars for the chicken. We made 65 dollars, after expense that left us with 19 dollars for hacklab. Yay!

Haskell is an awesome purely functional language that I’ve been becoming more and more obsessed with in recent months. I consider it to be the most elegant language I’ve ever worked in and want to introduce more people to it!

So, on Monday, August the 8th, 7pm/19:00 I’ll be teaching an introduction to Haskell workshop! Come and learn about laziness, type classes and (the awesome power of) monads!

Please note: This is not an introduction to programming class. You will not be able to follow along if you don’t have experience programming. I am planning to do a day long weekend Introduction to

Programming/Python workshop sometime in the near future that would be much more appropriate for you.

(Sorry about the late notice. I posted to discuss and then forgot to put up a blog post.)

Update: And it went awesome! There was a much bigger turn out than I expected. Here are some notes:

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On Monday May 16th, 19-21:00, I’ll be doing an introduction to transfinite numbers. Topics will include:

• Cardinals and Ordinals
• Cantor’s Diagonalization Argument
• The Continuum Hypothesis
• Transfinite Induction

Transfinite numbers are really cool, since, well they deal with infinity, don’t match your intuition’s about infinity, and have a tendency to drive people insane!

Unlike previous math workshops, there is no prerequisite knowledge for this workshop. It should be lots of fun! I hope to see you there.

On April 25th, at 7pm/1900, I will be doing an integral transform workshop. This workshop will introduce ideas like convolution and the Fourier Transform (and possibly L² Spaces, the Laplace transforms or Fourier Series). Examples of applications will include solving PDEs.

Integral Transforms and the Fourier transform in particular are very powerful ideas. The Fourier transform changes from looking at functions in terms of amplitudes at points in time to amplitudes at frequencies. It has applications to audio and image processing; see examples of what it does to these images (though note that the author is using discrete 2D Fourier transforms, which are a little different from what I’ll be showing).

They’re also very useful in ODEs and PDEs, making them invaluable in physics, including electronics.

NOTE: You should know what derivatives and integrals are if you intend to come to this workshop. I’m really sorry, but I simply won’t have time to teach introductory calculus and cover this material. And it isn’t nice for people who do know calculus if I try to do so.