I care to introduce myself, my name is Adam Evenden. Over the last few weeks I have slowly been moving into my new role as the Photo Journalist in Residence, at the HackLab.

Tuesday have been a magical time at the HackLab for me over the last 2 years that I have spent visiting the Lab. Having met many interesting individuals, heard many great ideas, seen many grand projects, and have always been excited to come back. I foresee meeting many new members in the future who I have not had the previous pleasure of meeting, and the enjoyment I have experienced in the lab so far extending into my new role as the Photo Journalist in Residence.

Over the recent years the lab I have had the opportunity to witness many entertaining moments at the hack lab, as well as triumphant progress within projects. I would like to share within my first post some of the moments I have captured at the hack lab over the last few weeks as the Photo Journalist in Residence, as well as some moments that I have captured while visiting Iceland’s hacker space Hakkavélin.

One of our members has been arrested on a number of charges related to the G20.

Byron is innocent until proven guilty, and as a member of the lab and a friend we are concerned for him.

HackLabTO is a non-profit organization which encourages people to socialize, share knowledge, and work together on technology projects. We run classes, workshops, and a community space in Kensington market.

The HackLabTO board of directors is responsible for the legal structure behind the lab, and is accountable to the members. Tonight we had the first meeting with our new board members, Dan Fraser and Chad Mounteny. It was quick and efficient, and we got lots covered; the minutes are up on the wiki here (registration-required). Fred Supinski, who was one of the initial Board signatories, is passing on the torch but staying on as a member.

We’re still looking for members to step up to be officers of the corporation – an email will go out to you all shortly.

-Leigh

HackLab.TO is having a job fair!

We know a lot of people who work in various tech fields. Some people are looking to fill positions at their companies, some are looking for new jobs, and others are finishing university and looking to break into the field. We’d like to help get you in touch with each other.

Bring your resume: we’ll have representatives from companies actively looking to hire people. Bring your business cards: we’ll have a lot of people from the local tech community who are interested in professional networking.

Attendance is free to people who are job hunting, although we ask that people use our ticketing system to RSVP– our space is limited, and we don’t want to be overwhelmed! The event will run from 10AM to 4PM on April 4th, with no registration for specific time slots.

For more details, and to sign up:

http://hacklabjobfair.eventbrite.com/

Spread the word, especially for companies recruiting or people looking for contract work– the more job opportunities available at the fair, the bigger of a success it will be.

Notacon is coming up, and it would be cool to get a bunch of people from Toronto to come along.

NOTACON, an annual conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, explores and showcases technologies, philosophy and creativity often overlooked at many “hacker cons”. Our desire is not to supplant other events, but complement them and strike a balance that has gone unnoticed in our community for far too long.

With each new year we build upon the successes and knowledge of the previous years. Our goal is to enlighten, educate, and entertain attendees, presenters, and staff alike. We do this by finding new ways to apply technology to graphics, art, music, or social interaction.

Notacon espouses an ethos of exploration, participation and positive contributions. Hence, while some of the material we may cover is controversial or potentially “black hat” in nature, we feel it is important to openly discuss all topics so that others can learn from the experience and create something good, fun or interesting from it.

Events during Notacon run from Friday morning through Sunday afternoon. These include over 40 presentations, contests such as “Anything but Ethernet”, game shows, prize giveaways and a whole lot of who-knows-what. Anything can happen, and usually does. New in 2009 we will be offering a Thursday night sampler, which will be free of charge and open to the public. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

If you would like to join the community, please explore our getting involved section. Be sure to check out our archives from previous years, featuring information and recordings of our past content.

Last year we had multiple cars head down (it’s only a 5 hour drive to Cleveland), and good times were had by all. It would be great if we could organize a caravan this year and bring as many people as we can to show support for this excellent event.

There will be a “temporary hackerspace” set up at Notacon, with help from people from other spaces including NYC Resistor, HacDC, and the not-yet-opened Pumping Station One. This will include representing and showing off the hacklab: our space, what we’re doing, our projects. Anyone who’d like to help out, whether just by attending or by putting something together to show off, would be very welcome!

A challenge has also been thrown down from people in these other spaces: we should show them (and everyone else) some of the cool things we can do by participating in the Anything But Ethernet competition. This can be the place for us to show off and engage in some friendly competition with our friends in hacker spaces across North America… anyone want to submit something?

For the past couple of weeks a few of us have been meeting up at the lab to learn some Python.  Some of us are complete beginners, while some of us have been programming profesionally for years.  It makes for an interesting evening and we’re been learning lots.

We’re basing the sessions on the book Python for Software Design: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, which is available for free online.  We’ve been impressed so far with the book’s clarity and the quality of the example code it comes with.

After a few successful sessions, we’ve decided to make this a more regular / official meeting at the lab.  It’ll be every Thursday at 7PM until around 9, though we have gone later in the past, and some of us show up earlier as well.  Feel free to drop in our IRC channel (#hacklabto on freenode) if you want to see if anyone’s already at the lab.  For this Thursday if you feel like catching up before you come out, we’re at chapter 4; don’t worry, though, we’ll be able to get you caught up if you’re a total beginner :)

-Leigh

I’ve been wanting to get back into playing go. There’s also this neat lab space that I can use for hosting events (maybe you’ve heard of it). While thinking about these two things, I figured that maybe they would work well together!

So, I’m going to try to start a bi-weekly go night at the HackLab. Starting next Monday, from 6-9(ish) PM, I’ll be trying to get back into playing this awesome game, and you should join me. I’ll do my best to bring extra boards so everyone who shows up can play, but if you have one, please bring it!

If you don’t know how to play, that’s ok too, as I’m more than happy to teach people.

I hope to see people there next week!

Project Blinkenlights will be contributing to Nuit Blanche this year with Stereoscope lighting up Toronto’s City Hall. From their page:

Stereoscope

After a long break, Project Blinkenlights is coming back big time in Toronto, Canada this year. Targeting the landmark building of Toronto City Hall, the group is participating in this year’s Nuit Blanche all-night art event on October 4th, 2008. The installation’s name “Stereoscope” reflects the special nature of the building with its two curved, opposing facades effectively creating a three-dimensional appearance.

Not having rested in the recent years, Project Blinkenlights has developed new technology to wirelessly control the lights placed behind the 960 windows of City Hall allowing for a large scale visual concert during the night in downtown Toronto.

Public Participation

As usual, Project Blinkenlights invites the public to be a part of the installation by opening up a variety of ways to interact with and provide content for Stereoscope.

Among the more traditional features, everybody can play classic computer games on the facade simply by using a mobile phone. The two upper parts of each tower serve as dedicated playgrounds each offering separate telephone numbers for individual gameplay. These numbers will be published on-site beginning the week before Nuit Blanche so that people can get the information where they need it – at Nathan Philips Square in front of City Hall in Toronto.

A simple animation tool and open animation data formats enable you to to create simple movies for Stereoscope – addressing one of four parts of the whole facade. Focusing on simple, low-resolution imagery, Project Blinkenlights wants to revive the spirit of the original Blinkenlights installation in Berlin that obtained its charme from the down-to-earth, barebones design of low-res imagery.

For advanced graphic artists, the group provides a set of tools running on Macintosh computers to design complex animation design that serves as the background imagery and core appearance of the Stereoscope installation.

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If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment and let us know what you think would be useful to see here. Also, if you can help us tweak this theme to make it more customized / less ugly, we’d greatly appreciate it!