Snowcon 2011 Begins
The moose is out in force, and the ground is covered in white. It's Shmoocon time again, and we're here to cause our usual stir. From an umbrella that looks like a Katana, to a grape soda delivering bomb disposal robot, heads are already turning.
Registration was smooth, and we're less than 30 minutes away from opening talks. A lot of familiar faces, and a brief visit to ReverseSpace has this years geek fest off to a good start.
Looking forward to the friends, the parties, the mindless goofing off, oh yeah and the talks too.
MAGFest (Jan 13th+) and Frostfest (Feb 5th)
Some members of the lab will be at MAGFest in Alexandria this weekend manning a table that will be representing Hampton Roads to a crowd of possibly 3000 people. We've done behind the scenes work for this years MAGFest including the InvisoFrogger frogger arcade hack, and some work to get past security measures on the Arkanoid arcade game board to get it to display custom made levels. InvisoFrogger has the frog removed for more difficulty, and some custom text.
Also of interest is the Frostfest ham fest in Richmond on February 5th. It sounds like it's going to be pretty large. We're hoping to get a table once again to represent the creative wizardry going on in Hampton Roads. www.frostfest.com has more information on the hamfest. I'm thinking we will bring information from our high altitude balloon project.
Flyers will end up at Shmoocon in DC. If anyone is interested in doing a video stream watching event at the lab, speak up on the mailing list.
And later this year in June it will be off to Maker Faire in Raleigh, NC. Another exciting event!
More info on that as it nears.
Ruby/Python meetup videos
We recorded the last Ruby meetup, and it's on Vimeo for those interested. We recorded a most excellent presentation by Jeremy Demar about pcap processing with python, and unfortunately something went wrong and there is no audio. We've got things down to a science now, and in the future there should be many more presentations from the lab.
International visitor, MakerFaire NC, etc
Sorry we've been slow updating the blog. There is a bunch of stuff coming rapidly. This is one of many posts coming.
In November the lab had a visitor from the Netherlands who did a tour of hackerspaces around America. He did an interview of some 757 Labs members and spoke about it on his podcast. You can listen here. More info here..
We've got visitors coming in Febrary from Michigan to check out our space. They are bringing an interesting project.
June 18th is Maker Faire in NC at the State Fairgrounds. 757 Labs plans to be there representing Hampton Roads! If you have ideas of projects to build or bring, let's talk!
More updates coming shortly.
Open hack night, Saturday, December 18, 2010
We are having an open hack night on Saturday, December 18, 2010. It will last from the afternoon, well into the night. Everyone is welcome -- bring a friend!
For new visitors: we are located at the corner of Bute & Duke streets in Norfolk, VA. Free parking is located behind the building, and there is also a city parking garage across the street (the York Street Garage) which has paid parking.
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- left-to-right: Mike (guest), Harold, Ethan, & Mark (guest)
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- Harold & Ethan troubleshoot a flat-panel TV
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- Ethan samples a 1970’s-era drum machine
Open hack night follow-up
Open hack night was another success. Vex was working on the laser engraver controller. Matt made some great progress with the laser-driven pong game (should be able to do a large building game of pong when this is done) and some other projects were going on. New people visited, new project ideas were formed, and we march on!
Oh yea, it looks like the lab is getting a donation from a friend. An industrial robot arm. The real deal. Trying to source some needed components. More news on this in the very very near future. It's insanely cool.
Open hack night, tonight (Fri), 8pm till 12pm
Another open lab night is going on tonight from 8pm till 12pm.
757 Labs at TEDxNASA
from NASA's website
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_TEDxNASA2010.html
Thousands Show that TEDxNASA Matters by Denise Lineberry - Oct. 5, 2010
"In another area of the lobby, Ethan O’Toole, a former robotics mentor and Langley employee, circled up with members of 757 labs, a club of Information Technology professionals."
More info on this annual, one-day conference: http://tedxnasa.com/matters/
Members-Only Cookout
The members-only cookout was a success! And by success, I mean, we managed to not burn-down anything.
The lab now has its own mini-grill, so we can look forward to future cookouts. The next one will probably in a few weeks, on a Saturday in the late afternoon. Also being planned is a LAN party, probably featuring Team Fortress 2, and possibly open to a small number of guests / non-members.
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- Mike assembles grill, Harold starts fire with heat gun
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- Mark & Mike set-up the grill
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- Mike cooking, TJ eating
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- TJ, Caroline, Ethan, & Brandon eating
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- Charles compliments the condiments cart
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- Ethan & Charles find Mike passed-out
First recorded presentation goes live
The first recorded presentation at 757 Labs has been posted to YouTube. A short talk on jUnit (Java Unit Testing) by Geoff from HRGeeks. The recording quality should be seen as a test. New (but used) cameras are being added at this moment as well as a direct feed from the projector into the video switching system. The new (but used) cameras can store positions in them and be commanded under computer control. It's a glimpse of what is to come and should give the lab a great capability.
Also, we've made improvements to the audio setup and will be testing settings with regards to better encoding of the videos for youtube and other free distribution.
Location
Google Calendar
@757Labs
- No public Twitter messages.
Links
User Groups
- 757 CCC Comic & Cartoon Creators
- 757 Objective C Group Objective C and Cocoa programming group.
- 757 Python Users Group
- 757.rb Ruby Users Group
- HR Geeks Hampton Roads Geek Community