HacDC

Sunday Aug 29th from 2 until about 4
Roasting and brewing coffee

HacDC member Ed O'brien will be hosting a coffee talk/brewing on Sunday, Auguster 29th at HacDC. People will be able to share their unique methods of roasting and brewing coffee. Ed will lead a talk on coffee in general and experience gained while working in the coffee industry in Panama.

Will

This summer I took my first vacation in years. I spent half of my summer in India. While I was in India I got to work at the hospital of a service ashram doing IT development work. The work done was almost entirely related to desktop Linux, a topic that has grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade.

Click “Read More” below to read the story of introducing desktop Linux to a hospital in India.

Will

Ash's Electronics class wound down last Wednesday, but that's no reason to stop soldering!

Elliot will be trying to make a bridged, push-pull amplifier out of a couple of LM386s. (There'll be plenty for experimenting, if you feel like helping out or making one for yourself.)

Otherwise, come on by and just get yer hack on.

A more detailed report will follow, I'm sure, as soon as the adrenaline fades and naps are taken.

Until then...

Also, there are more pictures in this Flickr Set.

The tentative time for the launch is 9:30am from Clear Spring, MD. Dial 202.559.1100 for flight information once it launches.

Schuyler Towne (A two time American lock picking champion; http://www.schuylertowne.com) of Open Locksport (http://www.openlocksport.com) will be coming to HacDC to teach DC about the world of locksport. In a city where secrets are at a premium, Schuyler will be joining us to dispel myths about the legality of lock picking and the ease of doing it. In addition, we are proud to host Schuyler as he shares the progress of Open Locksport and what can be expected of it in the coming months.

General topics will include:

• Lock Picking
• Lock Bumping
• Basic Forensics
• Speed Picking
• Much More!

The class will be scheduled as Lecture w/ Q/A session and hands on demos instructing individuals on the intricacies of lock picking. All required tools will be provided and HacDC will be subsequently maintaining a lock library for continued exploration. Highly recommended for individuals wanting to demystify locks and physical security.

Once again, HacDC is planning to launch a near-space balloon this weekend (on Saturday if conditions permit) to capture pictures of the Earth's horizon. To learn about the blimp's behavior and to assist in the recovery, the payload sends packets of sensor data through the Automatic Packet Reporting System, a quite interesting amateur-radio-based system to distribute real-time information through a repeater network. This time, however, we are parsing this data to send it through a number of useful communication channels.

One of these includes a voice phone number, 202-559-1100, powered by Twilio's phone application API. By calling this number during the day, people will have the opportunity to listen to the current data about the blimp's status and location and to receive SMS messages with the same information, including direct links to Google Maps. The flight team will also have the option of recording updates into the phone menu system. And there will be a Twitter feed with the data at @hacdcspaceblimp.

Unfortunately, however, the recovery team is capped according to the "Hackerspaces in Space" contest rules, so we do have to warn against any enterprising people from taking this information and tracking the payload down themselves. However, if you are interested in being involved, there may be opportunities to observe the launch and recovery this weekend.

We also will update this blog with details on the final launch time!

"Before the first person shooter there was the second person thinker."

Join us for a screening of Jason Scott's new text adventure documentary, GET LAMP! We'll be showing this movie starting at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium at 1525 Newton St. NW (directions).

This event is part of an inter-hackerspace screening of GET LAMP. If possible, we'll be setting up a video or audio chat with Jason Scott before the screening, in conjunction with i3 Detroit.

As always, this movie night is free and open to the public.

HacDC launched its first near-space balloon this past Saturday as part of a contest called Hackerspaces in Space that challenges hackerspaces around the world "to send a weather balloon, with payload, into near-space to capture pictures of the Earth's horizon, to return the payload safely to the ground, and to retrieve the payload."

To avoid Washington, DC-area restricted airspace and the Chesapeake Bay, given the southeasterly winds, the balloon was launched from rural Edinburg, Virginia. The payload included a camera running CHDK, a GPS receiver, and a transmitter sending APRS packets containing position information so we could track and recover it. The electronics were encased in a foam shell tethered to a parachute and the helium-filled balloon, which we calculated would burst at around 80-85K feet, around the same altitude at which we had a nichrome wire set to cut the balloon free if it hadn't yet burst.

Here's a map plotting the position data received from the balloon's payload. Somewhere in the course of the flight it seems to have stopped transmitting, so the recovery team relied on the last-known and predicted positions to try to receive some potentially-degraded signal, but none was detected. The payload has not yet been recovered, though it's still possible someone will find it on their property and call one of the contact numbers listed on the outside.

Photos of the launch and recovery effort by Katie, Mark, and Bryce—who also posted a personal account of the day's events—are online.

The team is tentatively planning a second launch with a newly-assembled payload on Sunday, 15 August.

DC Music and Technology (DCMAT) is a monthly meeting for audio enthusiasts with an interest in technology. Chats, demos, critiques, and the occasional gear build are all fair game for meetings.

The group meets on the third Sunday of each month, from 1-3pm in HacDC's main room.

Composers, musicians, artists, audio hackers, coders, and anyone curious about sound is welcome!

More from organizer Jonah Beram:

Come by this Sunday, August 15th for the usual informal get together. I will be bringing a copy of Renoise to demo.

Renoise (http://www.renoise.com/) is a modern musical software sequencer that uses the tracker paradigm. Trackers have a very unique way of inputting and displaying note and arrangement data. By using keyboard entry and spreadsheet-style visualization, trackers facilitate quick music composition and transcription. Providing a solid suite of audio effects, Renoise is an excellent tool for sound design as well as composition and has recently added Lua scripting.

Read more about trackers, including free and open source implementations, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)

As always, feel free to bring a friend, some personal musical work, or some music technology to demo!