HacDC

Due to the predicted snowfall and DC's declared state of emergency, tonight's (Friday, 2/5) event is canceled. Stay warm, safe, and happy neighbors.

[This event has been canceled due to the predicted snowfall and DC's declared state of emergency. Stay warm, safe, and happy fellow hackers and hacker accessories.]

Since there will be a lot of great people who will be in town for ShmooCon this weekend, we're providing a place to chat, hangout, munch, and whatnot. Daniel's offered to help put on a light show and some music of some sort.

I expect the HacDC proper will be open, but we also have run of the dining room (in the basement). Current plans are to rock out from 8pm-2am Friday night (2/5). If you want to see what sort of awesomeness is afoot, or contribute some awesome of your own, check out the wiki page.

See you there!

Event Banner: 

Glance from Andy Holtin on Vimeo.

Andy Holtin : How to Fit as Many Steps as Possible Into Ideas that Started Out Really Simple

Working on his new project "Glance" allowed Andy to explore and employ a surprisingly wide variety of processes, both artistically and technically. He'll be sharing his obstacles and the solutions they generated.

Atau Tanaka : Current research

Atau will talk about his current research in Mobile and Locative Media Art, Interactive Performance, and Creative practice on Public Displays.

More at DorkbotDC webpage and after the jump.

There's a great article today in Wired Magazine on the trend of "Open Source Hardware" and DIY custom fabrication. It mentions the hackerspace concept in particular.

At HacDC, we have a RepRap available for use (and volunteered hacked improvements), and our members and friends own a good selection of the fabrication tools mentioned in the article. Some of them are perfectly willing to take orders with enough lead-time. If you are interested in learning more about this general trend and participating, feel free to stop by HacDC whenever we are open!

Google's Android cell phones, based on Linux, have really taken off with
the list of supported devices growing faster by the week. Phil Shapiro,
public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library (and PCWorld blogger) will
show and tell what he has learned about his own Motorola Droid. Learn tips
and tricks for using your own Android phone and find out why you don't
need to own an iPhone to be the coolest person on the block. You can even
use your Android phone for viewing screencasts. (See this recent blog post
on PCWorld.com http://bit.ly/63JrmY )

Please bring your own Android devices and questions for what is sure to be
an interesting gathering about a most extensible device!

Hacdc will host the event in our normal space this upcoming Saturday
afternoon.
(2010-1-23) @ 2pm to 5 pm

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_devices

HacDC will hold the first Gentle Hackers' Literary Salon at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 16 March 2010. We will be discussing Cory Doctorow's 2009 Creative Commons-licensed science fiction novel Makers. You can read the dead-tree version or download it for free. The salon will be a casual, minimally-structured discussion of the book. Light refreshments will be available. Steampunk attire optional. :)

This event is free and open to the public.

Photo by Alex Barlow

Join us for Tea Night at 7:30pm on Tuesday, 19 January 2010 in our space. There will be demonstrations of gongfu tea ceremony and Japanese tea ceremony, and if you'd like you're welcome to bring an interesting or favorite tea of your own to share. This event is free and open to the public, no RSVP needed.

Last week, the phone application start-up Twilio obtained a nice little bundle of press for its announcement that it had obtained $3.7M in funding from Union Square Ventures.

To a couple of us at HacDC who have been playing with their product for a few months, this was not so surprising. They have built a clean and intuitive API for rapidly building phone applications using web services.

On Thursday, January 14, at 7:00PM at HacDC, Todd Fine and Darius Roberts will introduce the Twilio API (HTTP requests to dynamic XML), demonstrate two applications built using Python and Ruby, and finally lead a brainstorming session about other creative and artistic possibilities using the Twilio platform.

The first application is a distributed microphone for group-created ambient soundscapes (tentatively titled "Spacerad"). Twilio's platform can record audio over the phone and offer a callback URL for the saved WAV file. Using XMPP (the instant messaging technology used, for example, in Google Talk), this URL is immediately sent to a Python script running on a local machine which can interact with a number of audio environments Todd likes to use (Pure Data, Supercollider, and, hopefully, Ableton Live). Hence, even a large audience, with the ubiquitous cellphone, can provide the samples for an open-ended and cooperative musical experience.

The second application is based on a classic phone application of the tape answering machine era. The creative band They Might Be Giants once had a Brooklyn local phone number, popular in the eighties and nineties, that would play some of their songs off an answering machine. While this service was "always busy, often broken," with Twilio's API, we can create a service serving TMBG songs that far surpasses the original Dial-a-Song in functionality, hopefully without losing its charm. Darius will present his Ruby-based version of Dial-a-Song.

This event is free and open to the public, and we encourage anyone interested in Twilio, Python/Ruby, Soundscapes, or even They Might Be Giants to attend!

When: 7:00PM-8:30, Thursday, January 14
Where: HacDC Space, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC 20010
Cost: Free and Open to the Public!

What's new:

Inside HacDC has been updated such that if @insidehacdc is following you and you direct message @insidehacdc then your message will appear on the web portal.

In case you don't already know, "Inside HacDC" is a location-based (of sorts) web application portal to Twitter that answers the question: "What are you doing at the HacDC space right now?"

The web portal, located at http://inside.hacdc.org , is accessible from anyone that is connected to the HacDC space LAN. Therefore anyone with a laptop, connected to the HacDC LAN, can post to this Twitter account without using their Twitter client. What you post, will appear on http://twitter.com/insidehacdc

We created the web portal you can follow http://twitter.com/insidehacdc and get status tweets from people at HacDC space. Also if you're at the HacDC space you can tell people know how long you will be at the space and/or what exactly you plan to be working on. The idea is to attract people to drop by the space and increase our space usage.

Next time you are at the HacDC space and you're connected to our HacDC LAN, please access http://inside.hacdc.org and post what you are working on or what ever is on your mind.

Be sure to tell your friends to follow @insidehacdc so they can follow what is going on at the HacDC space.

If you are interested in extending the functionality or capabilities of this Twitter gateway, please join the Software Projects forums on our Projects Server located at http://projects.hacdc.org and feel free to post to this software project forum "Project InsideHacDC"

A dozen Game of Life kits were built by thirteen people on Sunday. Every one who came had fun and every kit was blinking by the end. Some photos are up: one set and another set. There's also a video of the joining of all twelve kits to form a 16x12 matrix.

photo by Katie

Now each person has a board with 16 LEDs attached to a microcontroller which can control them individually. So, as a follow-up of sorts, we're building programmers next month. They will let you install your own firmware into any of Atmel's popular AVR chips using any computer with a USB port. You're welcome to join us if you have one or more of the following:

• An assembled Game of Life kit
• Some other microcontroller project
• Interest in microcontrollers and no project (yet)
• A funny hat

Once again, no experience or tools are necessary. Just go register before we run out of seats or you run out of time! (Sales end January 7^th)