01.23.2011
Marty
With our move to the third floor of the Load of Fun building, Baltimore Node gained an awesome new space, with a ton of new opportunities! Unfortunately, we also lost one good feature of the old space – having a street-level entrance that we can leave unlocked while we’re in. Anyone with a key can let themselves in to the building, but folks without a key need to be let in.
We have a lot of ideas in the works for solving this problem, involving everything from RFID and electronic strike plates, all the way through a key hanging on a string. There’s no telling which of these will be our final implementation, but here is one that is ready to use now!
NodeNock is an “access system” that’s designed to be easy for everybody!
If you’re outside the Node and need someone to let you in, just call the phone number posted on the door. NodeNock will connect you to someone who is already inside.
How does NodeNock know who to call? It looks at the list of people who recently checked-in with Foursquare. Anyone who has registered their phone number with NodeNock can get the call while they are checked-in at the Node.
Registration only needs to happen once, and it’s pretty simple:
- Make a Foursquare account, if you haven’t already.
- Visit NodeNock from your smart phone, using your Foursquare account to log in.
- Register your phone number with NodeNock. You’ll get a validation link sent to your phone in a text message.
- Finally, friend Baltimore Node on Foursquare so we can see when you’re checked-in.
NodeNock certainly won’t solve all of our access problems, but it does make it easy to get on the phone with somebody already inside. For now, it should help members who forget or don’t yet have keys, as well as visitors for Open Hack and other events.
NodeNock is available on GitHub if you’d like to check out the code.
Node members – please give NodeNock a chance, and give feedback on the Node Discussion list!
01.16.2011
mattyfo
Yesterday was the CreateBaltimore event and wow what a day! The Baltimore Node was out in force and I was really happy to meet a number of our neighbors (Effervescent, Single Carrot, Hexagon/Charm City Art Space).
The goal of the CreateBaltimore barcamp was to bring together artists and technologists and inject some design thinking into Baltimore. Of the three rounds of sessions I went to the entrepreneurship and business session, the Betascape session and the community spaces session.
The big takeaway from the first session is that there’s a lot of discussion and mentoring to be done to help people figure out how to put together their business plan and how to profitable. Shameless plug: come out to Monday night’s Baltimore Business Book Club meeting to learn!
The second session on Betascape went well and if you’re interested in participating we’ll be hosting out Kickoff meeting on January 26th at 7pm at the Node. You can find details on the meeting here please come out with your ideas.
The last session was on Community Spaces and it seemed to really focus on how we could better connect with people and promote ourselves to the greater Baltimore area. One of the topics that came up was pushing for more involvement with the Second Saturday’s project that apparently has funding for groups in the Station North area. Moreover, I’m going to work at putting together a roundtable of people running community spaces/organizations in Baltimore so we can get together to share our successes and help mentor each other, drop me an email if you’re interested.
Overall the event was a stunning success, big thanks to Scott, Buck, Andrew and Dave for making it happen, I can’t wait for it to happen again!
01.13.2011
Marty
The Node Book Club met yesterday at 6:30pm to discuss our first reading – the original paper on Hamming codes. There was a lot of interesting discussion about the history of computing (from mechanical relays to modern consumer radios), and many other topics. (Disclosure: I missed a lot of discussion because I thought the meeting was at 7:30pm. Whoops!)
Our next meeting is currently scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 9th, at 7:30pm. We’ll be reading Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, published by the Pragmatic Programmers.
From the publisher:
You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer.
But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you’ll get a
hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite
language is on that list, you’ll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages
side-by-side. You’ll learn something new from each, and best of all, you’ll learn how to learn a language quickly.
The book can be purchased in ebook (epub/mobi/PDF) form and (when they’re back in stock) paperback from their website. It can also be found online and in some stores at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Our next meeting is less than seven weeks away, so we don’t expect anyone to make it all the way through the book and all of its activities. Feel free to skim it at a high level, read about the languages that are the most (un)familiar to you, or just pick a couple of really interesting/different languages and dive in. The hope is that we’ll learn some new and interesting things about the theory behind these languages, how to find similarities between languages, learn new tricks for picking up a new language, and get a lot of inspiration for using these languages in our projects!
Feel free to start the discussion early by posting your plans, progress, thoughts, and ideas in the discussion thread!
Thanks to Colin Freas for getting this club organized and underway!
12.01.2010
Kelly Egan
The Node is moving up in the world. Our new space two floors up in the Load of Fun building is a whopping 1600 square feet. Thats a 240% increase on our current space.
We are still in the processing of moving. Stop by tonight (Wednesday Dec 1.) to help us finish moving our stuff from the first floor or come out tomorrow night (Thursday Dec. 2) to help us unpack at our first open hack in the new space.
We will be doing even more hacking to improve the space the weekend of Dec. 11-12 as we participate in a mini hackathon with other hackerspaces to create a RFID lock system for the new space. We can use your help!
You can find the SketchUp file for the picture to the left on the Nodes wiki:
3rd Floor Planning
11.29.2010
6cef
The Node is moving! Tomorrow, 11/30, and Wednesday, 12/1, we’ll be moving from the 1st floor of the Load of Fun building to a much larger space on the 3rd floor. Please come by (5pm till late) and lend a hand as we transition to Phase III of the Node World Domination Plan.
11.17.2010
Adam
Just got done with the second workshop in my thrilling “Linux For People” bi-fecta, “Using the Hell Out of Vim”. Thanks to all who came out, it was good to see brand new faces out at the space along with the regulars. Hopefully there was no boredom, only the awesome intake of Vim knowledge that I like to imagine happens every time I take a deep breath and start spouting the effusive praise of the tools I use.
Vim is awesome, by the way. You can check out the presentation at http://using-vim.heroku.com/, arrow keys to step through, “c” to open a table of contents. If that’s down, the presentation source is available at https://github.com/abachman/using-the-hell-out-of-vim. If I continue to offer the workshop, it will continue to evolve, but the slide show and the Readme should give you the general idea.
10.14.2010
mehuman
The first Baltolug meeting being host at the Node is happening next Tuesday. Brian will be presenting a talk on everyone’s (and I mean everyone RMS) favorite editor Vi/Vim.
Even tarsiers love vi.
10.06.2010
Adam
Posting the materials from our “Intro to the Command Line” class. A slideshow:
“Intro to the Command Line”
And a document version (with fewer sweet graphics).
If you couldn’t make it this time and would like to attend at some point in the future, contact me or post to the mailing list with the times that work for you. If there’s enough interest we may run the class again.
Alternatively, if you’re interested on getting command line / system administration lessons, contact me and I’ll see what we can set up. I’m not at every Open Hack, but I usually make it to one or two a month.
Peace, love, and unicorn blood to you.
09.23.2010
justin
It wasn’t that you were not good stuff. All of you at some point were used and loved. But now requirements are different. The big picture fits together differently than when you started. We looked at the little parts through to the case, raw materials to component and asked our self do we have room? Is there time in our short blip of a lifetime to find purpose in these bits? What is the historic and cultural significance vs monetary outset to replace?
Sadly not everything we were given, with the best of intentions could stay.
To the sad pile going to the next phase of existence, I hope you don’t poison and hurt people processing you to be the new newness.
A toast to organization and other things!
09.18.2010
mattyfo
You should follow Maker Bot #131 at twitter.com/makerbot_131
Wednesday, September 29th at 7:00pm Dorkbot will be hosting Marty McGuire who will be giving a talk on desktop 3D printing and giving a live demonstration on his printer.
Details as per him:
Rapid digital prototyping and fabrication technologies such as 3D printing and milling have existed for decades, but have been so expensive that they have remained largely in the hands of big manufacturers or researchers. Now, thanks to open source hardware initiatives like RepRap, 3D printing has become a hobby that you can do at home.
Marty will talk a bit about the current state of commercial, community, and desktop 3D printing, and how one kit company in NYC, MakerBot Industries, is trying to turn this hobby into a revolution. He’ll also give a live 3D printing demonstration on his printer, MakerBot #131.
Marty McGuire lives in Baltimore and is a web developer for MakerBot Industries. He rides the Bolt Bus quite often.
See you there!
