a view into the mind of dlade

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Hackmeetup is dead, long live Forskningsavdelningen

Since last time I wrote anything here, Hackmeetup has both died and been reborn as something new. On the 25th of August, we got access to our very own little space in the house called Utkanten. Since then, we’ve been cleaning it up to make it usable for our purposes. In this process, Hackmeetup has also transformed into something slightly bigger and different. Instead of being a few geeks sitting in a meeting room and experimenting with software, it’s now going to be slightly more geeks in their own space experimenting with electronics, food and anything else we can think of that sounds like fun. It has also changed name to Forskningsavdelningen (the Research Department.)

There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of setting the place up, but we just couldn’t wait any longer, so yesterday we started on the first project. This project is to build some kind of radio controlled sound system. The exact details of what it should become seem to be changing slightly as we progress, but that’s part of the fun.

The other part that I’ve always found to be fun (just ask my mother) is to take electronic equipment apart and seeing what it looks like on the inside. Yesterday was most satisfying, as we busted open a whole heap of speakers and then also disassembled my old DVD-player/stereo. The twist this time is that we’ll actually be putting it together again, and hopefully into something that actually works.

Other fun activities included burning up a volume control from one of the active speakers while testing if we could connect it again and playing blip blop music (of course including the Bubble Bobble theme tune) on a pre-existing home built sound system and a toy synth.

Hackmeetup, bigger and bolder

Yesterday’s hackmeetup was definitely a success. As Olle has already written, we had a new record in the number of people showing up. It was also the second time we had a theme, this time around hardware and electronics. I didn’t personally bring any project, but I had a lot of fun with Olle’s arduino kit.

The real theme for the evening for me, however, was derailment. Like how Olle’s and my project to get the arduino to play music got derailed when we obsessed around getting the correct notes for the Bubble Bobble theme tune and started googling for the correct frequency for a b (or h) below the standard c, and then tried to figure out how to convert that into a number we could use to send to the arduino. (It turned out that the conversion was really simple if you just knew how.)

Or when I was just going to quickly show off what Processing looked like and loaded a silly little project that I built out of boredom last week when I was ill. It’s a version of pong that takes the built in webcamera on my MacBook as input and bounces the ball against anything dark in the picture. Luckily the wall behind us was light enough to be a playing field and we ended up in a long deathmatch between my (currently a bit too big) hair and mickeprag’s sweater.

So for me the evening included a whole lot of silliness and not a lot of usefulness. Just the way it’s supposed to be.

Tweaked hackmeetup poster

Olle posted a hackmeetup poster over on his blog and ended the post saying that something about it is crap. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word crap, but I agree that there was something a bit uncomfortable about the way the text was aligned. Since I had some time off from work to do whatever I felt like, I opened up the poster and started tweaking the text a little.

Now, I’m in no way saying that my version is perfect, but I think it’s a little improved from the one Olle posted, so therefore I’m making my version of the poster available here.