Russ Nelson is going to be in town and he’s organized an OpenStreetMap mapping party!

Hey, want to come out, and make NYC a better place to live whilst having fun at the same time? OpenStreetMap is a community-generated Open Source map of everything you think is interesting. “If you want it mapped right, you’ve got to map it yourself.” Don’t have the skills? Well, that’s what a mapping party is for! We’ll have GPS receivers to loan out, we’ll give you some instruction, and turn you loose on an unsuspecting city. You gather interesting positional data, come back, and we’ll show you how to place that on the map. Give it an hour or so, and it shows up on the map that everyone can see. The parties are Saturday 2/14 and Sunday 2/15, 11AM to 4PM, both at Radiance Tea House south of Central Park South. Details here on the OpenStreetMap wiki

Looks like fun!

ShmooCon is an information security conference held in Washington DC, this past weekend. About 1300 people attended talks ranging from DIY UAV design to disk recovery methodology. It was an intensely fun time. HACDC the local DC hackerspace and close friends of NYCResistor hosted a pretty amazing party inside of a church down there. I remember grabbing rubens with Nick Farr and company at around 6 am the following morning, and thinking… goddamn I am glad I came. However, as of Friday around 1 pm I had still not left NYC. I was working and being a generally busy person. But I got a call from an unnamed person whom we will for the sake of time refer to as “Deep Throat”. Several hackerspace members had arrived at Shmoo to discover that this year’s badges were in fact made of acryllic.

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Inspired by Kelly’s experiments with laser-cut sponges, I cut myself a few Menger sponges* the other week. They’re handy both for light housecleaning and cosmic conundrums!

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These classes fill up, reserve your spot now!

Harness the power of an Eplilog 35 Watt Laser! In this class you’ll learn everything you need to know to make the ideas in your head become a reality with a laser.

Bring a laptop and design ideas. If you think of it, install inkscape on your laptop, it’s opensource and free.

In this two hour class, we’ll walk through all the steps from idea to pressing the “go” button on the laser. We’ll cover safety and basic design skills in Inkscape and you’ll learn how to do a burninate test to find out if something is laserable. After the two hours, you’ll have time to prototype something until 3pm!

After learning the basics, each student will create their own design and lasercut it on the laser! A $10 lab fee is included in the ticket price and covers 12″ x 12″ of acrylic or wood and time on the laser cutter to cut and etch it.

I will be providing bagels and cream cheese. Give me a heads up if you are a vegan and I’ll make sure to have some jam or tofu cream cheese!

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

MakeNYC held it’s 10th meeting at NYC Resistor last evening. Phil Torrone the editor of Make Magazine stopped by and dropped off some freebies. We held a timer challenge in which 4 teams worked tirelessly throughout the night to construct awesomely unique devices that would be able to be initiated on command, count to 10 seconds, then ring a bell. The results were awesome. The winning team won 4 bottles of club mate (courtesy of me). Much fun was had by all, and we are looking forward to an even more awesome event next time. Thanks to all who showed up, and the continual support we’ve received throughout the DIY and hacker communities. You guys are awesome.
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