Toorcamp is a hacker/maker conference and camp, the next one is coming up August 8th through the 12th and takes place on the Northern Washington coast in Neah Bay. Hacker camps generally consist of talks and workshops, plus the fine tomfoolery that hackers can come up with when faced with the great out doors.

Just like last year, Noisebridge is planning a camp, The People's Republic of Nosebridge. Within PR0N we'll be hosting the Welcome Pavilion, Light Tower of Consenso, Occubus, Drama Cafe, and a vomitorium.

Interested in going to Toorcamp? Want to possibly camp with PR0N? Are you an excellent human being? Great! Get on our mailing list and ask how now!]]> http://blog.noisebridge.net/2012/07/28/toorcamp-with-noisebridge/feed/ 0 http://blog.noisebridge.net/2012/05/18/stop-by-noisebridge-after-maker-faire/ http://blog.noisebridge.net/2012/05/18/stop-by-noisebridge-after-maker-faire/#comments Fri, 18 May 2012 18:32:54 +0000 Rubin Starset https://blog.noisebridge.net/?p=628 We'll be open every day/night during Maker Faire, drop by and check out the space if you're visiting! ]]> http://blog.noisebridge.net/2012/05/18/stop-by-noisebridge-after-maker-faire/feed/ 0 http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/21/geeks-depression-meetup-in-san-francisco/ http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/21/geeks-depression-meetup-in-san-francisco/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:03:52 +0000 maltman23 http://blog.noisebridge.net/?p=595 Geeks & Depression meetup
Tuesday, 6-December, 7:30pm
No Starch Press, 38 Ringold Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
(near Civic Center BART Station)

Let’s have a meetup where geeks can talk about depression and suicide. You are not alone. Share your story, if you like. Share a friend’s story. Or just hang out and listen. Let’s make it OK to talk about these things so that we don’t feel so alone with our feelings of being alone and depressed or suicidal.

This is not a support group — none of us are trained professionals, but we can get together in a safe, confidential space to talk about depression and suicide — an important part of life for so many of us geeks.

If others elsewhere in the world feel like creating their own meetups, please do.

Mitch.
#ilyaz

Ilya hung out at Noisebridge, and also led workshops and hackathons for Diaspora at our space.  Most people who met him were quickly taken in by his enthusiasm and do-ocratic charisma.  I became instant friends with him the first day he showed up at Noisebridge shortly after he moved to San Francisco last year.

Hardly anyone had even a clue that Ilya was depressed, let alone suicidal.  He was bubbly, cheerful, excited about all the way cool projects he was implementing, as well as the ones he had thought, and would think of.

Last night was his memorial in San Francisco, followed a party in his backyard in the Mission.  This party was typical of the epic parties Ilya threw in his backyard over the past many months, bringing together so many wonderful people — incredible opportunities to have fun meeting and connecting with each other.  The only thing atypical last night was that Ilya was not there.

Both the memorial and the party were full of people who knew and loved Ilya, and who Ilya knew and loved.  Ilya could have reached out to any one of us — any time of day or night.  He could have reached out.  But he didn’t.

For Ilya to have held in and hid his pain so well that all of these people, including myself, had no clue — Ilya must have felt *so* alone, *so* isolated, exacerbating his pain too greatly.  If he had reached out, maybe — maybe — he could have lived another day.  But he didn’t.

I lived the first half of my life in total and utter depression.  No joy, just shame, just self-loathing, dread and anxiety and fear of other people — total depression.  I know what it is like to be depressed.  I know what it is like to live for one’s whole life knowing and believing that the best life might have to offer is the ability for me to endure the pain till I eventually died.  That was the best possibility.  As with Ilya, I hid all of this from the world as best as I could.  And most people had no clue I was depressed.

Yet, I learned, through making choices for myself, and learning from the consequences of my choices, and with help and support of others, over a period of many years, making more choices, learning, growing, crashing, burning, making more choices, more support. . . — I eventually learned to live a life I love.  I love the life I live!  If I could learn to live a life I love, then, certainly, it is possible for anyone to do this!

It is more than possible — it is way worthwhile, way rewarding, way wonderful to go through the experiences of our life — through the ups and the downs, through the all-arounds, and all the pain and suffering and joy and love and excitement — and come to a place where you know that the pain, regardless of its intensity, is yet another (perhaps seemingly unendurable) experience, which gives way to more of what makes life even more worthwhile.

Depression is an important part of life.  Everyone experiences it to some extent.  But to those of us who know chronic depression, it is our own unique hell.

Unique as it is to each of us, we all share a lot.

And we all have a lot to share with each other. Through the ups, and the downs, the all-arounds.

For someone who has no experience reaching out, it can seem to be the scariest thing possible.  But it is possible.

It is very possible.  Ilya is dead.  But you — you are still alive.  If you are contemplating suicide, please know that you are not alone.  You are part of a community of others, many of whom know what it is like to be hopelessly depressed.  Many of whom are more than open for you to reach out to (if you only knew!).

You *can* choose to kill yourself.  But it will be your last choice.  If you are ready to kill yourself, why not try out one choice first?  What do you have to lose?  I know it is scary, and perhaps way shameful, and maybe too awful, and extremely difficult — but, really, what do you have to lose?  Please know that you *can* choose to reach out to someone.  Please, know that you can.  Please, pick someone and reach out.

Why wait till your pain is so unendurable?  You can reach out now.  (Really, you can.)

Thanks,
Mitch.

The Occupy Movement is an international protest movement which is primarily directed against social and economic inequality. Currently near by to us there are Occupy encampments in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.

Noisebridge as always is open to those looking for a space to work on projects, and resources to make those projects a reality. We've been seeing more and more groups coming through seeking aid for things related to the Occupancy. Together we've built out interesting ways to recharge car and cell phone batteries, provided internet at camp, had meetings about web presence, document GA minutes and more.

We want to let participants of the Occupy Movement know that we're here and open to them. We've also started a site called hackupy.org. Hackupy are open hack nights at hackerspaces for Occupy related projects, and the site gives a listing of spaces which provide such nights. So far hackupy has been happening at NYC: Resistor and almost 24/7 at Noisebridge, and we look forward to seeing more hackerspaces jump in and provide time to those wanting to hack for excellence!]]> http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/12/hackupy-org-hack-nights-for-the-occupy-movement/feed/ 0 http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/02/replicator-wednesday/ http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/11/02/replicator-wednesday/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:20:16 +0000 elijah http://blog.noisebridge.net/?p=560 We made a giant fastener. We used the laser cutter. More fun shall ensue…

There is a powerful, small minority of ultra-right-wing Islamic theocrats called the Salafiyun, with ties to the supreme military council running the country. They want to rid the country of Coptic Christians (and, of course, Jews), and want to force Islamic law on Egypt.

Coptic Christians are angry at many violent and deadly attacks on them over recent days and months, and were demonstrating today in Cairo, when thugs of unknown association(s) attacked them. The Copts attacked back with weapons (perhaps ones taken from police or military).

There has been hatred exacerbated and promulgated by many religious groups: Sunni, Shiite, Sufi, Coptic Christian (with everyone hating the Jews). This is accelerating and getting worse. If this hatred and violence continues the “Freedom Revolution” is under threat of becoming a big win for the Salafiyun. (And many believe that it is being purposely spurred on by provocateurs from the previous Mubarak government and the Salfiyun.)

Let us hope that the majority of people here, who want to live in peace, and enjoy the freedom to be themselves, continue to prevail without violence (since, in my view, any apparent gains by violence will be of little long-term value).

At Noisebridge we've got a network rack named Susan The Rack (she might be old but she's got one hell of a rack), she held our internet important network gear. After a month people started throwing their own gear in there (because obviously a free hacker space wants to host your internet/power hungry torrent box), she thing turned into the rats nest of cables and junk and hacker STDs, and we couldn't tell what was internet important and what was just garbage hardware not doing anything. Eventually the DSL modem got shoved off the rack and was just hanging off by its phone cord. One night a couple hard working dedicated Noisebridge members aimed to fix this problem...

Behold, The Wall-O-Tubes! The idea is that everything that involves getting the internet into the building and back out through our wifi is bolted onto this wall. If the wall has power, the internet should work through our wifi network. If the internet goes down, it'll be easy to diagnose, and hard for someone who isn't dedicated to fix (you have to go get a stool or ladder or poking stick to do much of anything). Currently the image shows version 1 of the wall.

One of the biggest problems we had was someone's laptop would stop loading web pages, the person would freak out thinking the whole internet is down, and start unplugging and rebooting device without doing any sort of diagnostics. For version 2 we're setting up a machine called Minotaur! This guy will monitor different parts of the network (our internet links, the router, servers and services on the network, wifi link), and display a sort of heart beat message in plain English on a monitor under the wall. If all is green, then your "internet problem" might most likely be somewhere between you and the keyboard.]]> http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/09/26/wall-o-tubes-v1/feed/ 0 http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/09/22/let-there-be-light/ http://blog.noisebridge.net/2011/09/22/let-there-be-light/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:30:39 +0000 lizzard http://blog.noisebridge.net/?p=509 Today at Noisebridge I learned that you don’t have to wave your lightsaber around like a fool in order for it to make the cool lightsaber noises. You can just tap it gently on the handle where the motion sensor is. Mike Kan demonstrates.

Mike explained to several people, during his signature “Telephone” tour of the space, that computer programming is difficult, a bit as if you were trying to teach someone how to make complicated origami over the telephone. It took me a minute to get this, but then I realized that in his parable the computer is making the beautiful origami for us and we are like these crazy monkeys screaming at the computer over a primitive communication medium.

Meanwhile! Ben did a bunch of work today testing some of our overhead lights as we prepare to try and figure out how to be more energy efficient, helped for a while by me and Evan, who mostly just handed him things while he was up on the ladder.

I showed Evan a trick that Mike Kan taught me a while back. If you stick a screwdriver or a thin piece of metal into a used cable tie, you can unstick the little tab from the ridges and undo the cable tie to be reused. We un-did some cable ties and gave them to Ben so he could secure the light fixtures to each other. You can learn a lot of useful and interesting things talking with Mike.

Later, while Ed was making pizza, Evan and I had the following conversation.

Me: Hey, Top of the Head Ponytail Guy. What’s your name?
Top of the Head Ponytail Guy: I’m Evan.
Me: Hi Evan. I’m Liz.
Evan: I’m a unicorn!!!!!

We got new soldering irons! Miloh arrayed them on a shelf near the entrance and they look very splendid. My guess is that they’re meant for Circuit Hacking Monday and other classes, as well as for general use. Someone left a bag of awesome donations including some xbee kits, some z-wave power switches, and some Raven thingamajigs. There was also a very fancy Weller soldering iron with a digital temperature controller. Do not steal it and try to sell it on the street somewhere in the city, because someone will see you.

These guys were making some sort of Arduino-controlled flamethrower with a giant battery.

Here are their schematics. The giant, scary-looking battery is sadly hidden behind the lamp. Nothing was on fire yet when I left the space around 8pm.

The sewing shop was full of people who I have never met who were going through the scrap bins and making stuff. I denied that my name was Rachel, and found out that they were learning to make button holes and then as I explained they were making buttonholes to everyone else, a plan was hatched to make the 3-D printers print some buttholes. BUTTONholes. BUTTONholes people. We don’t make buttholes at Noisebridge. Though perhaps you could say that buttholes make Noisebridge.

There was a Replicator Wednesday meeting tonight from 5 to 9pm. I met Andrew who claims to be the Fastest MakerBot Assembler in the west — and Willie who came in to talk about the Thing-o-Matic he has at home. As I left a bunch of other people were Replicating very busily. Andrew gave me a glow in the dark Dalek bottle opener! He plans to ask for donations for them, perhaps to buy more spools of printer plastic.

Bonus link to a time-lapse video of people assembling a Makerbot. I am sure Andrew is faster.

Robert was working on his motorized bicycle. Also notably he was skateboarding around the space tonight along with Dan the Guy who Always Wears Rollerskates. His motor looks like it’s coming along nicely.

My new interest is in messing with MC Hawking, the Noisebridge powerchair robot, a joint project by Lilia and Jake and whoever else helps build it. You can ssh into MC Hawking and control his motors and cameras and Kinect and missiles with a library of Python scripts written by Lilia. The latest improvement to MC Hawking is a board screwed to the wall with a power outlet — so that in theory you could drive the robot remotely right up to plug itself in for a recharge.

Other stuff going on but not photographed: Caves full of people doing something linuxy. Re-working of the Network Rack and installation of minotaur, a new server. (If you like messing with network infrastructure you should read (and update) the Network resources page on the wiki, and join the Rack mailing list.) Coding with headphones on. Grumbling that the soda vending machine uses 3.5 kilowatt hours per day even after its lightbulbs were removed; more than a fridge and not really enough to justify having it to raise money. Soldering of things. More soldering. Kitchen cleaning by Wish the lady who is running for Mayor of San Francisco. Oh and earlier in the evening as part of the glory that is Tastebridge, Francisco made empanadas, and taught people how to do it, but sadly I have no photos and did not get to eat any delicious looking empanadas.

On the way out a horde of Bitcoin meetup people were just coming in and I disconcerted them by realizing they were The Bitcoin People and screaming “BITCOIN!!!” at the top of my lungs.

I found a tiny geocache just sitting on the table! Also, I picked the lock on the donation box, took the money in there, counted it, pocketed it, transferred the amount to the Noisebridge account and emailed the treasurer. Thank you for donating, generous visitors! In fact if you enjoyed reading about Noisebridge and just wish you could be there you could donate to Noisebridge right now!