Flacknite returns to join up with the rest of the Irish Hackerspaces in the Synchronous hackathon next weekend over Saturday the 17th and Sunday the 18th.

Drink, Noms, and Hacking, all kindly supported by the folks at Instil, who you may know for their fantasticBASH developer events, including the upcoming Big Data Bash (Sold out at time of writing).

We’ll have video walls linking us to hackerspaces around the island and hopefully some collaborative projects to busy the night away, and may even have a special guest who’s appearing in Belfast later in the week..

 

Participating Spaces:

• TOG - Dublin
• 091 Labs – Galway
• Nexus – Cork
• MiLK – Limerick
• Lightbox Lab – Drogheda

Event Links

• Eventbrite
• Facebook
• Digital Circle

 

 

...

Some say that he was once in a joint AMA with Chuck Norris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and The Most Interesting Man In The World, and still got the most questions.

All we know is, he’s Martin Gilchrist.

Martin is a regular user of the space and always has some hairbrained idea to try out and bash against the wall to see what sticks, and one day, he came to us with an idea for an informal networking event based around our georgous blackboard, which after some discussion developed into what we’re calling ‘Blackboard Tuesdays’

The Concept is simple. Intro Per Square Foot.

We have approx 30 square meters of blackboard. About 322 sqft in old money. We guestimate that about 250 of that is usable by the average human. We also have a high definition camera mounted in the ceiling that captures most of that blackboard.

Each attendee has a little over a square foot to describe themselves, make an impact, and leave enough contact details to be got in touch.

That’s the gimmick. The real draw is the community.... ...

The SpaceAPI was born in the Netherlands, and now lives on github. As the name would indicate, it provides an API abstraction layer to a physical (hacker)space.

It exposes information such as:

• Open/Closed State
• Location
• Webcam Feeds
• Contact Details
• Sensor data

and more, from a simple JSON API.

The Farset Labs SpaceAPI server was built to solve the problem of multiple occupancy on the K8055 interface board, that had been the centre of the space’s open/closed notification system.

This system, internally called on differentoccasions Farbot, or Titania, communicated over Twitter and IRC as well as exposing a SpaceAPIjson responder for any  enabled services, the Global Hackerspace Wall being a perfect example

When it was decided to integrate the door control from the planned Access Control System into the same service, it quickly became clear that Titania was getting too big and too ugly, and it would be beneficial to decompose the problem into different application.

But these applications wouldn’t... ...

Tech-Camp, a 4 day residential run by the Rosemary Presbyterian Church for 13-16 year olds, “filled with lots of visuals, audio, internet and much more” came to Farset Labs last Friday.

And boy was it a wild afternoon.

Tech Camp were introduced to us several months ago by our good friend, Rob Elkin (who’s currently sunning himself on the west coast, lucky duck). We scheduled a day where the kids would come in and explore, and it was almost immediately forgotten about. Then I get an email during the week from the lovely Ruth Elkin reminding me of what I’d let Farset Labs in for.

[fsg_gallery id=3]

The Level of excitement from these kids was amazing. I was expecting a flying visit with a load of bored quiet students who’d be afraid to ask questions. Not so lucky!

Seeing these teens brought back just a little bit of faith that given a few years, we can turn this province into a real innovation engine, driven by the passion for STEM and ‘Tinkering’ that I saw, and one of the kids (epically) found one of our broken... ...

Well, it’s been an interesting few weeks.

Open Data Playground

After several abortive attempts over the past few months (mea culpa!), Open Data Playground on Thursday evening was a blast.

Things started off with a good hearty conversation between the attendees and our visitors from the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Communications office, Michael and Caroline. They were there to show off and to consult our community about the recently released NIAssembly Open Data API. (They also have a fantastic mobile webapp btw)

First off, I’ll personally say that compared to the likes of data.gov.uk, the NIA API is much cleaner and easier to use quickly (We’re slowly putting together a Python module to make life even easier).

In terms of the data available at the minute, they have Member information going back to ’98, (i.e. who was in each Assembly, who were they representing, etc), Question/Answers put to the Assembly floor since around ’07  (including text-search), and another data set of Organisations, listing Departments, Committees, Political Parties, and All Party Groups.

While all this information is well and good, the major points that... ...