After a wonderfully democratic Doodle, distributed through our Twitter, Facebook, and IRC channels, the community has decided to have another, informal, ‘Gathering of Sleet’ (aka Gathering of Lightning Event) squeezed into the year at very short notice.

This Sunday! (Thanks for that guys… :P)

Anyway, standard Gathering of Lightning rules apply:

• Flying pigs after 7 minutes
• No Presentation tools (Prezi, Powerpoint, Keynote, Beamer, etc)
• Arbitrary order or presenters
• Heckling Encouraged

(Unconfirmed) Presentations offered by the community over the thought process of this so far are:

• Chrome OS: Are you ready to live in the cloud?
• Ruby/Javascript/Io/Twillo/Erlang/Go/Linguistics (One person offered these… brave lad)
• Parallelism in Web Programming
• Windows 8/Windows Mobile App Certification processes / pains
• Dr Strangethings, or How I learned to stop worrying and love Rapid Prototyping
• Probably more!

Since it’s short notice, we’ve got no sponsor for this one, but we’ll grab a few crates to drink and people are, as always, free to BYO Food/Drink.

PLEASE REGISTER FOR THE EVENTBRITE EVENT

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Farset Labs would like to introduce our latest corporate member, Evorack!

Owned and operated by Belfast firm ABPNI Computer Solutions Ltd, and run by our own member Jonny Tripathy (don’t worry, he’s still paying membership as well!), Evorack provides Linux and Windows virtual server hosting solutions based on the open sourceXen Hypervisorplatform.

In conjunction with Evorack’s infrastructure and experience, Farset Labs hopes to roll-out server hosting tools to our members, enabling them to develop, test, build (and break) cool cloud apps and services.

With the number of new innovations in web-based apps and services having some sort of cloud back-end, it is only natural that Farset provides these resources to our members.

Over the next days we’ll be transferring much of our web infrastructure to Evorack, and implementing member level, private web storage, VPN, and community application servers. As with most things there may be a few hiccups… But we’ll make it through.

Anyway, welcome on board guys!

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Friday night saw the Event Space in Farset Labs packed with eager attendees to Northern Ireland’s first ever Raspberry Jam.

Raspberry Jam is a rapidly growing global network of Raspberry Pi users that regularly meet and, following the success of Friday’s Jam, Farset Labs is pleased to announce that the event will be joining our wide and eclectic event calendar as a monthly fixture.
With the Event Space stuffed with in excess of thirty attendees, with an age-range stretching from six to sixty and abilities ranging from the simply curious to the robot-controlling masterminds of future world-domination. In respect to the latter, one of the most impressive projects on show was the use of a Pi to control an NXT robotics system; this was from a (impressively uniformed, for 7pm) sixth form student from Dalriada School, giving weight to the hopes of the Raspberry Pi Foundation that their innovation will ignite the passion for tinkering and technology in schools. Of course, not only is the Pi a wonderful development system, it can also run a variety of more consumer oriented tasks; if loaded up... ...

Generation Innovation

Last Night, we were invited to join NISP and a range of other sponsoring agencies to help out at the Generation Innovation event in the Titanic Building, which is a mentor-ship and networking programme for the Next Generation of Northern Irish Entrepreneurship.

This event was not only an awful lot of fun for us (apart from nearly de-limbing a few people with the catastrophic failure of our recently donated AR Drone 2.0 experimental platform… Sorry) but was also a great opportunity to show this brilliant young group of people what you can do with a little bit of gumption and a lot of hope, and just a little bit of enabling tech.

Kids from all over the province joined us, having been selected in each of their schools for being ‘high potential’ (read: Not “Highest marks”, or “Fastest Legs”, or “Most Popular”), and we were also joined by a... ...

Our long and exciting Sponsume campaign is finally over, and there is evidently plenty of support for a 3D printer within the space – we raised over £100 extra by the time the fundraiser was finished. In the time that it ran, we saw very evident spikes and patterns, which coincided nicely with various announcements and media publishers.

We’d like to thank everyone who helped get the word out about the campaign, and would especially like to thank every single person who backed the Sponsume appeal. Even now we are getting occasional offers from people who want to chip in a little more towards consumables. We hope that everyone that donated enjoys their rewards, which will be sent out in the following weeks after they are all organised and produced.

Once the custom print rewards are finished, the 3D printer will be open for every member of Farset Labs to access whenever they wish. Significant quantities of PLA and ABS plastic have been ordered, and this is open for all members to... ...