The L0pht was not the first hacker space, in fact at the time of its creation in Boston there were at least two other such spaces, Sinister House and Messiah Village, which later moved and became New Hack City, or simply New Hack. L0pht wasn’t even the cause of the recent explosion of hacker spaces across the globe. I like to think that as an early trail blazer L0pht had at least some influence in that explosion but I have no evidence to support it.
A few years ago I read about the Hacker Space Passport which I thought was a really cool idea except that my, and most peoples, do-it-yourself craft abilities are mostly sub optimal meaning that if I attempted to construct the Hacker Space Passport it would look like total crap. So I promptly forgot about it and went along with my day. But the idea was still sound, as you visit different Hacker Spaces or cons you would get a stamp in your Passport verifying your visit and giving you a sort of memento of your stay. Almost exactly like a real passport without the freedom grope, personal questions, and suspicious looks.
Hackerspace Passport. There are hundreds of hackerspaces around the world – teaching, sharing and becoming valuable parts of their local communities. As makers travel from place to place a popular thing to do is to visit a local hackerspace and get your very own hackerspace passport stamped! Adafruit is pleased to have these in stock now! We spent a long time testing different materials and embossing to make these Hackerspace passports something you’ll have for a lifetime.
These are high-quality and durable passports with beautiful silver embossing, they’re very similar to passports, but for hackerspaces!
Here’s how Mitch Altman (TV-B-Gone, Brain Machine) who came up with Hackerspace Passport, describes them!
I created Hackerspace Passports to:
help promote people visiting as many hackerspaces around the world as possible
increase collaboration
increase cross-pollination so we can all learn from one another
encourage all hackerspaces to support each other
(And it’s fun.)
These Hackerspace Passports look a lot like US Passports, but no fingerprints needed! And, rather than a requirement for passing borders, they are intended to encourage it! Hackerspace and hacker cons around the world have made their own stamps, so people can get their Hackerspace Passport stamped everywhere they go! I released the first 2600 of these at Chaos Communication Camp 2011, which seemed appropriate to me, since the previous Camp (in 2007) was the birthplace of the new wave of hackerspaces.
Size:
3.5″ x 5″
Here are some great photos of people using the Hackerspace passports!
The Mechanical CPU Clock shows the basic building blocks of a CPU (ALU.Buses,RAM,registers, and a Control Unit). It executes a set of instructions which will emulate a simple wall clock.
The inspiration for this project came from trying to teach my son and daughter about how a computer works (in reality, I was always fascinated with mechanical computers and clocks, but I had to give a better excuse to my wife for buying a laser cutter specifically for this project). After looking around the web at various mechanical computers, I could not find something that represented all the components of CPU.
So, what exactly constitutes a drone? An interesting question that we’re going to need to a clear answer to soon, as civilian use of drones takes off (npi) and the hobby/industry begins to face inevitable regulation. via SciAm:
At a time when drone aircraft have become a daily feature of the news and are about to proliferate in U.S. airspace, it’s a good idea to take a step back and examine a very basic and very important question: What, exactly, is a drone?
The answer turns out to be more complex than might be expected. Strictly speaking, a drone is an unmanned aircraft that can fly autonomously—that is, without a human in control. But even that seemingly simple definition quickly runs up against the nuances of how contemporary unmanned aircraft are flown.
For example, consider an aircraft that is under the control of a remote pilot for most but not all of a mission. If the pilot switches to a GPS-guided autopilot mode for a few minutes, does the aircraft become a “drone” for that subset of its flight, and then lose that designation once the autopilot is switched off? Or does the presence of the GPS autopilot, regardless of how much it is actually used, make it a drone?
(Even when autonomous flight does occur, the human element is still very much present but simply shifted in time. Designing systems and methods to successfully allow a computer to control an aircraft is a high art in and of itself. Autonomous flight is made possible by the tremendous amount of human ingenuity invested well in advance of an actual flight.)
Many people (the author included) have used “drone” to describe any aircraft without an on-board pilot. But that is an oversimplification that masks the incredible range in shapes, sizes and capabilities that characterize today’s unmanned aircraft. And it can fail to fully recognize the high levels of skill involved in piloting—whether or not the pilot is actually in the plane.
Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to get the CPU running. If things fail at this point (e.g., the CPU is busted or missing) then you will likely have a system that looks completely dead except for rotating fans. A few motherboards manage to emit beeps for an absent or faulty CPU, but the zombie-with-fans state is the most common scenario based on my experience. Sometimes USB or other devices can cause this to happen: unplugging all non-essential devices is a possible cure for a system that was working and suddenly appears dead like this. You can then single out the culprit device by elimination.
Newer systems boot up in a different ways, but this is an interesting read.
Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. See highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn facilities. Hear his full audio reports on your local public radio station or online at http://www.marketplace.org.
Notch is at it again, and we couldn’t be more excited. You may have heard of Minecraft, the award-winning game Notch released a few years ago that has recently marked its 5 millionth sale.
0x10c, Notch’s new game, is a space simulator with an interesting twist: every spaceship in the game is controlled through a “CPU”, implemented on the server through a Virtual Machine. Players program their spaceship in order to play the game. The DCPU-16 Specification identifies what the CPU is capable of. The rest is up to you, but we’re here to throw you a hand.
GitHub officially supports the DCPU-16 assembly language
Today we have added DCPU-16 Assembly as an officially supported language on GitHub. Files with the .dasm16 or .dasm extensions will be automatically recognized and highlighted properly when pushed to your repositories.
Likewise, code blocks with the dasm16 tag will be highlighted in comments, and you can now choose DCPU-16 Assembly as the language for new Gists.
Have you ever wondered why a supercomputer is called a supercomputer? Is it the number of processors or the amount of RAM? Must a supercomputer occupy a certain amount of space, or consume a specific amount of power?
The first supercomputer, the Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600, only had a single CPU. Released in 1964, the CDC 6600 was actually fairly small — about the size of four filing cabinets. It cost $8 million — around $60 million in today’s money — and operated at up to 40MHz, squeezing out a peak performance of 3 million floating point operations per second (flops).
Chris Gammell has teamed up with Jeff Shelton to create a new engineering podcast. The as-yet-untitled new show will discuss more general engineering topics, drawing on Chris’ EE background and Jeff’s ME background. Chris Writes:
As some you may know, I’m the co-host of an electronics podcast called The Amp Hour. It’s a lot of fun and our listeners run the gamut of hobbyists to professionals. Me and Dave Jones talk about circuits and related topics weekly.
But something has happened lately. I keep trying to draw the conversation away from electronics during the show and into more general engineering topics. I enjoy talking about more general topics such as innovation and the design process. But that’s not what Amp Hour listeners want to hear, they want circuits. We’ve done a couple surveys and each time that comes through loud and clear.
So, I started a second podcast!
I’ve paired up with Jeff Shelton of Engineering Revision. He’s an experienced mechanical engineer who is back in school for his PhD at Purdue and has lots of great experiences to draw on during the show.
Head on over to Chris’ site (or Jeff’s site) to check out the first episode. They’re also looking for name suggestions for this new endeavor, so if you have an idea for a name, help them out!
I think a general engineering podcast is a great idea, and I wish them the best of luck!
Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International and crucial figure in the early history of personal computing, passed away surrounded by his family on Sunday, his family confirms. He was 83 years old.
Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928. During World War II, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz, after which he and his father were sent to a labor camp called Ahlem, near Hannover. Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947. In 1984, after being forced to leave the company he founded, Jack bought the crumbling Atari Inc.’s Consumer Division and formed Atari Corporation.
New York’s Collab gives members access to 3-D printers, lasers, industrial equipment, and more in exchange for creative collaborations across industries. Here cofounders Adina and Mark Levin explain why you need an invite to get in–and why you will definitely want one.
Electronics market at night, where you can buy anything from a USB charger (for about $3), to a smart phone (for $150) to a fake ThinkPad (for $200).
Hong Kong
April-2012
Printable catalog (PDF)
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