Just wanted to shout out in recognition of esigns.com a custom online print shop who was kind enough to donate a large dry-erase street sign for use by the guild. Esigns has many great products for very good prices and I am very happy with the quality and size of the sign they sent us. I took a couple of snapshots of the sign in action, should be very useful to draw people into the space!
In no particular order:
* SIG member Jeff Mahon has finished work on his wooden workbench at the guild and it is looking really solid (both literally and figuratively). Looking forward to when the workshop is full of them!
* The SIG communal robot is coming along nicely, it is now at the stage which it can be controlled by a microcontroller and I’m starting to mess around w/ an Arduino to be able to do some cool things with it. I’m going to use this as the basis for upcoming classes on Robotics and Arduino programming, check the events calendar for when those are scheduled
* Member dues are currently $35 a month but there are several members who chip in more (up to $50 a month plus donations) for no other reason than to help support the guild. At some point this premium membership will come with additional benefits, but until then the least we can do is thank them on our wiki
* Makerspaces have been getting some major attention in the news, SIG member Lou Ruppert points out this article in The Guardian, and just this past Friday on the National Public Radio (NPR) an excellent piece was aired on the movement. Hows that for publicity!
* SIG member Ed Deaver a student at ESM high school is always thinking out of the box, and has started the ESM Linux Club! We at the SIG are really looking forward to supporting and working with his group in any way we can! ^_^
* Finally I would like to leave everyone with this inspirational quote by Theodore Roosevelt (originally found here) which we’ve printed and put up on the wall at the SIG. If this doesn’t motivate you, don’t know what will!
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Glad to say the e-recyling day last Saturday was a success. We had a few guild members show up to help sort through and inventory drop-offs and help clear the way for the next batch. Really looking forward to the next one!
Next, be sure to checkout this promo video for the CNY Artists art gallery which the guild will be visiting the Saturday after next (09/10/11 @3pm).
Furthermore, Peter Svoboda who runs the gallery is looking for someone to help him out w/ a laser tripwire project (perhaps something similar to this). Email or ping me if you would like to help and I will forward you his contact information (he said he would pay for materials and in return would promote the Guild w/ a plaque and other promotional materials in his gallery)
Finally also be sure to swing by during our newly-scheduled weekly Coworking Session (Wednesday from 10-5) and Projects Session (Sundays from 2-5). For those unfamiliar w/ the concept, co-working is a relatively new trend, where people who work remotely meetup and work together (as in in the same vicinity, not on the same things) in order to get some human interaction and to form a community.
As far as the projects day, the idea is to get people together at the space, but to do less socializing and more working on projects. Everyone is welcome to attend free of charge (members and the public alike) so long as they have something concrete to work on. It can be a side project, school / work, or anything else that’s creative / productive.
Hope to see everyone there!
We had a good turnout at the first Open Source Night, but an issue we ran into was that several people didn’t have laptops / computers. So to rectify this, we spent a while just building up systems to develop on from the multitude of components we have at the SIG.
This weekend I spent a little while resolving this situation and setup 4 workstations and one server at the space with Fedora 15. The workstations should be good for general purpose use and / or development, and are scattered around the space (the server obviously being in the server room). All are welcome to use (members and guests alike), login instructions (locally or via ssh) are posted on the computer chassis’ themselves).
Hey all, be sure to check the much more organized and improved SIG Wiki. Many thanks go out to Ed, Lou, and Thickface for contributing to the Web Content/Lets Start a Library Night which turned out to be a great and fun time.
Of particular interest is the up to date Member List, the Completed / In Progress Projects Page, the Complete SIG Inventory (as of 08/15/2011) and what we are looking for
As always, all additional contributions to the wiki are more than welcome.
Hey all, be sure to checkout these upcoming events being put on by various groups in the Syracuse Community.
First off, our friend Jim Moltion from Northeast Surplus and Materials is holding an e-recycling event two weeks from today on Saturday August 27th at their headquarters at 440 Shonnard Street (right off of Geddes). A few of us from the guild are going to show up and help collect and sort through the materials people drop off, and everyone is welcome to attend to either drop off unused electronics (some restrictions apply such as no crt monitors) and/or to help out with the effort.
Furthermore, our friend and SIG member Peter Svoboda has invited the Guild to visit the CNYArtists.com art gallery located in the Shoppingtown mall food court. We’ve scheduled a day to do so for Saturday September 10th at 3pm and encourage anyone who is interested to attend (Peter has a very impressive collection, all done by CNY area artists). Hope to see everyone there!
I’m pleased to say that we had a phenomenal turnout (our best yet) at our first open house at the new space last Thursday. Many existing members showed up to share their projects, there were many fresh new faces, great food, and a fun time overall. No worries if you missed it, we will be having regular open houses (scheduled for the 2nd Thursday of every month) from here on out.
As far as other exiting happenings at the guild, be sure to come on down and checkout our multimedia room / sound studio which is in progress. Once completed, we will be doing full on audio and video productions, including a regular jam night at the Guild as well as a regular webcast regarding technology in upstate new york and around the world. It’s a really fun project and we invite anyone who wants to participate to come on board!
Finally also be sure to checkout the SIG communal robot that I started building recently at the guild (yes I know, shameless self promotion :-p). I will be hacking on this regularily but inivite anyone who is at the space to simply take up some tools and make modifications of their own (no need to ask first, just hack away!). Ideally we can build a army of these things (we have the raw materials, everything on the robot was procured for existing items at the current space) and take over the world! Mwhahaha! <evil-genious>
Well that is folks, stay tuned until next time!
We’ve got some great events planned for later on this week at the Guild. First off, this Thursday night (08/04) at 7PM, Jeff Mahon is holding a beer making workshop covering beer history, the basic of brewing, and tips / tricks to making the best brew.
The following night, Mark Scrano is holding the next class in his Information Security series, and will be discussing a Live Linux distribution called Tails which integrates Tor and I2p networks.
Both events are looking to be fun and informative times, hope to see everyone there!
As a followup to the night of lightning talks, I will be giving a presentation / walkthrough of the Ruby programming language on the night of Wednesday July 13th at 7:00PM. The event will be held at the Syracuse Innovators Guild’s new home at 3650 James Street. All are welcome, the event will be free of charge, though a $5 or $10 donation is suggested for non-members.
No special equipment is needed to attend, feel free to just come and listen, though for those wishing to follow along w/ the commands in the presentation will need a laptop setup with the following before hand
– A linux system (native, live cd, a vm, or whatever doesn’t matter, preferably Fedora as that is my distro of choice)
– ruby, irb (the interactive ruby shell), and rubygems
– the following gems: nokogiri curb sinatra thin gtk2 uuidtools activesupport sys-cpu dbus
It is up to each person wishing to follow along to setup their environment, I will be at the space shortly before hand to help out, but can’t guarantee I will be able to solve any issues.
For those wishing to follow along on Fedora 15, feel free to follow these instructions to setup your system:
– Install Fedora 15 or Download and run Live CD
– Install ruby, irb, rubygems
# yum install rubygems
– Install the necessary gems
# yum install ruby-devel rubygem-nokogiri rubygem-curb \
rubygem-sinatra rubygem-thin rubygem-gtk2 \
rubygem-uuidtools rubygem-activesupport ruby-dbus
# gem install sys-cpu
– To start IRB, run the following command:
$ irb
>
Hope to see everyone there!
Update 07-14-11: Here are the slides from last night, hope they are of assistance!
