Crowdfunding Copenhagen Suborbitals

Copenhagen Suborbitals recently began crowdfunding their 3rd spacecraft the DIY space capsule Tycho Deep Space II through Indiegogo, which unlike Kickstarter also works for projects outside the US.

Google buys Meebo. Messenger and others discontinued on 2012-07-11

If you are using meebo.com and want to keep your chatlogs, you should download them before 2012-07-11 where the messenger and other things will be discontinued because Google bought Meebo.

https://www.meebo.com/support/article/175/

Do you like puzzle games and helping science?

If you like puzzle games and helping science, then check out this game about RNA folding: http://eterna.cmu.edu

Some more or less educational but surely entertaining YouTube links

So, I was bored and looking around on YouTube, and I guess I should share some of the nifty things.
Some of the links are listed in multiple categories.

Math:
http://www.youtube.com/user/chychochycho
http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart

Physics:
http://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZMXWmlp9g + the series starting at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPDP_8X5Hug which is the rest of the lectures.

Biology:
http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

History:
http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

Random stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/user/scishow
http://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey
http://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium
http://www.youtube.com/user/destinws2
http://www.youtube.com/user/truthorfail

FormuLab tour and paintjob

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, and now I finally got around to taking the pictures for it.

First here's the floorplan with more or less correct functions put on for each room.

It's still unclear what we're going to do with the purple room named "Clay? Dreamlab?", the rest should be correct. The office space part of the yellow area is supposed to be used for programming and similar activities that doesn't make too much noise and that doesn't make a mess. Anyway, on to the tour part.

Here we have the main entrance to the building.

And in the foyer, looking towards the meeting room. The wires hanging down on the left are part of the RFID based access control system that's still being worked on. On the big green wall there'll be a board for projecting info on for workshops and talks and such. On the wall on the right side of the picture there'll be painted a floorplan with room function names similar to the one at the top of this post. Just around that corner is the office/administration room from the floorplan.

On towards the meeting room we meet Tux. We were going to tear down this wall, but someone decided it'd be more fun like this. It's still a work in progress but it's almost finished. The door on the left is a toilet and shower which we're thinking of making into a darkroom instead. The door on the right is the kitchen which I forgot to take a picture of.

And here's the meeting room. It still needs to be painted, but that should happen soon as far as I know. You can't see it on the picture but off against one of the walls there's chairs that can be put up to seat about 50 people for talks, presentations and the like.

This is the yellow area on the floorplan, the lounge part is near the red wall and the rest of the room is the office space part. The door on the left side of the picture is locked storage area in the middle of the floorplan.

Here's a picture of the same room taken from the lounge area end of the room.

And one more. The door in the middle is the locked storage room. The one on the right is towards the toilets and wardrobe and it leads out to the foyer. The pale yellow area to the left of the pillar is the red workarea on the floorplan.

Here's the aforementioned hallway from the office space side.

And from the foyer side.

This is the foyer seen from near the hallway with the Tux cutout.

This is the purple area on the floorplan that still doesn't have a function; For now it's storage for the pain and other random things that were in the way while painting and fixing up other areas. The big frame on the wall is leftovers from some company that used to own the building.

And from another angle.

The hallway towards the heavy duty work area/storage area, with storage lockers for people's projects along one wall and the door to the fuse and server room on the right, just outside the frame.

Here's some pictures of the heavy duty work area/storage area. So far it's just storage but we'd like to get some wood- and metal-shop machines in here.

Some of our parts pile.

More parts.

Another angle on the room.

And another.

And one more.

Heading back towards the work area we come by the fuse and server room again. That thick bundle of cables in the middle is for all the ethernet plugs in the building, we just need to get some rack panels for it and get them hooked back up.

Here we have the atalier.

The tools we have in the workarea so far, though they may need to be moved to the heavy duty work area because of noise.

Some of the furniture for the lounge and yellow office space area.

More of the same.

An old coffee machine that needs to be fixed and/or hacked into something awesome.

The locked storage room.

FormuLab - HAL9k's new home

So we finally decided on a name, after about a month of being in the new space. We being HAL9k, Tossestreger, Platform4 and a few other people.

The space is about 450 square meters and looks like this:

The names on the rooms are more or less how it's going to be organised.

Definition and description of the space(text in Danish, sorry):

FormuLab CO-WORKING SPACE

FormuLab er et co-working space - et samarbejdshus - med teknologi som omdrejningspunkt, hvor kreative aktører og kunstneriske sjæle kan udvikle idéer i fællesskab. Husets 450 kvadratmeter workspace og værksteder deles kollektivt og som bruger har man adgang 24 timer i døgnet.

En stor del af husets brugere arbejder med kreativ brug af teknologi og uformel ingeniørvidenskab. Her leges der eksempelvis med microcontrollere, 3D-printing, robotteknologi, sensorer og andre inputs. Andre brugere fokuserer på visuelle udtryk, herunder videoprojektering, lys-eksperimenter, 3D-mapping, masking, grafik, alternativ styring af computere og softwareudvikling.
Der arbejdes også med medier, digital formidling og kommunikation, herunder eksempelvis produktion af lyd og levende billeder, webdesign, crossmedia og leg med sociale medier. I øjeblikket arbejdes der på at opbygge et audiovisuelt værksted i huset ved fælles hjælp og donationer. Af andre teknologiske afarter eksperimenteres der eksempelvis også med spiludvikling, vedvarende energi - og nye fokusområder kommer hele tiden til.

Legen med teknologi laver ofte sidespring i forskellige kunstneriske retninger, også af mere traditionel karakter. Ofte kombineres teknologien med eksempelvis billedkunst, arkitektur, træ- og metalarbejde og til disse formål rummer huset bl.a. atelier og maskinværksted.

Huset er således en glimrende mulighed for at søge ekspertise og vidensdeling i et uformelt miljø. Brugerne spænder fra ingeniører til nysgerrige rodehoveder. Alle kan være med og bydes velkommen i fællesskabet - og nybegyndere kan nysgerrigt udforske nye begreber i selskab med erfarne aktører.

Husets nuværende foreninger og grupper tæller bl.a. hackerspacet HAL9k, den kreative gruppe Tossestreger og aktører fra kunst- og teknologihuset Platform4. Herudover har en stor mængde løsgængere og selvstændige sin daglige gang i huset. Alle er velkomne - også dig!

So that's what we want to do, but what have we been doing at the new space so far and what are the future plans?

• We spent this weekend painting and fixing up the parts of the space we're going to be using most at first.
• Some of the people from HAL9k have been working on an RFID-based door lock system over the past month.
• Thursday this week there's a small PCB making workshop.
• Some people are talking about starting a weekly(?) programming day.
• Some other people are working on making a concert with Tesla coils, chiptunes and violins for Aalborg Kulturnat 2011 in September.

HAL9K - Aalborgs new hackerspace

Just a quick heads up in case anyone are following my blog and are interested in a hacker-/maker-/creative-space in Aalborg, Denmark.

We have gotten a temporary space we can use for free for a few months and it's nearly set up to be a basic workspace for now. The plan is to have it open at least every Thursday evening to begin with.

Would you like to know more?