Digital Crusader

I've settled down again! I just rented a room in Kensington Market, a hip shopping area in Toronto, Ontario Canada. My room is immediately beneath the big "LSD!!!!" graffiti :-). Yesterday I bought some good sharp cheddar at the cheese shop, some salami at the meat market, and an awesome loaf of bread at the baker: all the makings of a great sandwich. Those who know me well know how much I love sandwiches! I'm also about a 45 second walk from hacklab.to, one of the hackerspaces here in Toronto. My room actually has a view of the CN tower! I'm looking forward to settling in and getting to know the area. I plan to print out a huge map of the area and pencil on all of the nearby restaurants and shops, then check them off one at a time as I visit them :-).

Coming soon: I will blog about my trip to Ireland. I visited two hackerspaces, TOG and 091Labs.

So I am super lazy, sorry about this being over a month late. I visited Quartz Lab on July 27th, 2010, for their Tuesday Open Night (TON). Flickr Set. I had a blast and made an impromptu talk about North Paw (no presentation, just off the cuff). There were two guys there who were the official speakers, they had built a Dr. Who Dalek, totally awesome!!!1!!1!1!! Apparently there is a UK group of people who have published all kinds of info about how to do this yourself, and they followed those plans. But they added a powered wheel chair inside, so that you can drive the Dalek around, which is awesome. You can see both the Dalek talk and my sensebridge talk.

Anyway, Quartz Lab has a great space, they have several thousand square feet, divided into three major areas. Just inside the door there is a nice couch area, to the right there is a great class room space, and then most recently to the left they have rented a new area which is going to be the workshop - drill presses, etc. The night I was there they had about 50 people in the space, and even when we all crowded into the classroom for the talks there was still tons of space. I also got a very warm welcome from Darin White, who I had previously given a warm welcome to Noisebridge when he visited San Francisco. I really like Quartz Lab, I'll probably be heading over once or twice a month for their TON events, anytime they promise an interesting speaker...

They also did something really awesome with one of their walls: they made it into a rotating art wall. Various artists are invited to show off their works. I think it's a wonderful way to get some awesome stuff for the walls while also exposing local artists, and incidentally spreading the word about the hackerspace into the artist community... Shear genius, I tell you!

On Sunday I visited ThinkHaus in Hamilton, thanks to Adina & her boyfriend for showing me around. Flickr Set. They have a huge space, several thousand square feet. It's divided into three or four rooms. There is plenty of soft stuff in the first room, and apparently they screen movies in there, which is cool. They have a shop room with a really awesome set of wooden lockers, they just look so awesome, not to mention being useful for storing your stuff :-). Upstairs they have a laser cutter and some servers. The laser cutter is actually a Chinese knockoff, they had to replace the controller boards to get it to work at all, but apparently it works great now. Given how little they paid, I think it's awesome! I love the ThinkHaus logo (pictured), it's one of the best logos I've seen for a hackerspace.

They are in the process of moving to a new space at the start of August, one with a better location. Apparently it's going to be smaller, but they claim that at the present location members find it difficult to get to the space, so I agree that it's worth moving. A hackerspace needs to be somewhere convenient and central, so that people are always popping by just because "hey, I was in the area anyway!". If you have to make a special trip just to go, you're not going to go unless you have active plans, and that defeats the purpose of a hackerspace, which is all about the serendipity of meeting new people and doing things that would never have occurred to you if you hadn't stumbled upon the place and found the tools...

Anyway, good luck with the move, and I'll be back to check it out sometime soon :-)

I attended Site 3's opening night party, although I only went for the afternoon. Flickr Set. They've only had the space since July 1st, but they've already got an impressive amount of stuff in there! It's a two story space, on the ground floor they have a workshop, with concrete floors and some machine tools and a storage room. On the top floor, it's a wide open space, with great ambiance, it'll make wonderful classroom space once they get a few more tables and chairs. Apparently it used to be a blacksmith's shop, they even have the old anvil! Also, there is no plumbing/running water in the building, so the toilets are incinerators!

The picture is of a flame device, the height of the flames changes according to the tone of a sound which is created by the speaker down the tube itself, pretty neat. One of the members is a steampunk artist, so upstairs there are a couple of pretty awesome steampunk costumes on dummies, including a leather armor piece that was created from a mold of Milla Jovovich's chest :-).

I think Site 3 has a lot of potential as a hackerspace, it'll be great to watch them fill the space up with love.

So there is a week missing at this point in the blog. I spent time with my family at our cottage, my parents place, and my sisters place. I figure that stuff would mostly bore you, so I've saved you the trouble of not reading that post by not writing it :-).

Anyway, Hacklab.TO in Toronto was my next destination. Flickr set. I was there for their second anniversary party, Friday Aug 23th 2010. The place was hoping with a couple of dozen people in attendance. They have an excellent location, right across from Kensington Market. There is a bar immediately beneath them, the U of T is only a few blocks away, as is China Town, there is plenty of foot traffic outside. I had a great time showing my hack book scrap book to people, and getting a tour from Leigh. Their space is small (perhaps 1000 sq ft?), but I understand not wanting to move, it's a great space in a great location. They have a laser cutter that they (re)built the controller for from scratch themselves, a nice library, a good electronic work station, a small couch area, and a small kitchen. They are super passionate right now about "Free Byron", their effort to get a member freed from unjust imprisonment (he was arrested at the G7 protest for taking photos of the fences around the CN tower!)

If I do settle in Toronto, I can totally see hanging out at hacklab.TO on a regular basis!

Northern Ontario is HUGE! Dude, once you cross the border you think, hey, I must be nearly to home! But then, you're still three days away! Ontario is larger than the prairie provinces combined! They have erected an awesome "Eastern Standard Time" monument that I simply had to stop and take photos of. Flickr Set

Anyway, I had fun in Thunder Bay, since I found a really cool gaming cafe, and talked to the owner for a bit. He's been running it for about 6 months now, the extensive collection of games (perhaps 100 in all?!?) he mostly owned before he even opened the shop, which is telling! Anyway, he's got a great space, and I gave him my best wishes for success.


In Sault Ste Marie, I stayed in an odd hostel, it's an old historic building right off the downtown, but it's only partially owned by the hostel, and there is a separate bar on the ground floor. The rooms were ancient! I even had one of those old hot water radiators. On the up side, the rooms were totally private - not dorm rooms. Apparently the place used to be an HI, but the old owners had some kind of fight with HI and so that deal ended. The new owners are associated with Backpackers, and trying to drum up business. I also toured around downtown The Soo, but I didn't find anything very interesting. It's pretty; the walk along the water is excellent. The Precious Blood Cathedral is awesome (clearly vampires named it!).

Regina is a pretty city, but as far as I can tell there is zero geek action here. I spent my evening walking around their man-made lake, which is a great way to unwind after a long day of driving. Flickr Set. Then the next day I drove to Winnipeg, which is a shorter drive.

I had a blast with the Winnipeg Geek Girls (need Facebook link), they enjoyed my scrapbook of hackerspaces, and I enjoyed having some geeky people to hang with. We played pool (badly) and talked about archiving, programming, finding like minded people, and lots of other stuff. Cheers girls and keep up the good work, it'd be awesome if you could grow your little Geek Girls events into a cultural force in Winnipeg! Flickr Set

Unfortunately, while this was going on, my drivers side window was smashed and my car was searched. Fortunately, they seem not to have taken anything except for a few american quarters (not even all of them!) and my bag of bagels. This proves of course that everything I own is fully worthless :-). Seriously though they did pass up on all manner of stuff like my weapons, some computer stuff (mouse, keyboard, power strip), towels and blankets, 10 North Paw kits, nice Chinese scrolls, my iPhone->FM radio dongle, etc. The really valuable stuff like my laptop was in the hostel, not in the car, of course, so my downside was limited, but even so I'm super glad they decided not to trash my stuff.

The ironic thing is that I went to special effort to try to park in a safer area. They offered me free parking at the hostel, but warned me not to keep valuables in the car, and I agreed: the area was far too sketchy. So I drove 6 blocks away and found a nice(r) garage and parked there, but apparently I didn't go far enough! At least my car was covered though so that the rain didn't get in my window hole. The final indignity is the cost of window replacement: $420! That's about twice what I was hoping for, and about 100x the value of what was stolen from me...