Tuesday, July 27, 2010
ThinkHaus in Hamilton
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 :-)
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