Tonight (Thursday) a new club will be using the Rochester hackerspace as a meeting ground for its first event. The Rochester TOOOL (yes three O’s) chapter is starting up organized by Jason Ross. What’s a Jason Ross and what’s a TOOOL right? Jason is the newest Interlock member and comes from a background in security – computer security, network security, physical security.. secure all the things!
Why Lock Picking?
It’s happened to the best of us, your bloodshot eyes open to find that you’ve been strapped to a bed with handcuffs again. What do you do to get out? Call for help? Wait until the lady comes back to break your legs like in Misery? No, you know how the locking mechanism works on a pair of handcuffs and you shim your way out and escape through the window to freedom.
Lock picking is learning about how locks work which turns them into a puzzle. The number of pins in a tumbler tells you how difficult the lock is. What does it mean when a pair of handcuffs are double locked? What are security pins? What’s the difference between a wafer lock and a pin tumbler? If you have these questions, TOOOL is the group to talk with to have them answered.
TOOOL
TOOOL is The Open Organization Of Lockpickers. These guys love to learn and teach about locks, lock picking, and physical security. The difference between TOOOL and a normal locksmith, is first they don’t do it for money, second, they exchange information about locks and lock picking openly, and third, they have more of a sense of humor than your standard locksmith. To become a locksmith, normally you’d have to learn through an apprenticeship. TOOOL on the other hand will be giving presentations to the community, teaching people how to pick locks, and helping spread the knowledge about lock picking openly to the community.
Legality
Is having a pair of lock picks legal? Is it against the law to know how to lock pick? What if TSA finds a set of lock picks in your bag?? These are all boring, but serious questions that TOOOL will answer. Here’s a hint, do you think Interlock would promote illegal activity on their blog?
What to expect at the meeting:
The meeting is open to the public and is meant to be the first of future meetings. There will be a presentation of some kind related to lock picking and a lot of discussion about how future meetings will happen. The organization requires that you become a member in order to keep up to date on the groups activities but there will also be public non-member, public meetings in the future. If you can’t come to tonight’s meeting but you’re interested in learning about how the group works, you can email Jason Ross.
Rochester TOOOL Chapter meeting starts at 7pm on 4/19 at Interlock.
from Antitree on April 19th, 2012
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I don’t have tons of statistics or great pictures or anything–I suppose those that have them might post them later–but in the meantime I figured I’d give a quick recap of my experience at our open house Friday, before it fades too much further from active memory into the realm of myth and legend.
It was, in short, a great time. We had a fairly good variety of folks wander through, from pre-teens on up. I spent a while fishing out from a small water-filled crockpot slow cooker fun little blobs of warm polycaprolactone These I then shoved into the hands of anyone who would take them as they wandered through our conference/presentation/meeting room. It was great seeing folks’ reaction to its warm, pliable nature and to listen to them comment about how tough and rigid it is once cooled. It’s a very minimalistic but (at least I’d like to think) very representative demonstration of the interactive, collaborative, exploratory, hand’s-on environment we try to provide at Interlock to members and guests alike.
I took a bit of a break from running my mouth and from noodling around in the hot water and gooey PCL to watch a short but sweet TOOOL-designed lockpicking slideshow, followed by a lockpicking workshop. Antitree had done the pied-piper trick, drawing a bunch of kids-in-fact and kids-at-heart into the conference room for a short statement of the lock picking rules, a little bit of lock construction and mechanism theory and picking how-to. Then everyone took turns with the several sets of lock picking tools and real locksets for some hand’s-on experience. Folks really seemed to have a good time with trying it out.
Elsewhere in the space, all the folks originally promised to appear were around. I can only guess at how awesome their presentations were, but there seemed to be people everywhere. Early on, I was worried no one would make it into the not-a-kitchen for snacks, but that turned out to be not-a-problem.
Not sure how much of the traffic was driven by word-of-mouth versus posted fliers, but I know at least some folks had seen our lead-off part in a feature in the independent weekly tabloid Rochester City Newspaper.
The lead-up to the open house rekindled a fire under some of our 3D printing aspirations. I don’t want to give too much away there, but that’s been bubbling along these last few weeks. And, in addition to folks who made it on Friday, we’ve also been having new folks continue to come in for our weekly Open Night. This week, we met John, who brought us some fun new-to-us toys (again, perhaps more on that later, but in the meantime, thanks, John!). Also, we got to meet and talk to (a different, distinct) Joe and Andrew. And so it goes.
If you came to visit us Friday, we hope you liked what you saw and will come back. If you missed it, not to worry: Please keep an eye on our calendar for other events (at least two every week). Or, if you can’t make it then, drop us a line and maybe we can work out an appointment for some other time.
from deejoe on March 21st, 20120 Comments
Hello hackers. Look at your office. Now look at the hackerspace. Now back at your office. Now back to the space. Sadly, your office doesn’t look like the hacker space. Do you know what the new hackerspace looks like? No? Well now’s your opportunity. I’m on a horse.
Tomorrow, Friday 3/16, at 7pm we are throwing an open house at the space. Of course it’s free, we just want to show off our new digs. It’s probably a perfect time for you to visit if you’ve never been. Or if you’ve only seen the old tiny space, see what we have to offer now.
Just so we can figure out how many people are coming, click on this link to get a ticket:
http://interlockopenhouse.eventbrite.com/
Here’s what to expect:
Food!
Hacking makes you hungry. As a reward for stopping by on a Friday night, we’ll be feeding you. Members are bringing in food in a pot-luck style. Mostly things to nibble at so bring an appetite. Eating and hacking; does it get better? Well… yeah but it’s still pretty cool right?
Mini-Presentations
The most common question that we get. “What are you working on?” To try and answer that, we’ve created mini presentations about what people do at the space. Here’s what we have so far:
- Amateur radio workshop run by JustBill and Walter
- Introduction to lockpicking run by Antitree
- 3D printer presentation and possible demo by Berticus
- Basics of electronics run by RoboAlex
- Bicycle repair run by BinaryMan
Hackerspace Tour
Here are some things to check out while you’re at the space:
- Rooms: Meeting room, hang out room, table hackers room, workshop area, Ham shack
- Network infrastructure
- Pen plotters
- 3D printers
- Metal lathe and wood working tools
- Ham radio shack
- Electronics workbench
from Antitree on March 15th, 20120 Comments
At the January Linux Workshop several people needed their systems updated. New versions of Linux Mint and SUSE were loaded. Experiments were done with other distros so each machine had multiple systems loaded . So a lot of discussing current events in the Linux world while we waited for installs to finish.
The other project was to figure out how to downgrade FireFox on Ubuntu. FireFox 9 broke a plugin but there appears to be no way to downgrade back to FireFox 8 on Ubuntu. Apparently all the older versions of FireFox have been removed from the repositories. The older version can be downloaded and installed manually but the requirement is for a simple maintainable way to install so old laptops can be supplied to kids with the kid friendly FireFox plugin. The plugin is just a version of a Windows app that uses IE so now the challenge will be to see if that app will run in wine. Maybe we’ll have an answer by next month.
from carl on February 16th, 20120 Comments
Interlock will once again be hosting a series of lightning talks this Friday, February 18th. These are five minute lectures and demonstrations that cover a variety of topics, and an evening typically consists of between 15 and 20 of them. This event is free and open to the public, and all attendees are welcome to present.
While Interlock is generally a tech savvy crowd, no subject matter is discouraged. Past topics have included homebrewing, chemistry, bookbinding, lockpicking, artificial intelligence, and plastic bag management. If you would like to give a presentation and have associated slides, please e-mail them to info@interlockroc.org, along with any special accomodations that might be necessary. We love to learn, so teach us something new!
Our doors will be open at 7:00PM, with refreshments courtesy of our friends at Cam’s Pizzeria East Avenue. Presentations will begin at 8:00PM, and should last a couple of hours. Event registration is available at Eventbrite. Seating is limited! Visit our Contact page for details on getting to our location.
from Bryan on February 14th, 20110 Comments
