Very shortly after Brian, Alex, and Bill got Interlock’s 3D printer going, I nudged my way in, and got them to print out a twisty puzzle for me. The puzzle I had printed was this screwless 1x2x3 model.

I decided to go for this one becuase I wanted to have it printed out and ready to go as qucickly as possible.  In retrospect, I should have gone for TomZ’s 1x2x3 design, for reasons I’ll get to later.  Anyway… on to the printing!

The printer did a great job of producing the pieces, although it would seem that perhaps the filament was being fed into the printer too quickly, as tolerances were overshot, and much sanding needed to be performed just to get it to fit together…

This design included a “barbell” shaped piece that snapped between the two halves of the core, eliminating the need for screws and springs to hold it together and give it tension. Because of the lack of support material, the printer had a difficult time properly printing out this barbell, as you can see in the following picture.  There was nothing to hold it in place, so it got dragged around a bit as the print head moved around.

The next step I took was to sand down the parts to get them to fit. The first thing I tried was sanding the ‘feet’ that protrude from the wing pieces. I was getting decent results, but then realized that a better solution was to sand the semicircular holes in the cores a bit more, opening them up, making the feet spin in the core more easily.

Between various nights of heading to Interlock to work on this, and without the needed barbell piece, I held it together with a rubber band.

Next, Joe came to my rescue.  He extracted the barbell piece out of the STL file, sliced it in half, then printed those two halves for me.  This time using the stylish metallic gray filament, rather than the stylish orange filament.

A little bit of super glue, and a little bit of sanding, and they were ready to install inside of the twisty puzzle’s core.  Within minutes, it was assembled properly for the first time! The barbell/snap assembly is a bit loose, and I think that some of the feet were sanded down a little too much, as there is a lot of play in the fit of the parts.

I was planning on perhaps dyeing it, or just sanding more and stickering it with the expected color scheme (red, orange, green, blue, white, yellow) but Nick had asked me a little about rotational symmetry of the puzzle, and a few minutes later, he had stickered it with blue painter’s tape. It was an ingenious solution, as no two pieces are stickered with the same pattern. (Note that you can also see the floppy tolerances on the top left piece of the next photo.)

After playing with it for a while, the barbell is definitely the weak point of the whole thing.  I had sanded it a little to get it to turn more smoothly, but now it’s way too loose.  The wing pieces are a bit floppy due to sanding.   I think that these two things can easily be changed for the next print, by first using TomZ’s design which can use a screw to hold it together, and also being more cautious while sanding to keep everything within decent tolerances.

What to expect

If you’ve never been to a hacker con, it’s a bit different than your standard conference. Don’t expect the venue to be a hotel. In fact, it’ll be at an old Masonic Temple inside the Auditorium Center.

There will be a lock picking village where the local Rochester TOOOL chapter will be around to teach people how to pick locks and the issues involved with physical security. They’ll also be selling lock picks to attendees.

Other stuff for those interested:

• a dozen or so presentations about information security by industry professionals
• a capture the flag hacker games competition
• a hacker puzzle to figure out during the con
• free breakfast and lunch

How To Attend

Attendance is free but requires that you sign up before hand. Go HERE to sign up. The conference starts at 8am so be there early to get the breakfast.

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.

Brian wowed them with his always crowd pleasing custom pen plot-matrix printer he’s famous for. The picture above is the pre-printed artist’s rendition of Seth holding his mic.

Von, Brian, and Bill put on their smart hats and answered questions about Interlock. Von, showed off the ham radio room and his skills for speaking with human beings. Bill spoke about his background, why he has been involved with Interlock, and included some razzle dazzle by printing on the 3D printer.

Brian, with his boyish good looks, sparkled on camera while showing off his knowledge of all things blinky. I have to admit that while it’s nice to have Interlock get some PR, my first goal in setting up the interview was to get Brian’s face on TV. If you’ve met Brian, you’ll know that he’s a very intelligent, multi-faceted, multi-facial-haired, reluctant leader. I think that he is a very good representation of what the modern hacker/maker looks and acts like. But, he’s also not the normal talking head you would see on TV which is why I want to get him out there even more. I’m giggling right now thinking about seeing him on YNN now.

Feeling bad for the quiet bear-hat wearing man on the couch, YNN even included me in a quick interview. I worked with Bill and Von on a lock picking demo that I hope makes to air. Veronica even challenged me to a lock picking contest where I had to go from nothing in my hands, pick up the tools, and pick the lock. I surprisingly aced it picking a 4 pin lock. (Thanks TOOOL) This will never be on the air of course.

UPDATE: Check out the story here:

Thanks to Von Brian and Bill for taking the time to come out and intelligently represent the group. We don’t know when/if the story will air. Surprisingly, some people have more important things to hear about than local hackerspaces but we’ll let you know when.

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.

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

See you there

We were delighted to receive embassy from FamiLAB during our weekly Open Night on Tuesday in the person of John S, who stopped by on his way through town. We had a great time talking about his awesome business making good use of high voltages, and about all the cool things Familab does, and showing him around Interlock’s new location.

Roboalex is all fired up to lead us into doing soldering classes with the MintyBoost kits, following FamiLAB’s example. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, it’s great to learn that FamiLAB has recently expanded and seems to be going from strength to strength, including their plans to host the Orlando Mini Maker Faire coming up May 26.

Oops. We’ve got another pen plotter at Interlock.

I mentioned before that I’ve been tinkering with said plotters and webcams and some minimal computer vision noodling. Eventually, I’d like to implement some of my own software (likely using Processing) to do some more in-depth sketchy-yet-robotic drawings.

As such, I had been trying to think of easy/cheap ways to get a pencil working on the device. A normal pencil will only get so far before it needs sharpening, and none of my plotters have yet become talented enough to lumber over to the pencil sharpener. Soo…

Tada! Did you know they make mechanical pencils that auto-advance their lead? I didn’t, until this was mentioned on a mailing list I’m on for discussing the Chiplotle python plotter library (and plotters in general).

A quick Amazon Prime-ing of the BIC AI mechanical pencil and away we go. I stuck it into a hollowed out plotter pen, as demonstrated above, and it seemed to work fine and auto-advance the lead whenever necessary. Sweet.

So for the two of you out there interested in pen plotters, now you know. For the rest of you, maybe you’ve got an Eggbot or a Makerbot Unicorn or some cool sort of homebrewed plotter… go get it running with some genuine 100% lead mixture of graphite with clay binder. And if you’re into drawing and/or robots and/or software, you should stop in and play with the plotters someday. I’ll get you started, so bring in some vector artwork, and maybe some paper, and we’ll see what happens!

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.

Before I get too far, I’ll have you know that their next meeting is Wednesday, February 15th (at RIT’s Center for Student Innovation), and you can get at them on their meetup group, or their twittery bits. If combining technology and journalism sounds fun to you, you should stop by, because it seemed like a bunch of smart and interesting people.

Ok. For the rest of our time together, I’m fixin’ to dump a few links on you. I am not a journalist, nor a programmer, but I have been quite interested in this area for some time, and hope to contribute – at the very least – as a well-informed cheerleader, brainstormer, facilitator, or village idiot. We’ll see. Either way, maybe I can give interested parties some ideas of what’s possible/probable before the next meeting.

Open Sesame

“Open” excites me. Open source software, open hardware designs, open data, “free culture” in general. Fun things happen when information is free and accessible. Maybe this first dawned on me when I saw the Oakland Crimespotting site. By now, everybody has seen a multitude of visualizations made by dumping data on top of Google Maps. Back then it was pretty new and exciting. What struck me most, at the time, was that the Oakland PD was publishing this data to a public website, and in a format that was fairly easily scrape-able and parse-able. Wow! Amazingly pedestrian, really, but for a city or county government it seemed unthinkable (and still does, apparently).

Many municipalities are doing a decent job in this area nowadays. Some have even progressed enough that sites like EveryBlock have sprung up, taking these public data feeds and massaging them into a format that mere mortals can make sense of. Baltimore has an open data website that looks like it has lots of useful info, in easy to digest formats. Chicago too. I’m sure there are many others… those were just the first two to pop up when I poked around for “data dot blah blah dot gov” sites. There is no data.cityofrochester.gov site, unfortunately. How do we make that happen?

Dumpy Data

In the meantime, we rely on FOIA requests for information from local governments. Often times, these arrive in the least convenient format possible, and they are likely full of sloppy and inconsistent data. We’re pretty lucky then, that after cleaning things up, the D&C often shares this data with us on their RocDocs site.

I wonder if they know about Google Refine? Refine is “a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.” If you’re dealing with cruddy data of any sort, you should check it out. It’s a bit of a weird install, running as a web server on your computer. Ask your local nerds if you’re having trouble… it’s worth it.

Community Data

Even if you can get it in a decent format, governments don’t always have the data you need. Or if they do, it might be stale by the time you can get at it. There are some fun things happening in the world of open data acquisition. Let’s call it “open mapping”, although I’m sure there are non-location-based projects I’m overlooking.

First, Google is changing the terms of service on their Maps product… taking it out of “beta” status and reaching into your wallet for some payback. If you have a certain amount of map views per day, it’s no longer free to use. Thankfully, all along, a large community of folks have been creating their own street maps by compiling open government data (TIGER files in the US), or by walking, biking, and driving routes with a GPS logger and uploading their tracks. OpenStreetMap is the result, and it’s an amazing feat. Anybody can edit the map… so feel free to liken it to the “Wikipedia of maps”, even though that probably makes some people bristle. Not coincidentally, the resultant data is available under a farily open license, and has thus been mixed and remixed into a plenitude of other projects, products, and experiments.

OpenCycleMap builds upon OpenStreetMap, and highlights cycling routes. It is rather sparse in the US. I recently attended some public meetings on Rochester’s bicycle plan, featuring some large maps of city streets rated “A” through “F” for bike safety. Perhaps that belongs on such a map, editable by all those who actually ride the city streets and know that traffic volume and speed are not the only relevant dimensions for such a grade.

OpenHeatMap lets you upload a spreadsheet of data and crank out a heat map on top of OpenStreetMap. Mapbox is a bit more sophisticated, but costs some money for hosted maps. No matter… the Mapbox developers have released TileMill, a gorgeous application that lets you handcraft interactive maps yourself. It requires a bit more knowhow, but I’m sure Hacks/Hackers has plenty of that.

The folks at Safecast wanted to map radiation levels following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, so they cobbled together some GPS loggers and Geiger counters. After driving around the country, they plopped the data on top of the OpenStreetMap. This isn’t child’s play yet, but every day it’s getting easier to bring together the hardware and software needed to record data and make it easily available.

A Brief Aside

These radiation mappers weren’t “traditional journalists”. Maybe it wasn’t even journalism or news. Whatever. It was really important info, and I’ll bet no reporter thought “I’ll just go out and record that data, instead of waiting by the phone for an official report”. I hope, after hanging out at Hacks/Hackers, that mindset will change.

Semi-related: Rochester has a nuclear power plant nearby, and Interlock has a Geiger counter:

(not a terribly well calibrated Geiger counter, admittedly)

For some more thoughts on the future of local news and journalism, from people much smarter and more cogent than I, I will simply link without comment to some posts I’ve bookmarked from Ryan Sholin, Jeff Croft, and Tim Porter.

Burbling Infobrooks

If real-time info is needed, Pachube is a free clearinghouse for data feeds. It’s ridiculously easy to upload sensor data to the site, whether it be temperature, weather, energy use, and so on. Equally important, it’s also easy to retrieve that information as a regularly updated and well-documented stream. Would you like to browse the 2700 available feeds tagged “radiation” on Pachube? Probably not. But it’d be a relatively simple task to create a program that retrieves and maps them in an easy to digest format.

Some folks – mainly in New York City – weren’t quite satisfied with the current status quo of air quality monitoring. So they’re building their own sensor network using open platforms to measure and make the data available to anybody that wants it, in real time. This stuff isn’t too technically challenging nowadays. We just need to pair up those with a need for info with the people who know how to get this stuff done.

Too Long; Still Reading

There’s plenty more fun stuff happening in this area, but that’s enough to keep you occupied for a few hours a least. If – after you close all your browser tabs – you still find your cravings unfulfilled, do join us at the next meeting, or fire away in the comments here. I’m sure we’ll be able to fill up or otherwise utilize your vast cranial resources. See you there!