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On this episode of Hacker Space Digets, Mog teaches everyone the word Ephemerisle. We find out that 3d printers can write out the United States Constition and print choloclate bunny molds. Also Mid-South Makers one up us on their planned Make-In. All this and more, one episode 23 of HackerSpace Digest.

Show notes are on the wiki

Hackerspace Digest 023 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Hackerspace Digest 023 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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This last weekend our shop had our monthly hackathon. I was pleased with all that we got accomplished. We had a wide range of projects this weekend:

  • Building a laptop stand car mount.
  • Added email support for our guest book.
  • Built leds into a handset for notifications.
  • Helped setup some gnu/linux boxes.
  • Rss filtering and aggregation.
  • Ate loads of pizza.
  • Fixed a flat panel tv with some minor adjustments.
  • Used a smudge pot to heat and blind members.
  • Fixed a stack overflow in a flight computer.
  • Worked on a two factor authentication token.
  • Using an ink jet printer to apply an etch resist to pcbs.
  • Rebuilt a reflow oven and controller.
  • Planned a film shoot.
  • Built a sword out of wood for dragoncon.
  • Freeze drying machine vacuum chamber.
  • Building better ventilation system for our laser cutter.

and finally a nice trip to ihop for the survivors of the night.

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I was listening to Major Tom by Shiny Toy Guns in my car the other day. There’s a part in the song where she says,

“The count goes on

4, 3, 2, 1…”

When I heard those lyrics, I thought of the rocket launch I went to on January 14, 2012. Dmitriy and John, 2 other members of ML256, launched their rocket Safety Orange twice that day. I thought that it would be really cool to sync up the rocket taking off and the “4, 3, 2, 1” part of the song.

So I started playing around with some video editing software. After a few minutes of editing the video that was taken from that day, I realized that the video editor I had wasn’t going to work for this project. So I talked to crashcartpro and he suggested I use OpenShot.

And away I went with the video editing. With help from crashcartpro, ratmandu, ramgraden, and korc I had a 2 minute and 24 second video in 2 days.

The rocket launch happens about 53 seconds in and at about 1:50 is where the rocket can be seen again deploying its parachute. Make sure you watch till the end…Dmitriy does a happy dance!

I used Inkscape for the intro and credits clips. And of course, OpenShot for the video editing. The song in the background is, you guessed it, Major Tom by Shiny Toy Guns.

Here is a link to the video.

Here is some more info about Safety Orange.

I’m really excited to do some more video editing in the very near future! Let me know what you think of this video!

-Kix

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I signed us up to participate in this year’s Global Hackerspace Cupcake Challenge.  If you’re asking yourself what is the Global Hackerspace Cupcake Challenge you can find the answer here: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Global_Hackerspace_Cupcake_Challenge_2012

If you don’t feel like visiting that page and reading all about it, all the hackerspaces in the world that want to participate have to build something that will keep a cupcake safe in the mail.  Each hackerspace picked another space to send their cupcakes.  Each space that receives a cupcake must make a video recording of opening the box and judging it based on things like: did the cupcake survive, creativity of the contraption that protected the cupcake, taste, and packaging decoration.  This very blog post even gets us an extra 3 points!  Here are some pictures of the contraption I built.  It fit exactly within the 12″ box limits and the whole thing weighed less than the maximum 2 kg at 1.52 kg.  I can’t wait to see what Alpha One Labs ends up with when they open ours!