The Stanley Ferry Workshops build lock gates for canals all over the country, the workshops are open from 9am-3pm on Saturday 11th Feb and you’ll get to see woodworking on a gigantic scale.

More details can be found here.

Meanwhile, JP (Squirrel) and I (Alex) are stepping down as Finance Director and Promo/Organising Director. It’s been a hard slog for the last four months and we’re both ready to stand aside and watch from the sidelines. Taking over an existing group with problems and a backlog of debt is never easy but we’re delighted that the debt has been cleared and the membership and visibility of the group increased. LHS2 promises to be a great opportunity for the current members, future recruits and Leeds itself. We look forward to seeing what happens next!

We’ll be at Old Broadcasting House talking about new toys and plans for 2012 from about 18:30. If you’ve not been to OBH before the map and details of parking etc are here. Hope to see you there!

Subscriptions

Being honest about how small our group of subscription paying members was has paid off, we have three old members tempted back into subscribing over the last couple of weeks. It’s also great to start seeing people we’ve missed over the summer coming back to the Tuesday night meetings. Knowing how close LHS2 is to being created and being able to see how we’re doing via regular updates and the thermometer hopefully will help others make the decision to join us!

Current Financial Position

We’re currently at £2103/£3000 raised. We said we’d start talking contracts on LHS2 anywhere north of £2700.

We’re *this* close to getting LHS2!

If you can fling a bit more in the pot, please, please do. We get £300-£350 in member contributions a month but if people can dig deep and spread a bit of Christmas cheer we can get the space right after the new year.

Wouldn’t you like to start 2012 *knowing* there was a hackspace waiting for you…?

One of the best thing about the hacker/hackspace community is the willingness to share mistakes. And one the best examples is the The Art Of 3D Print Failure group on Flickr. A small group of people sharing what they’ve learnt from their 3D printing experiments by getting it very, very wrong.

It all stemmed from a blog post by RichRap. RichRap normally makes fabulous things but he decided to take time to diagnose why some of his attempts at printing had gone horribly wrong (and in some cases looked like ectoplasm). From that post, the group was born.

Here in Leeds we’re all keen to get a 3D printer right after getting the new space and some of our members are already using their own and learning how to avoid the pitfalls. Check out this piece Craig brought along to our Tuesday meeting this week:

Craig’s Printing

It’s part of one his current projects and is a fair bigger than most badges and trinkets we’ve seen as starter projects. In fact it took 3 hours to print due to the size/thickness of it. We were all impressed by the solidity of it and the fineness of the weave which is really visible close up.

Craig’s promised to run a 3D printing day for us next year so we can start plotting crazy designs of our own, can’t wait! Even if we get it wrong, we’ll have somewhere supportive to share the photos…

06DEC – 18:30 – Old Broadcasting House – Arduino Session
Bring any Arduino-y bits or projects you’ve been playing with, come along to find out more about Arduino or just come and say hi. All welcome.

13DEC – 19:30 – TBC – Leeds Hackspace Christmas Meal
There’s a poll on the mailing list for everyone to vote on their preferred venue for a meal followed by drinks. Eat, drink and be merry!

20DEC – No Meeting
27DEC – No Meeting
Please don’t head down to Old Broadcasting House, we won’t be there…

03JAN – 18:30 – Old Broadcasting House – Hello 2012
Social to compare cool new bits of kit, catch up or just come and see what hackspace is all about – we’d love to see in the new year with some new faces. All welcome.

Yesterday, on a brisk but sunny Sunday, a small band of Leeds Hackspace folks caught a train to York and went on a tour round the cold war bunker in Acomb.

The bunker’s oddly suburban location and slightly Teletubbies-like appearance are quickly contrasted when the gate opens sounding a siren until it is shut again, and when it does shut, it clangs ominously behind you. As you make your way up the stairs to the entrance the first thing you can see through the door is a RADIATION poster and the decontamination zone – three sinks with shower hoses attached.

The one hour tour covers almost all of the bunker and starts with a video explaining the history of the cold war and the threat of four minute warnings. After that you’re led through corridors and claustrophobia-inducingly small rooms, past oddly marked cupboards until you reach the operations room, the point of the whole building.

The operations room is where the staff at this HQ would receive and pass on information from the 20 smaller observation posts it managed. Had a bomb been dropped in Yorkshire or Lincolnshire it would have been in this room that staff worked to triangulate the blast’s location and calculate the power of the blast, the radio-active fallout’s spread and it’s impact.

The Cold War Bunker Operations Room

The operations room is a geek’s treasure trove. It has all sorts of archaic bits of kit (including the only AWDREY on display in the UK), huge floor-to-ceiling perspex maps, telephone posts and update boards to relay information coming in from other observation posts. It has the only computer on site. And a wonderful thing called a Bomb Power Indicator made by the General Radiological Company of London – it’s a pressure gauge!

It’s hard to believe that if a bomb had been dropped this tiny bunker was designed to hold 60 people for up to 30 days.

The Cold War can often seem a remote possibility today but ROC No. 20 was in use from 1961 right up until 1992 when it was finally stood down. What’s even more remarkable is that this bunker, and all the others across the country like it, were staffed almost entirely by civilian volunteers.

We left the bunker with lots more photos, copies of the EH guidebook, a meaty tome on the whole history of the Cold War and a desire to be somewhere warmer and less apocalyptic. Which is how we ended up in Evil Eye having a pint and a Sunday roast and then in The Old White Swan demolishing their whisky collection. :)

There’s a feature in Issue 105 of Linux User magazine which mentions us!

In an article entitled Hackerspace Entrepreneurs and Makers, Richard Smedley looks at how the same impulses that drove the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution to create engines and machines are today driving makers and hackers to work with Arduino and 3D printers.

It’s an interesting article and covers recent products and tinkerings at DoES Liverpool, Fizzpop over in Birmingham and Build Brighton alongside the obvious London Hackspace mention. There’s also a list of active UK hackspaces/hackspace groups which includes Leeds and the article includes a link to hackspace.org’s list to find out more.

The article isn’t available online but there will be a copy of the magazine available to have a look at the next LHS meeting if you fancy a look.

Run on the lines of a 24 hour hackday event, CHN had the twist of the data provided to the hackers coming from ‘cultural’ sources such as museums, art galleries and even an opera company.

Mick and James joined forces with Carolyn to form Team WANT and created Informed App – a Siri style opinion generator to help out in those awkward moments when you need an opinion on something or someone you’ve never heard of. It hunts keywords like ‘I think’ or ‘everyone knows’ and returns the results on your phone to get you safely over the conversational gap.

JP and I (Alex) meanwhile came up with Consider The Library – a Chrome plug in that reminds book-buyers that the book they’re considering is in their local library branch and available for free. It works by hunting webpages for ISBN numbers and checking their status on Talis Prism, an online catalogue used by lots of UK library services. If it finds the book is available in your local library service it flashes a little pop up to tell you which branches have it.

Both hacks were well received on the day and won prizes. :)

Informed App got James and Mick Amazon vouchers and tickets for a show in Sheffield. They’re going to keep working on it to make it a bit faster and filter out some of the dafter comments it comes up with, ‘On it like a car bonnet’ springs to mind as one baffling offering.

Consider The Libraries meanwhile scooped the 5kg tub of sweets shown at the top of the post, a huge box of Walkers crisps and £70 worth of Amazon vouchers. Since we’re LHS directors and can’t possibly eat 5kg of sweets the food has been donated to Leeds Hackspace along with £70-worth of cash. We’re getting a bit of traffic here on the LHS site as a result of all the linking around I’ve been doing… every little bit of promoting helps, right? :)

Although Leeds Hackspace members regularly go to hackday events and uncons this is the first one where we’ve really been visible and represented what we can do as a group. I think we did ourselves proud. :)

The other hacks can be viewed over on the Culture Hack North website.

So, I’m a bit behind with updating the blog but there’s a couple of things I want to share. First up is the link to listen again to the Radio 4 show Click On which featured London Hackspace, Manchester Fab Lab and Raspberry Pi. It’s interesting to see ideas and models compared across cities and needs this way in a full programme that has time to ask a few questions.