Hackerspace Happenings: Metalab Turns 5

Home
Hackerspace Happenings: Metalab Turns 5


Metalab Celebrates its Fifth Anniversary


Congratulations to Metalab of Vienna, Austria on their fifth anniversary. They’re in the middle of a week-long mini convention with demos of pinhole photograhy, LED throwies, screen printing, 3D printing, lockpicking, gilding, and lots more.


3taps/Creative Commons Hackathon in San Francisco

Meet fellow designers and developers. See how your peers are wrangling data into something that looks fantastic, feels intuitive and is super-useful. Use your skills to create great apps and visualizations from an open data set that includes Indeed, Etsy, Craigslist, Ebay, Zillow and others. Show your stuff to investors looking to seed data-related projects – they’ll be coming to see team presentations on the final day of the hack.

The hackathon will be held April 29th and 30th at i/o ventures at 780 Valencia St., San Francisco, CA.


New Makerspace in Seattle

We are proud to be celebrating the opening of our new community art/maker space “ALT Space” and you are cordially invited to join us! We will have snacks & drinks & music for you and plenty of art on display.

Saturday, May 14th.
Central District Artwalk & ALTSpace open day: noon-7pm.
ALTSpace Opening Party: 7pm – 11pm.
2318 E Cherry St, Seattle, WA 98122

ALTSpace is an open workshop stocked with tools and supplies for making things out of wood, fabric, metal, and electronics. We offer monthly memberships as well as single-day passes; it is a place to share tools, make art, and share skills and information.


Springfield Make Club Grand Opening

We’re doing a promotional photo scavenger hunt for the grand opening of our hackerspace, which runs from tomorrow through the opening on May 6th. We’ve decided to open up participation to locations everywhere so that people at other hackerspaces can take pictures of themselves doing silly things at local landmarks in THEIR hometowns


Google is Making Hackerspaces for Employees

Via Adafruit, Google wants to return to its startup roots by encouraging employees to tinker in hackerspaces:

Amid all the free food and other goodies that come with a job at Google Inc., there’s one benefit a lot of employees don’t even know about: a cluster of high-tech workshops that have become a tinkerer’s paradise.

Workers escape from their computer screens and office chairs to weld, drill and saw on expensive machinery they won’t find at Home Depot.

Besides building contraptions with a clear business purpose, Google employees use the shops for fun: They create elaborate holiday decorations, build cabinets for their homes and sometimes dream big like the engineers working on a pedal-powered airplane with a 100-foot wingspan.

The “Google Workshops” are the handiwork of Larry Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in a rented garage. Page authorized the workshops’ opening in 2007 to try to reconnect the company with its roots.

Google, which has kept the workshops under wraps until Tuesday, gave The Associated Press an exclusive tour shortly after Page reclaimed his original job as CEO on April 4.
The workshops offer a peek into ways Page may try to make the Internet giant work with the verve and creativity of a garage-bound entrepreneur. Page believes the 13-year-old company needs to return to thinking and acting like a feisty startup as it faces competition from younger Internet stars such as Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

“There is a feeling here at Google that all good things start in a garage,” said Greg Butterfield, an engineering lab manager who oversees the workshops. “Larry wanted to create the same kind of environment he and Sergey had when they started Google — a sort of a playground or sandbox for pursuing their ideas.”


Are you a hackerspace member with an event you’d like to publicize? Send it to johnb@makezine.com or tweet me at @johnbaichtal and I’ll post it. Also feel free to subscribe to my hackerspaces Twitter list. Hackerspace Happenings will run weekly Tuesdays, and the next one will come out May 3rd.

2 thoughts on “Hackerspace Happenings: Metalab Turns 5

  1. Gregg says:

    The Android I/O device that Sparkfun is arranging to sell, is a direct outgrowth of that. I say arranging because they do not have stock and yet it is listed accordingly. My guess is that they are busily making it.

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

My interests include writing, electronics, RPGs, scifi, hackers & hackerspaces, 3D printing, building sets & toys. @johnbaichtal nerdage.net

View more articles by John Baichtal

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK