A man walks into Maplin with an Amstrad CPC464 under his arm….

Yes, it sounds like the opening line to a joke, but it seems that Fligg is getting himself a bit of a reputation at our handily placed local Maplin store. More on that later.

We managed to repair the smoking power supply in our BBC Master (it just required some new capacitors – everything you could ever want to know can be found on Sprow’s website). It took some fiddling to get everything set back up – we replaced the battery pack as part of the work and that required some fiddling to get all the settings in so we got BASIC instead of MOS when the machine was switched on. Sadly it seems the disk drive has seen some abuse and it won’t read any disks. It also can’t be heard stepping, so it’s possibly jammed – something to dismantle on another day.

The other weekend highlight was Rob turning up on his Powerisers (yes, the guy that London Hackspace know as the lunatic on the unicycle owns other weird and wonderful modes of transport). Here’s Fligg trying to get used to having very springy legs an extra foot long:

There’s video available of his spectacular collapse. Bribes will be accepted for both posting or losing it.

Tuseday’s hack night saw Fligg’s Maplin trip hinted at in the title – where we’re convinced they must now know him as the 8-bit weirdo. The quest was for a power connector to fit the CPC464. We managed to power it up, but having only a monitor which takes TTL input and an amstrad which only outputs 1V peak to peak video we found that it wouldn’t sync and so we’ll have to postpone further work on both the Amstrad and Commodore 64 until we have a more appropriate display.

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A Busy Weekend

Saturday saw 3 of us take a trip to Harrogate for the Model Engineering show, thousands of square feet of exhibition space filled with tool porn and stunning models (though the term “model” doesn’t really do them justice!).

It was an exhausting day, and required monumental effort not to spend every available penny we had on the vast quantity of shiny stuff available. We spent the rest of the weekend attempting to sort out more stuff around the hackspace, but we seem to have acquired the habit of collecting more and more stuff. Fortunately in this cast the stuff was incredibly useful. a HUGE thankyou to the pedallers arms (our awesome neighbours downstairs) who wanted to get rid of the coolest junk cluttering up their cupboard, so we now have a rather nice bench pillar drill, and a lathe (the labeling is somewhat ambiguous, but it seems to be some sort of Axminster 460)!

If anyone knows anything about the lathe, or could even provide us with a manual (or even the loan of one which we could copy) we’d be eternally grateful.

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80s Night

Shinaku goes back to the 80's with a BBC MicroBit of an impromptu 80s night tonight.

Shinaku, deciding to get the BBC Micro working but lacking a monitor cable spent a little while playing with fedora 5.5 and a tv capture card before bodging a BNC test lead into service.

Not properly used in years, the BBC sprang to life and apart from a couple of dodgy keys, seemed to be working absolutely fine. There was an amount of the obligatory `10 PRINT LEEDS HACKSPACE; 20 GOTO 10` and was just moving onto some far more interesting colour (proper spelling) manipulation when things obviously got far too exiting and in retaliation the Micro set itself on fire and started belching an upsetting amount of constant magic smoke. Interestingly, the program kept running, so whatever component committed Seppuku obviously wasn’t that integral. Time to build an operating table so we can see what’s going on.

In other news, we adopted an old 80′s cabaret arcade table which needs some TLC (and insides) and I spent some more time hitting hte floor with a hammer. Progress, I tells you.

Tomorrow we have a contingent heading to The Harrogate Show, specifically for the Model Engineering and Modelling… should be a fab day out.

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Bank Holiday Movement (and first “proper meet”)

It’s been a somewhat crazy weekend, but with the massive help of a number of members (and non-members alike) we’ve finally gotten (nearly) all of our stuff out of storage and into the space.

Saturday and Sunday were spent moving car-loads of stuff and on Monday (and again Wednesday) Yorkshire Van Man went out of his way to help us move the larger stuff.

Photo’s of the space are here; we apologise for the mess, though rest assured it’s all coming together rather nicely -though if you happen to have a spare sofa or desk, then please get in contact ;)

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LHS 2.0 is a reality

We got possession of the keys to the new space yesterday (LHS 2.0 – or is it 2.3? We don’t really care, we’re just happy to be in there!), and a few celebratory drinks were had. Today we’ve spent the day cleaning up and acquiring stock for the tuck shop – essential as the thirsty work of moving all our stuff begins tomorrow.

More updates to follow…

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Harrogate Model Engineering Exhibition

The Harrogate Model Engineering Exhibition runs 11th-13th of May at the Yorkshire Showground, Harrogate. It’ll be full of amazing projects, tools from spanners to CNC machines and laser cutters, and a whole host of incredibly enthusiastic people wanting to show off what they’re working on.

It’s looking like we’re going to be going on Saturday the 12th, drop us a line if you’re interested in tagging along – it’ll be an inspiring day out!

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Space for a Space

So here’s a somewhat verbose update on where we are with regards to actually getting HackSpace into a space. It’s getting cross-posted on both the website and mailing list. And its tl;dr’d at the bottom -badly. As I can’t come up with a funny logo for the post, I link to today XKCD as it struck me as somewhat relevant (in a “get on with it” sort of way)…

Think the Life of Brian "Get on with it!"

But First

A quick apology. As a few of you are aware (mostly the ones who idle on IRC or made it to the last meeting) there’s been quite a bit of behinds the scenes activity recently regarding moving forward.  I should have done a better job of keeping everyone up to date than I have been; I’m sorry bits have been coming out in dribs and drabs. The only excuse I can give is that I didn’t want to start making bold public announcements before we knew anything concrete; I really don’t want to get peoples hopes up if there’s a chance of them being crashed again.

Continue reading for exciting updates (there’s a graph and everything) !

Continue reading

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Stanley Ferry Workshops Open Day – 11th Feb

Our first trip of the year is one not to be missed for anyone with an interest in woodwork, engineering or those of us who thrive on workshop envy.

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.

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January 2012 Financial Progress

The current funds raised total is £2735/£3000 (which is wonderful!) and talk on the mailing list is now turning to the practicalities of getting a lease signed for LHS2 and doing it up as soon as possible. If you’re a member or potential member head over and join the conversation.

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!

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First Hackspace Meet of 2012

After postponing the meeting on 03JAN due to scary weather (high winds, lashing rain etc) we’re delighted to kick off the New Year with our first 2012 meet tomorrow night (10JAN).

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!

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