Photo courtesey cliff1066™

If it’s been a while since you last laid your eyes on the nav bar of our humble website, now would be a good time to reacquaint yourself with it.  We’ve added a Media tab up top that contains all of PS:One’s official video (and soon to be audio as well).

We’ve been quietly recording talks and events over the last year and here is just a small selection of those recordings.  There are additional Guided Tours along with the rest of your favorite PS:One talks still in queue to be edited.

Many people have invested a lot of time and work to bring this content to a broader audience extending our reach into the greater community.   Carl Karsten was integral in showing me a less-cumbersome workflow for shooting and recording audio.  Also, Tim Saylor has scheduled so many great speakers for Guided Tours and made such a great help with production (and even taking over once as of this writing).

Now give your strained eyes a rest from this 20th century concept of “reading” and sit back to enjoy some syndicated PS:One goodness.

Photo by Anne Petersen.

Adults who missed the thrill of Power Wheels or Little Tikes cars as a child now can go one better: by modifying the battery-powered child-size vehicles and competing at Maker Faire Detroit. Teams of DIY mechanic enthusiasts have been upgrading the small-scale cars far beyond stock performance levels to win prizes and bragging rights.

Among many other activities at Make magazine’s Maker Faire at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, July 31–August 1, the DieHard-sponsored Power Racing Series (PPPRS) will premiere. In its inaugural year the event was internal to PS: One, but this year brings teams together from far beyond the Midwest.

Jim Burke, a Pumping Station: One Director-at-Large and the Director of the PPPRS, said “I want Makers to meet face to face with a common project. Modifying and racing these toys is fun, creative, and challenging.”

This year, with DieHard Platinum batteries and chargers powering the series, nine teams from six different hackerspaces and makerspaces will compete in the three events of PPPRS: a drag race, a road race, and an endurance race. The PPPRS will be a main event at Maker Faire: Detroit, and families are encouraged to attend. We hope to see you there!

A quick reminder, we’ve gone back to weekly membership meetings.

That’s right – we’re having full meetings every Tuesday at 8pm.  Board meetings will happen at 7pm.

Quick facts about this change:

• 300 Seconds of Fame will begin immediately following the membership meeting and will continue as a monthly event on the second Tuesday of every month. Sign up with Anne if you want to have 300 seconds of your very own.
• This month’s Guided Tour will be the last of the series for the foreseeable future.
• The extremely fun 5th Tuesday Potlucks will also continue (immediately following the membership meeting).

Click Link for an updated map: Network Map Link

When you connect to the network at Pumping Station: One by plugging in or via wireless, you are joining a very special network.

We’re one of the first networks to join with Agora Link.  Agora is the North American arm of a global Research network that is linking hackerspaces’ internal networks together into one awesome collaborative mesh.   We’re tied in with the ChaosVPN in Germany, and as of this past weekend we have 50 registered end points.  If interested, you can read more here:

• Agora Link Homepage
• ChaosVPN Wiki
• Periodically updated network map

What’s the payoff?  First up is a plan to host an international CTF competition using hackerspaces and other labs as the meeting points for teams. So look for more details on that in the near future.

More developments on this will be popping up throughout the next year.

This was co-posted from Matt’s “Openfly” blog post at NYC Resistor

Twitter: @agoralink

Everything You Wanted To Know About Super Computers But Didn’t know Who to Ask.

If you’ve ever wondered what makes some computer so super, or just wanted to know how to start building your own, this would be the talk to attend, and bring questions. Why should I go with a AMD chipset or not? What’s a beowulf cluster? Why might I want to go with PlayStation 3’s. Plus much much more.

This talk is open to the public, seating is limited so show up early. This presentation will start right after the weekly meeting and is tentatively scheduled start at 8:30pm this Tuesday.

In The Laboratory by Henry Alexander

Art museums appear to be impenetrable fortresses after closing time. What is often unknown to the majority of the visiting public is that the majority of these collections are stored and cataloged outside of these main halls. In many cases up to 99% of museums’ collections are stored away never to be seen for decades, if that often.

Over the last 8 months I have researched the difference between movie museum security and the reality of museum security.

Just published is a some of my results in the Journal of Physical Security at Argonne National Laboratory.

You can find the article here.

Or here.

As if we didn’t have enough excitement going on at Pumping Station: One this weekend, with the didgeridoo class and the Come On, Feel The Noise Hackathon, this weekend we will have visitors. A group of people from i3Detroit, the hackerspace in Detroit, will be visiting Pumping Station: One this weekend! They will be arriving Saturday afternoon and heading home on Sunday, so they’ll have plenty of time to explore our space and enjoy our Hackathon.

Remember, the Hackathon is open to the public. So, if you want to not only work on your projects but also enjoy the chance to meet your fellow hackers from the Motor City, make sure to come by the space this weekend!

• 1st Tuesday of the month: Monthly Membership Meeting and Board Meeting
• 2nd Tuesday of the month: 300 Seconds of Fame
• 3rd Tuesday of the month: Open House
• 4th Tuesday of the month: Workshop Day (a longer-format talk)
• 5th Tuesday of the month (when it exists): PS: One Pot Luck

All events are open to the public, occur at 3354 N. Elston Ave in Chicago (look for the red door) and start around 8pm, and doors always open at 6pm for schmoozing (use the doorbell if you can’t get in).

Since the foundation of Pumping Station: One, our weekly Tuesday night membership meeting has been the cornerstone of our organization. Every week, we met and discussed business, met new people, and showed off our projects.

As we matured as an organization, we realized that we don’t often have the volume of new business to support a weekly membership meeting, and we also had a lot of fun ideas for public events.

So, I’m proud to announce our new Tuesday night schedule – each Tuesday night is a guaranteed time that anyone can enter our doors and find more about what we do, and I’m sure that all these events will be a fun time.

Special thanks to Anne, Laurie, Tim, and Jeff for taking the lead on our new events!

As I step down from my position as president, pass the reins to the 2010 board of directors, and become a normal member again, I want to look back at everything that led to the founding of PS1 and all the work we have done since then. I have had the distinct pleasure and honor of working with a literal army of like-minded and brilliant collaborators to create and work with some amazing organizations over the past few years.

Back in 2004, with the help of many friends, I helped co-found TOOOL US (The Open Organization of Lockpickers, US division) with the blessings of Barry Wels (a TOOOL Holland founder).  We put our necks on the line and worked to bring lockpicking out of the shadows and into the national and international spotlight by showing that holding information back only hurts. By releasing information detailing lock weaknesses, manufacturers improved their systems and the field of physical security.

In 2008, I worked with an amazing group of people in the Washington DC area to help found HacDC, the nations’ capital’s hackerspace, and one of the first US hackerspaces. Learning to work with community leaders, acquire funding, and bring brilliant people from fields not used to collaborating together other was exhilarating, and even more exhilarating when those collaborations bore fruit.

In late 2008, a small group of friends and I began organizing meetings for what would eventually become Pumping Station: One here in Chicago.

In the past 12 month since Pumping Station One’s January 2009 founding, some amazing things have happened:

• Successfully created a space for hackers of all types to meet and work together
• Built a pretty decent network capable of people working on projects related to it
• Held the Geek Prom and the PPPWRS to great response from the media, the hacker/geek crowd, and community of Chicago
• Many of our members have contributed code and hardware designs to the Open Source community
• Brewed some wonderful concoctions in our Zymurgy (beer making) workshop
• Built a woodshop and an electrical workshop.
• Built a massive loft.
• Built a TARDIS
• Had members featured in articles in several news sources (including the American Bar Association’s Journal!)
• Reached 50 members and growing
• Countless projects from smart fabrics, pneumatic launch systems, code development, and chemical engineering.
• Countless milestones large and small I’m certain to have missed here

In the process of accomplishing this there are so many people to thank for helping to achieve the dream of a hackerspace in Chicago:

• All the founding members who contributed generously of their money, time, and effort when Pumping Station: One was just a glimmering dream and a tiny pile of paperwork at the State Secretary’s office.
• The entire 2009 Board of Directors for helping to keep this herd of cats organized and pointed in the same direction.
• Nathan Witt for being such a gentleman with the patience to take all the notes, take care of the website, and cut so much wood into useful assembled pieces (including our public stocks).
• Ishmael Rufus for looking after our books, because if he hadn’t we’d probably end up in prison for doing our taxes wrong.
• Eli Skipp for making the world inside our walls prettier and more awesome every day, and while being a source of inspiration for women everywhere.
• Nicolle “Rogue Clown” Neulist for being our own legal beagle(and Commodore 128 music queen).
• John “Jur1st” Benson of the Cowtown Computer Congress in Kansas City for also  keeping us out of legal hot water.
• Sacha De’Angeli for being our Danger “Safety” Committee chair and make sure we all have our fingers, noses, and toes.
• Jeff Kantarek for keeping a hovering firm hand on how not to create hydrogen by sticking a car batter in salt water.
• Sarah Sutherlin for making sure the loft didn’t collapse on us with her keen architect skills.
• Nick Farr for helping keep me sane from afar.

There are many, many others that I wish I could thank.

A year ago, we all set out to create a space where it is encouraged to learn beyond the normal educational path, I am proud to see what we have all built together, and I am excited to see what will evolve from our organization and from the worldwide hackerspaces movement.

So this boy from New Jersey has the pleasure to introduce an excellent group of leaders that will bring PS:One into a new period of enlightenment and exploration – the 2010 Board of Directors: Jim Burke, Tim Saylor, Jordan Bunker, Ryan Lanham, Ishmael Rufus, Sarah Sutherlin, Jeff Kantarek, and Sacha De’Angeli.  I’m terribly excited to see what many people thought wouldn’t be possible in Chicago grow into something that no one expected.

Per Ardua Ad Astra

Eric Michaud,

President Emeritus

Note: as internet memes are constantly being invented, rising, and falling again into obscurity, this will be the first installment in a series of classes.

Address, times, etc. are listed on the calendar to the right!
(Image via encyclopediadramatica.com)