NYC Resistor: DIY Hackers Doing Awesome Things 134
HansonMB writes "Founded by a handful of friends who wanted a place to tinker with electronics and meet like-minded hackers for good, NYC Resistor has blossomed into one of the country's most influential hackerspaces. On any given Thursday night, their cozy, cluttered loft workshop is crawling with a diverse crowd of hardcore tinkerers and curious newcomers. Throwing some caution and many user warranties to the wind, they're there to build, refine, break and share everything from toy robots to intricate paper sculpture to open source musical instruments."
Hackerspace? Goat-space is where it's at (Score:0, Interesting)
I used to run one of the UK's most popular hackerspaces up until last year when the popularity of goat based experimentation made it quite clear that a goat-space would be a far more rewarding and popular event. Now my goatspace events attract a crowd twice as large, and the advances made in goat technology are fantastic. The only problem is that our webserver keeps getting hacked, but that is probably because it runs on Windows. All it takes is a goat to wander aimlessly past it and get the ethernet cable entangled in its horns and down goes our website! We are upgrading to Linux next week and will use some better ethernet cables that Windows doesn't support.
Re:Labels and Pop Culture (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why being creative in the "industrial arts" has gained hipster status...
It's either hip, or terrifying, depending on who you talk to.
That being said, the reason is simple:
The vast majority of people nowadays have no idea what goes on outside their own job, and a lot of them don't even know what goes on _in_ their own job.
The days of most people being able to take things apart and fix them themselves are long behind us. What caused this downfall of knowledge, I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with Fox, American Idle, partisan politics, NIMBY, and excessive litigation.
Basically, society has been moving in a direction that discourages - or downright criminalizes - tinkering. Most people support this, because it means they don't have to know how things work, and the mental stimulation and exercise that might be required is easier to waste on Fox and American Idle.
The fact that you can get sued for changing a chip out in your own hardware is simply an extra reason to avoid even finding out how to do it. If you're a clueless idiot with technology, you can't be accused of modifying that technology.
Re:Labels and Pop Culture (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet there is one universal fact... and it works in hackerspaces or in Car clubs.....
Typically the old guys always out-do the young snots. For two reasons, and one of them huge...
1 - old guys know more from experience, sorry kiddies you cant read that one to learn it.
2 - old guys ALWAYS have more money than the kiddies. This rubs the prima donna kiddies the wrong way bad.
Ay my car club one of the new snots claims he could build a car faster than any of the old guys. we decided to teach the snotnosed punk a lesson so we called his bluff...
Buy a mazda Miata, does not matter what year, and make it as fast as you can in 3 months.
He worked hard on it the entire time, scraped together lots of performance parts.
The old guy that took up the challenge installed a Corvette LS3 engine in his. Outspent the snot by 5X.
Guess what, old guy with a passenger that weighed 250 pounds was 4 seconds faster than the snot-nosed kid in his stripped and turboed performance setup. He learned right there that Old guys will always win because we got more money than you kid.
Get used to that 20 something snot-nosed punks... that 40 year old guy will ALWAYS win because he has more money than you.
and yes kids, you CAN easily fit a LS3 in a miata.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TllaD4VTjCw [youtube.com]