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Those of you who have been following my blog since around 2009 will remember that myself and Nikki Pugh once ran a hackerspace in Birmingham called fizzPOP. Actually, calling it a hackerspace was a bit of a stretch as we never had our own permanent, access-any-hour space and always relied on organisations such as…
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Somewhere in late December 2008 I was frustrated with the apparent lack of a local hacking scene. Luckily a few other people felt the same and in January 2009 fizzPOP was formed. I once had all the time and energy in the world to pump into helping to organise events such as the fizzPOP…
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For the last month or so the fizzPOP team and Mr Underwood have been planning the awesomely awesome Theremin Day that took place at fizzPOP on Saturday 24th April. The day kicked off with an optical theremin building workshop, which produced some very interesting sounds. One person described the noises produced as “lil creatures……
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Recently fizzPOP celebrated the two of its first birthday’s. On January 26th the mailing list was set up and on February 28th we had our first meeting. We count each one as our birthday, which, in theory, means more cake! I’m really quite proud of what myself and Nikki have achieved so far with…
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From February 2th6 to 27th I was in London for dev8d. It describes itself as: Dev8D is 4 days of 100% pure software developer heaven. It will be intense. It will be exhilarating. It will make you a better programmer. • Learn to use unfamiliar languages (such as Python, Ruby and Clojure) • Team…
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Ever since I went down to an Openlab workshop last year I’ve been fascinated by live coding. From Wikipedia: Live coding (sometimes known as ‘interactive programming’, ‘on-the-fly programming’, ‘just in time programming’) is the name given to the process of writing software in realtime as part of a performance. I thought about doing live…
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Recently Helen Flanagan, who was mentioned on CiB last week, contacted fizzPOP about doing portraits of hackers. I happily volunteered myself and this is how one of the pics came out: Notice the roflcopter t-shirt hiding underneath the clown shirt. Major WIN! There’s two more pics on her blog and you should check out…
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Brumcon 9 is coming up this Saturday and I’ve been asked to give a short talk about fizzPOP and hackerspaces. BrumCon is a regular event organised by Brum2600 regulars, featuring a wide variety of talks, discussion, demos and most importantly, alcohol. Incorrectly but neatly dubbed a ‘blackhat thinktank’ by NTK, The Register – ‘We…
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Last Thursday I gave a short presentation at Eastside Projects about fizzPOP. There were a few presentations on the night, all of which focussed on what artists have been up to since their studies. Although I’ve been out of university since July 2007 fizzPOP has really been my main activity since then. What’s interesting…