The drawing will be tonight, at 8pm CDT.  It will be streamed over Ustream.  View the channel using he address http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hackfactory. A notice will be posted on the TCMaker twitter account when the channel is open.

EDIT:  The winning ticket number is 364!  Note that we started our ticket numbering at 100, instead of 0, to make a dice roll easier to interpret (4-sided dice are numbered 1-4, not 0-3.  It’s almost like they weren’t designed by someone who starts counting at 0!).  We ended up using random.org to generate a truly random number.

Thanks to all the participants, and congratulations to our winner!

For those of you that would like to automate their membership payments you can now do so using Paypal’s subscription option below.

Due to what can only be termed overwhelming demand, we are closing the ticket sales for the MakerBot drawing.

Unfortunately, logistics are precluding us from arranging payment with all of you wonderful folks who have e-mailed or otherwise offered to buy tickets via non-PayPal methods.  We actually went a bit beyond the originally planned 300 tickets (~340), but shipping is going to be fairly pricey, and we plan to buy some plastic for both our machine and the winner’s machine to jumpstart the process.

Look for an e-mail in the upcoming days verifying the number of tickets we have you down for.  The drawing will be next Wednesday night at the Hack Factory- as is our standard practice we’ll have a Ustream feed set up for it so the whole world can watch.

Thanks to all who participated- this has been an outstanding experience for us and a wonderful reflection of the support the Maker community has for its own.  If you have any questions or concerns,  please send us e-mail at twincitiesmaker at gmail.

Per PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, we can’t sell raffle tickets through their service.

Please cease using PayPal as a payment method for raffle tickets; PayPal can, of course, still be used for paying your monthly dues or making regular donations to TCMaker.

We’ll be selling tickets at tonight’s meeting; people out of town can e-mail us at twincitiesmaker[-at-]gmail.com and we’ll figure out a way to facilitate a distant payment for your tickets.

This Thursday is the second installment of Handmade Music: Minneapolis.  There will be some fun stuff to see, hear and do.  Come check us out, the festivities start at 7pm.  We have created a blog dedicated to the monthly event, so you can read all the details about this month over there.

Also, if you would like to to help us spread the word there are some fliers that you can print off and distribute.

Handmade Music: Minneapolis #2

It’s been mentioned in the semi-weekly update, and here’s the skinny:

This coming Friday, March 26, the Hack Factory will be hosting a HACKQuarium.  What is a HACKQuarium?  It’s an event (FREE to members; TCMaker respectfully suggests a $5 donation for non-members) where you get to play around with sugru, a fun new material designed specifically for the DIY/hacker/maker community!

Sugru is a hand-moldable material that can be used to repair or improve existing items.  Check out their website for examples of things people have done with it. Start thinking about what YOU want to do with it- bring your stuff to fix, hack, or trick out.  Prizes will be awarded to the best uses!

We do ask that if you plan to come, you register in advance so we know how many people to expect.  As with most TCMaker events, BYO snacks or beverages, or we’ll have some non-alcoholic beverages on hand for purchase.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9974196&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff0048&fullscreen=1

If you haven’t been to the Hack Factory yet, above is a little video of the place, and here is another more poorly done video that shows the downstairs area and what the space looks like during the Wednesday Open House Meetings, which we everybody and anybody to attend.

TC Maker is starting to announce more and more events as we start to get things together, for those new to the group we are a bit over a year old, but rather new with this whole physical space thing, that said we are really excited and have seen some great things come from the tangible world. Here is what is coming up in the near future.

• Wind Turbine Class: This filled up before it hit the internet (Watch the calendar for more info)
• Synchronous Hackathon: The cats at Hackerspaces.org are calling for a worldwide hackathon in hackerspaces the weekend of March 20th, 2010,  join in and make stuff.
• Welding Class:This is an ongoing class that started last month and filled up to capacity the first time around, look for future classes here.
• NSFW: This will be the first event called Now Showing From the Internet, it’s a spin off of a similar event from the people over at NoiseBridge
• Handmade Music Minneapolis: These guys have decided to go monthly after the response that we got at the first handmade event, and a dedicated site Handmade Music Minneapolis was quietly launched in the mean time.
• Blender: This class actually starts on April 1st, it’s an introduction into the workings of Blender an opensource 3D animation suite.
• Hackquarium: TC Maker was able to get their hand on the coveted and colorful Sugru fix it clay stuff, check it out before you put an order in.
• Wednesday Open House: Check out TC Maker.

Welcome to Chiphacker

Chiphacker is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for electronics hackers – regardless of platform or language. It’s 100% free, no registration required.

It’s like a mash up of a wiki (collaboratively edited) and Reddit (vote system), and I really like it. So far I have asked a few questions and got some quality answers. I recommend all of you to try it, as they are currently in a sort of beta stage trying to grow the community and they are encouraging people to do that by not making them register.

Further, the site is impressively coded. Who ever did this went extra lengths to make the whole experience of chiphacker seamless, they also added this little badge system for contributing which is quite fun.

Also if you look their mascot you can see that it has been endowed with three arms. Anybody who has soldered can attest to the luxury that would provide, surely with that guy leading the site it headed for great things.