Category: Events and meetups

Annual Meeting Oct 3 @1pm

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, general, Meetings, Membership, Posts

Annual Membership Meeting On ZOOM: Saturday, October 3

We’ve scheduled our annual meeting for Saturday 10/3, starting at 1:00pm .

To keep everyone safe we will be holding the meeting and election remotely. You be able to attend the annual meeting via Zoom, look for more meeting information to come.

We’ll go over the previous year’s financial s and major happenings, and talk about future plans. We’ll also be voting for two Governing Board seats that are up for reelection this year. There will be more information coming out as we get closer to the meeting date.

Which brings up a couple of sub-points:

Nominations for board positions are open

Have a member you think would be an excellent leader for out organization and want to nominate for the Twin Cities Maker 2020 Election? Please do email nominations@tcmaker.org.

Eligibility Requirements: Any member in good standing and 18 years of age or older may be nominated to the Board.

The board terms are for 3 years and will expire in 2023.
Please review the Board Position and Expectations and Code of Conduct before making a nomination.
https://wiki.tcmaker.org/about_us/org_chart/duties/board
go.tcmaker.org/conduct

Want to know what a board meeting is like? All of our meetings are open to members! The next board meeting is Tuesday 9/8, starting at 6pm here: go.tcmaker.org/boardmeeting .

The meeting agenda is also open

Got something you’d like to discuss at the Annual Meeting? Let the Board board@tcmaker.org know that too! We need to get the agenda at least mostly set by Friday 9/25, so please submit your items before then. There will still be the chance to bring things up at the meeting, but 9/25 is the last day we can get it onto the agenda that will be sent to all members. (Why do we send it out to all members? We want members to be involved and state law says we have to!)

Want to get Involved another way? We have open shop positions that need Leaders to fill them.

These positions are an excellent way to make a positive impact on the Twin City Maker community, the lives of others in it, and those who are touched by it’s impact.

Shop General Manager

Facilities Manager

Logistics Coordinator

Robotics Team Coordinator

Marketing Team Volunteers

Position details and responsibilities can be found on our wiki here: https://wiki.tcmaker.org/about_us/org_chart/start

 

 

Prop Party Saturday, November 16

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Meetings, Uncategorized

Join local members of The Replica Prop Forum for a party, with props!

Do you have an interest in building props for cosplay or your own collection? Come in and meet some local prop builders, learn some techniques, find some sources.  This event is open to all prop builders, collectors, prop curious, costumers and cosplayers.

TC Maker Members drop in whenever you want, otherwise please register on through our class registration system.  See you then!

https://tcmaker.org/classes/class/?event_id=78400466907

Grilling! With food! Wednesday night!

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, general

They said it couldn’t be done. They said we were foolish to try. But Grillchefmeister Michael is planning on doing what doubters said couldn’t, nay, shouldn’t be done! Grill outside in the lovely fall weather we’re currently experiencing. So come early, come often to the Open House Wednesday night, and experience the Thrill of the Grill when you can actually use some nice hot food.

(If it may seem wrong to grill without mosquitoes, we regret to tell you you’ll need to bring your own.  But we’d prefer you didn’t.)

 

New space presentation and discussion: Saturday 6/30 @ 3:00PM

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups

As you may have heard by now, Twin Cities Maker is expanding! We’ve signed a lease for just over 3000 square feet of space opposite the wood shop’s south wall. The board and shop managers reviewed and discussed a number of possible floor plans, and have come up with one that we think solves a good number of the space problems that we are experiencing.

We invite you to come give feedback and comments on the proposed floor plan. We’ll be having a discussion/presentation of our space plan on Saturday, June 30 at 3:00PM. You can take a look at the proposed layout below (click to embiggen). The plan gives both the metal shop and wood shop more space, and moves member storage closer to the loading dock.

If you’ve got any questions, please come by on Saturday, or talk to any of the board members or area managers in person or via email.

First “Hardcore Hacknight”

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Hacking, Meetings

Hack Factory hosted its first Hardcore Hacknight on March 22nd. This is a recurring event for software developers to mingle, share their projects, and collaborate. We had a packed room, definitely more than thirty people. The event brings an increased software presence to the space to complement Hack Factory’s abundance of physical wood/metal/electronics projects.

a full room
Part of the room at the first meeting of the hardcore hacknight

What We Worked On

The general format for the event is to get a group of interesting programmers together for pizza, beer, and pair programming. After eating and chatting, we go around the room and each person says briefly what they’re interested in working on, or things they want to learn.

There were lots of cool projects. We had Eric talking about generating Erlang from Idris, Ioannis showing some cool C-based X11/graphics demos, and Dave busting out a development environment totally inside a smartphone and doing M4 text processing. The room was full of conversations and lore about everything from BSDs to embedded devices.

coding on a smartphone
World’s smallest development machine

Team Rust commandeered a whole table. Boyd was going deep into writing algorithms in Rust without using any standard library functions, as low level as you can go.

rustlang strike force
“Team Rust.” People kept joining this table throughout the night.

There were quite a few people who either knew or wanted to learn about Haskell and functional programming. Darren was leading a table on some game design and I think doing it in Elm. Then there is Scott who has many years of experience with Common Lisp (even Maclisp, straight out of MIT), Racket, and Clojure.

We also had people exploring new computer interfaces, like Craig who does a cross between C++ development and fine arts. Or David who likes making music and has a project that maps syscalls into a complex chorus of sounds so you can hear your computer’s processing.

Ian and some conspirators were building a neural network from scratch, and struggling with the intracacies of backpropagation. And speaking of networks, Neil was distributing tasks between machines with ZeroMQ, experimenting with the ventillator pattern.

In addition to all the above, let’s not forget the intrepid beginners who showed up. As Alex, a code bootcamp student joked, “I’m understanding only about one out of every ten terms I’m hearing tonight, and it’s awesome!”

Join the Next Meeting

Our second meeting will be Thursday, April 26th at 6:00. If you’d like to attend please RSVP at the meetup page. The event is free, but we do ask attendees to bring a few bucks to chip in for food.

Noodling Night: Friday 2/23 @ 6pm

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups

No, this isn’t about catfishing. To quote from the New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd Ed.):

noodle | ˈno͞odl | verb (informal[no object]) improvise or play casually on a musical instrument: tapes of him noodling on his guitar | (as noun noodling) : ambient synthesizer noodling.

Thus, Noodling Night, where we will bring in some instruments and noodle on them. Maybe we’ll learn a song or two. Maybe we’ll just sit around making various more or less musical noises. Either way, it should be fun!

You don’t need any particular skill level to join in — I’m scraping 25 years of rust off my so-so chops, so if you’re a beginner you’ll be in good company. And any instrument is welcome, including hands, feet, and voices.

So if this sounds like your kind of thing, well then dust off that autoharp, dig out the old Casio keyboard, and we’ll see you on Friday night!

Twin Cities Maker 2017 Member Meeting

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups, Meetings

Twin Cities Maker will hold its annual Member Meeting on Saturday, September 23, 2017 at 2:00PM, at our offices at 3119 E 26th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55406.

The agenda of the meeting is as follows:

  • A report on the financial condition and activities of Twin Cities Maker.
  • Election of 2 Board Members to replace Board Members whose terms of office are expiring.
  • A Q&A period for members to ask questions or bring up any suggestions or motions they may have.
  • Act on any other matters that may properly come before the meeting.

The meeting will start at 2:00 PM. Afterwards we’ll pull out the grill and feed everyone!

Members in good standing of record on the books of the Corporation up to the close of the meeting on 9/23/2017 will be entitled vote at the meeting or any adjournment thereof. Member in good standing, for purposes of the annual meeting, means a Member who is current on payment of monthly membership dues.

You may vote for Governing Board candidates in person, or via email or physical mail. Information about the current candidates and an official ballot are contained in the Member Meeting information packet linked here. Instructions for submitting a ballot are included in the packet. Votes must be received by the start of the Member Meeting, 2PM on Saturday 9/23.

You may also assign proxy voting rights to another member in good standing who will be attending the meeting. Please complete the Proxy Voting Form contained in the info packet, and send it to Twin Cities Maker via email, postal mail, or in person. Members who attend the meeting may revoke their proxy and vote in person if they so desire.

The governing board would like to thank each and every one of you for being a member and supporting Twin Cities Maker. The making, sharing, and learning could not happen without you!

Scott Hill, Vice President
for the Twin Cities Maker Governing Board

MSP Maker Faire This Weekend May 14th #MNMakes

Posted on by oldpostholder in Events and meetups

MakerFaireMSP2016

Hello TC Makers, just a friendly reminder that we have a great event coming up this weekend Saturday May 14th. If you have no plans then stop on down at the State Fairgrounds between 10am and 6pm.

Also don’t forget about our very own and – Free – Minnie Faire happening the following weekend. Saturday May 21st, Tim Kaiser will be performing at the after party as well as wood-shop manager Reed’s Guns and Roses Tribute band. Happy Hour and in between music also provided by DJ Stankyleg.