As soon as Bart got hands on an old fall arrest net, he knew exactly what he was going to do with it. Really there was only one thing that just had to be done – turn it into a giant hammock! In its original 20×2 metre length it was hardly suitable though, so some Read more about An evening in the Meadows – Hacklab style[…]

As some of you may have heard already, our member and friend John Lamb died recently in a skiing accident. John had spent the winter in Chamonix and was an accomplished skier and snowboarder, sadly John’s accident was caused by bad weather and bad luck. On behalf of Edinburgh Hacklab I think it’s fair to Read more about “Laser” John Lamb[…]

After some kerfaffing we finally managed to get our favourite Mexican take away – Los Cardos – to deliver to our new home in Summerhall! Nom nom nom …  

  Yes, it’s that time of year when the Hacklab and tedium intersect in the Venn diagram region of the Annual General Meeting. The Open Night will therefore be slightly later than usual. Members, be here at 7pm sharp. Visitors and guests, we plan to have the doors open to you at 9pm.  

Good news everyone! It’s just over a week until the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire! Put Sunday the 7th of April from 10AM in your diary and come down to Summerhall for: Robots! Electronics! 3D printing! Flashing lights! Skulls! Boats! Etc! As the Mini Maker Faire will be at Summerhall (where Hacklab lives), in addition to Read more about Maker Faire is coming to town![…]

So Runesketch was the game we tried to get ready for Make Game Month in November. Sesh! That seems like a long time ago. We tried alpha testing it a bit Feb, but there were not many biters. Its hard to judge what the problem was, was it too hard to find someone to play Read more about Runesketch, now with sketch[…]

The loins of #makgammon (make a game month) are bearing fruit. Runesketch the collectable card game is ready for alpha testers. When Runesketch was aired for #makgammon, common feedback was that the rules were incomprehensible, the multi player was hugely buggy to the point of being unplayable and generally it looked like a game that Read more about Runesketch Alpha ready![…]

So 1st of December was the conclusion of make a game month, an idea that was created by Edinburgh Hacklab. Was it a success? Yes, but maybe not how we initially expected it to be. Of the 5 initial developers who said they would build a game, only one turned up. However, we had some Read more about That was that month that was #Makgammon[…]

I recently wrote about a free way of running version control without owning a server, by hosting a remote repository in a Dropbox folder. One concern raised about using git on Dropbox was “what happens if people push at the same time”. The fear is that the conflicts would irrecoverably corrupt the git repository and cause a headache. Of course we have the local backups of data, but there was a nagging doubt that perhaps a corrupted server could corrupt a local repository. Anyway I tested what really happens by doing it, and learn a bit about git in the process.

Experiment

I wrote a script that commits random data and pushes to a bare repository hosted on Dropbox. After push blasting the Dropbox folder with 1,000 pushes from 2 machines in parallel, syncronisation with Dropbox took ages longer than usual (10 minutes)
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