swatheWell the first Hackerspace meet, whilst humble in size and facilities, went very well. We had six attendees at its peak, and a variety of things were shown. Noorbeast and his son demonstrated an electronic whiteboard, utilizing a projector, wiimote and an infrared pointer. Hampered somewhat by the ability to find a good mounting position for the wiimote, they still managed to show it in action, and we even did a little doodling in GIMP, my kids thought it was great!
Noorbeast also showed me some code he was working on that allowed the overlay of images and text editing via a web browser than could be used to creating custom images for various uses. It’s only early days in its development but is showing a lot of promise. His son did a bit of PSX emulation up on the projector, and is something I plan to give a good workout in the future! Another rather amazing game (windows based but forgivable in this case) was a software package Noorbeast brought along. Using biometric feedback via 3 sensors attached to the fingers, you can use your “state” to control elements in the game. It really is a great thing to try out and quite easily demonstrates the power of calm and also of excited thought patterns.
After some hardware troubles involving a faulty stick of RAM, and some assistance, I managed to get MythTV with XBMC as the front end running on an old P4 I had sitting in the cupboard. As per Noorbeasts advice I also setup the Shepherd scraper for TV guide information. I also mapped the media server from my NAS box to it and the new creation now lives in the bedroom, letting me enjoy Star Trek on a nightly basis 
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Lastly I managed to install the Metasploit network on my n900. Whilst I have not had to play with it, I plan to in the future and will also be putting up a guide to install it on the n900 device.
Due to a dying GPU, sadly there was no real chance to get into any gaming, but I plan to remedy that at the next meet.
All in all I had a great time and learnt some handy tricks, and I look forward to the return of the attendees of the first one so we can help it grow and evolve further. Next time I promise to remember to take some photos!
Swathe, you forgot to mention that after we played with Wild Divine ( http://www.wilddivine.com/ ) on Windows, you then had the pleasure of blowing Windows away on that box, to turn it into something that is far more useful, your Mythtv/XBMC box.
Thanks to swathe and his family for putting up with all us ‘geeks’, I had a great time at the initial HackSpace meet!