HACKY HOLIDAYS

Saturday December 23rd @ 18:00 - 21:00

Do you love the GREEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZHHHHHHHHHH noise of the dot-matrix printer? Do you want to make cool lo-fi pixelated greeting cards for your loved ones?

Come to COOP Recyborg on the night of Saturday, December 23rd starting at 6PM and we will show you how to print these cards on a real Apple IIe computer and Apple ImageWriter II printer from the mid-80s!

This is a mask-mandatory event (N95 or better).

Held in conjunction with Recyborg. Special thanks to @computerbomb, Curator of the Foulab museum, without whom this would not have been possible! He will be co-presenting the workshop with me, Kastora, The Witch of the Wires.

COOP Recyborg is located at Bâtiment 7, rue 1900 le Ber, Suite C, on the 57 and 71 bus lines.

Accessibility information:

• Masking is required (N95 or better), however, unmasked customers will have been in the space earlier in the day during business hours.
• N95 masks in three sizes are available at the door.
• The space is on the ground floor and wheelchair accessible. A shallow-grade ramp leads up from the street near wheelchair-accessible bus stop to a walkway along the side of the building to our south door.
• The 71N and 57E stop a few meters away north of the ramp at stop 53029.
• The 71S and 57O stop one block south of the ramp and across the street at stop 53030.
• The 71S and 57O leave from Charlevoix metro. The 71N leaves from Lasalle metro. The 71S also leaves from Lionel-Groulx metro.
• Not all buses on the route have front ramps. Please check the linked STM schedules linked above the day of the event to see which buses do.
• You can also arrive to the north side of the building by car, where there is a curb, unfortunately with no curb cut. It is accessed through the parking lot at 1830 le Ber. We will try to get a ramp for this side before the event, and this page will be updated if we get one.
• There is a wheelchair-accessible bathroom, but access to all bathrooms requires exiting the space and going back along the walkway to another entry about 70m.

• CO₂ levels are quite low in the space, because it’s a drafty old warehouse. That’s good!
• It’s cold in the space, because it’s a drafty old warehouse. The temperature will be around 16ºC. That’s bad! Expect to keep your coat on.

If time and ink permit, we may even get to make ~BANNERS~

This event is FREE, no registration required

Saturday December 23rd @ 18:00 - 21:00

Est-ce que vous aimez les sons ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZHHHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGG des imprimantes dot-matrix des années 80? Est-ce que vous aimeriez fair les cartes de souhaite genre lo-fi pixel rétro pour vos proches?

Venez chez le COOP Recyborg le samedi 23 décembre dès 18h le soir et nous vous montrons comment faire ces cartes aven un vrai ordinateur Apple IIe et une imprimante Apple ImageWriter II qui date dès années mi-80!

Les masques N95 ou mieux sont requises pour toutes les participantes.

Faite en conjunction avec Recyborg grace à l’aide du conservateur de la musée de Foulab, dit @computerbomb, sans lesquelles cette événement n’aurait être pas possible! Il présentera cette événement avec moi, Kastora, la so(u)rcière des fils.

Le COOP Recyborg est situé à Bâtiment 7, rue 1900 le Ber, suite C, sur les lignes d’autobus 57 et 71.

Consignes sur l’accessibilité:

• Les masques (N95 ou mieux) sont obligatoire, mais avant l’événement, il y a des clients non-masqué(e)s dans l’espace pendent la journée de travail.
• Les masques N95 en trois grandeurs sont disponible à la porte.
• L’espace est sur la rez-de-chaussée et accessible en fauteuil roulant. Une rampe avec pente peu profond vient du trottoir proche des arrêts d’autobus à une passage plat et ensuite à notre porte.
• L’arrêt 53029 pour les autobuses 71N et 57E est quelques metres au nord de la rampe.
• L’arrêt 53030 pour les autobuses 71S et 57O est un coin de rue au sud à l’autre barre.
• Les autobuses 71S et 57O départ de la station Charlevoix. Le 71N départ de la station Lasalle. Le 71S départ aussi de la station Lionel-Groulx.
• Pas touts les autobuses ont une rampe d’avant, veuillez checker sur les liens en haut pour vérifier avant que vous partez.
• Vous pouvez aussi arriver en voiture au côté nord du bâtiment. Il y a un trottoirs sans rampe de hauteur d’environ 12cm ou 15cm. C’est accessible par le 1830 le Ber. J’essai de trouver une rampe avant l’événement, si j’en retrouverai un je fais un mise à jour ici.
• Il y a une salle de bain accessible mais l’accès aux toutes les salles de bain sont à l’extérieur de l’espace, il faut sortir et reculer vers la façade de l’edifice environ 70m.

• Le niveau de dioxyde de carbone dans l’espace est faible parce ce que c’est un ancien entrepôt avec beaucoup des courants de l’air dedans. C’est bon!
• La temperature est basse parce que c’est un ancien entrepôt avec beaucoup des courants de l’air dedans. Ça fait mal! Il faut prévoir garder son manteau.

S’il nous rester assez de temps et de l’encre, nous pouvons faire aussi des ~BANNIÈRES~

Cette événement est GRATUIT, aucune inscription requise

The last month of the year is here! Work winds down, people start working on projects, and with it, a whole stack of interesting things to do appears around the lab. Here are just some of them:

Tuesday December 12th @ 18:30 - 23:00

You may have heard of our last unofficial Project Night - an informal gathering where people demo cool stuff they have worked on lately. Good news - our member noi is hosting another one just next week! Drop by to see our community’s work from professional to casual, or even demo something of your own! See you there.

Sunday December 17th @ 15:00 - 19:00

The last event by Killed by Dice has unfortunately been canceled due to a COVID scare. Foulaber der_moderne_man’s tabletop RPG community returns to invite guests to an afternoon of Mothership once again. Join us in a thriller RPG set in the far off future. Fight off cosmic horrors on a Sunday? Sounds good to us. RSVP here if you want to join us - be wary, slots are limited!

Thursday December 21st @ 18:30 - 23:00

A Christmas party? A New Year’s party? A weighted average of all the winter-related parties in one convenient Foulab package? Yo!

If there are any events around Foulab to visit this month, this is definitely the one you should show up to. Enjoy a festive mood with fellow hackers and grab a slice of pizza as we send this old year off together 🎉

Saturday December 30th @ 15:00 - 17:00

Another organizational meeting. We’ll tally up 2023, and discuss how we plan to go forward with the things that transpired. Spoiler alert - it’s looking pretty good. Join us to see the internal workings of this space, and maybe even make your voice heard on an issue you care about!

Exciting news this month! Members and friends of Foulab are planning some November events - and the more days pass, the closer we get.

Saturday November 18th @ 19:00 - 21:00

A Trivia night? True Foulabers remember - our very own kida used to host a recurring get-together of trivia-inclined minds to keep us together during COVID.

It returns the third Saturday of November, in person at Foulab. Come join us for a treat of an evening!

Sunday November 19th @ 10:30 - 17:00

Another partnership with a friendly organization, an open Sunday full of Debian & Stuff is happening on the 19th. An all-day gathering of Linux enthusiasts and whatever friends would like to come by? Definitely worth it to check it out, if you have a Sunday free.

Saturday November 25th @ 15:00 - 17:00

We are going have an organizational meeting. It’s a great way to get yourself involved in the local community - and get a peek at the near future of Foulab while you’re at it! Swing by, if you’re interested.

Sunday November 26th @ 15:00 - 19:00

Killed by Dice, a tabletop roleplaying community hosted by Foulab’s der_moderne_man, humbly invites you to join a public session of Mothership - a nail-biting sci-fi RPG centered around a horror from outer space. …Gulp. The situation needs urgent player help - please RSVP here, slots are limited!

Foulab is now officially registered as a project on the Libera.Chat IRC network. This means the channel has moved from ##foulab to #foulab (single hash mark). A redirect has been setup, so your client might already be on the new channel.

This also comes with improvements to foubot like the ability to change the topic with the status of the lab.

Tuesday October 31st 2023 @ 18:30-23:00

A Halloween party? Don’t mind if we do. Come one come all for an unforgettable evening of scary high-tech stuff and exciting company of friendly neighbourhood cyberpunks.

Come dressed as hackers - or as whoever you want :)

Hey all.

We’re officially back with our first event in a while, a fresh new collaboration with PapersWeLove.

In this event, Catalin Patulea will be presenting the famous 2006 paper BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by F. Chang et al.

A brief abstract from the announcement on Meetup:

Bigtable was developed by Google from 2004 to 2006 for storing large amounts of semi-structured data in a wide range of applications, including web indexing, Google Earth, Google Finance, Google Analytics and others. Its design lies somewhere between traditional relational databases (RDBMS) and pure key-value stores, which later inspired a family of storage systems such as Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB. Modern storage systems such as Google Spanner and CockroachDB also contain design elements similar to Bigtable. Therefore Bigtable is of both historical and current interest.

In this talk, we will start with the basic data structures used by Bigtable: SSTables and log-structured merge (LSM) trees. We will show a highly simplified LSM-tree implemented in Python and demonstrate its functions. This is the basic unit of scaling in Bigtable.

Then, we will roughly follow the 2006 paper: 1) data model and client API, 2) the underlying infrastructure on which Bigtable is built, 3) how the database distributes work across many machines and achieves scaling.

We will briefly cover more advanced topics such as tuning Bigtable for specific use cases or to improve resource efficiency.

Light refreshments will be served.

Android updates for any phone that isn’t a flag-ship phone is patchy at best these days. Between that and a world of benefits for those who customize android, compiling android is a useful skill. We’ll be going over some of the basics next Thursday (the 2nd) around 8pm EST.

Since the files involved are massive, and the build times are long, we recomend a bit of prep work: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/blueline/build Getting to the stage where you have downloaded the source code is a good idea.

Workshop is free, however donations are welcome. Remote atendees can tune in here: https://meet.jit.si/CompilingAndroidWorkshop