Sauna

10 years of Helsinki Hacklab and workspace extension

2020-01-17 jssmk

Cutting the cake in celebration of ten years of Helsinki Hacklab on next Tuesday!

The formal association running Helsinki Hacklab was founded in the first meeting on 17th January 2010. Ten years after the hackerspace has grown into a group of over 400 members and more than 350 square meters of workspace.

We are celebrating our anniversary on next Open Tuesday in a new one hundred square meter workspace extension above our current basement level rooms. The new rooms are on ground level and make about one fourth of the total upstairs floor area.

Ground level expansion side of the building. Front doors on the left.

The group that initially started the space between 2009 and 2010 first met in libraries, in a squat house, small business development hub and an art space. Though the founding meeting was held in January 2010, it was later in June the same year when we opened the doors of our first self-organized physical space in Vallila. We moved in Pitäjänmäki in November 2014 and have remained in the same address since. Previous expansion of the space was in 2017 when we took over the remaining half of the basement level in our use, and now we are taking steps upstairs.

Birthday party on Tuesday

On next Tuesday we’ll open doors upstairs at 19.00, cut the cake and introduce everyone to the unlocked areas. The 100 square meters consist of three larger rooms, a closet room, kitchen, toilet and a bathroom with a small sauna, making Helsinki Hacklab one of the two hackerspaces in the world with a sauna besides Jyväskylä Hacklab. There is no stair connection between these two levels, making the ground level space more suitable for quiet and non-messy work, such as day out of office workdays and textile work.

We are also planning for more co-operation both with the local infosec group HelSec and Disobey ry. in 2020. This might include using the space more often for software and information security targeted courses and happenings.

Finnish hackerspaces meet in Jyväskylä

2018-03-05 jssmk

Ten participating hackerspaces must be a record for the biannual gathering of Finnish hacklabs! Hacklab Summit Finland 2018 was arranged in Jyväskylä, and despite the local hacklab was in charge of the event for the first time, they managed to make this happening one of the best in the history of HSF.

The major theme for this year was planning the way how to formalise hacklab.fi as an official organisation of hackerspaces in Finland. We now have initial idea how the organisation should work, based on opinions and votes of those, who took part in this meeting. Unanimous conclusion was, that the founding assembly is going to be the next HSF in Helsinki this summer. Hacklab.fi has a history of more or less informal co-operation between cities since 2012. The new organisation will be strictly for member-operated hackerspaces, supporting new groups to get started, offering web services, representing our local scene in events both in Finland and further away, and making all kinds of PR work to help people find their local hacklabs.

Jyväskylä Hacklab took the responsibility to arrange HSF in connection with Instanssi demoscene event. This enabled us to have more space, content and possibilities than before. As usual, the program was fixed weeks before the start, and a hourly timetable kept us on track with finishing robots ready for the competition, remembering to eat, presenting recent happenings in different hacklabs, doing something more than just sitting behind the laptop, going to a indoor trampoline park and of course, the sauna.

Helsinki participated in the robot race track competition with two robots. The robot track is a 1 × 2 m box which has copies of itself in some of the hacklab.fi member spaces. Joonamo found his robot from last summer still working, and I assembled hastily some LEGO robot that had code running just few minutes before the competition started. The program was written in Python from scratch, the robot did zero practicing on the track, and I only knew it could probably move forward when turned on. For my complete surprise, it actually managed to make one clean complete round on the track, and didn’t even finish last on the results list. Joonamo’s robot came 3rd in speed results and 4th in popular vote, and the host city Jyväskylä took the first place. Robot competition was also included in the Instanssi program, so we had a great audience supporting the bots on the racetrack.

The weekend ended in visiting Hacklab Jyväskylä, which is about to move to a larger location soon. Tampere Hacklab is expanding its place with a new metal room and textile work section. There are also plans in other cities to look for larger workspaces and Nokia just started their own lab. This HSF had a very positive athmosphere where collaboration is taken for granted.

Definitely looking good for hacklab scene in Finland right now. A big thanks to Jyväskylä for hosting us!

Photos from weekend:
Helsinki Hacklab flickr
Tampere Hacklab flickr

Robot competition:
Twitch video

Blog posts in Finnish:
Jyväskylä Hacklab
Tampere Hacklab

Next time:
HSF18½ in Helsinki, 8.—10.6.2018

Bringing a sauna to a hacker camp #SHA2017

2017-08-14 jssmk

Photos now in Flickr album: SHA2017 pictures

The outdoor hacker camp SHA2017 is now over and we want to thank you the organizers of the awesome event. This time the Finnish Embassy came to the camp with an electric barrel sauna. Initial negotiations with different organizing teams suggested that there was enough power to choose an electric sauna and reasons not to take a wood heated model, and we gratefully received help finding one. The popularity struck us with surprise and the sauna was occasionally not enough large for the masses. For those who might be interested, the sauna was rented from NL, not far from the event site. If you plan to bring an outdoor sauna to an hacker camp in the future, it might be easier to arrange than you think! We’ve heard there are already plans elsewhere to bring a sauna to Chaos Communication Congress 34C3.

As soon as we received our event badges, we decided to make something sauna related with it. The sauna temperature app was soon prototyped and launched on camp day one. We used RuuviTags and other sensors for monitoring the heat and informing everyone when the sauna was ready to use. The app even got mentioned in badge presentation highlights.

The sauna was still going strong after 2 am when music started to fade out on the field. We only have vague hearsay that the sauna or nudity at the camp caused some disapproval, but everything we witnessed ourselves at the sauna was only positive.

See some of the sauna reactions in Twitter: Twitter search sauna and sha2017

Planning

This time everyone from Finland took a plane for this event, so to keep us properly equipped for all the flashiness and coziness, we had to think another ways to bring our stuff other than distributing it in multiple luggage bags. Tarlab and other campers from Oulu, Burner in lead, packed (video) and delivered a cargo pallet full of materials such as lights, camping equipment, Finnish salmiakki candies, power cords, a small fridge and loads of other stuff. Arranging a shipment like this to a hacker camp is doable and we managed to get it on site nicely and in time – also not too early. Just make sure with logistics and villages teams know about your plans beforehand. Our delivery had a GPS transmitter inside, so we could follow the shipment arriving to SHA camp field live.

This time the Nordic Villages area was somewhat more planned than in Chaos Communication Camp 2015, and we had some idea who were joining the cluster beforehand. For the next camp we could try to be even more coordinated and plan what equipment different groups could bring. For example, we had no sound system, but could use the Swedish one using their awesome Youtube playlist IRC bot – thanks! The Nordic Villages and hackerspaces mailing list is an attempt to collect interested people to join future planning for camps, happenings or maybe demoscene events and visits to other hackerspaces. Let’s see what use it might find. We need enough people in the list to keep us connected, so please join the group.

Keeping the spirit up

Hours after the closing ceremony, the leftover campers of Nordic Villages were still going strong continuing with completely new programme. The Norwegian Embassy took over the near emptied Swedish tent and spray painted a sign on a remains of a Kartent to make it “look official”. Lars from Malmö started inviting bypassers and asking them “are you here for the lightning talks?”. The spontaneous presentations were either recycled slides from other occasions, mixed topics, show-and-tell style talks and such. After 8 or 9 pm when the camp site went silent and power was shut down, we continued in the dark using flashlights. Almost everyone in the tent also gave a talk.

Nordic Villages is most likely happening also in Chaos Communication Camp 2019. Thank you for all those who visited the sauna, Taike for the grant, our neighbours, and the SHA organisation to let us make this happen!

(200th blog post on this website!)

Sauna arrived in SHA village

2017-08-03 jssmk

Hacklab.fi rented a sauna for SHA2017 event in Netherlands. The electric barrel sauna arrived today at 4pm and is now running hot. Come visit the sauna if you are with us in the event!