Coding with Fountain Pens

Ann Arbor is sprouting some great dedicated third places which have got off the ground recently or are in the works in the near future, that you may not be aware of.

Annarbor.com just did a story on the Blue House, across from the stadium. It’s a handmade studio that recently opened and is a dedicated space for crafters and it also offers workshops on things like block printing and knitting.

The AHA! Shop (All Hands Active) is a space for makers at Digital Ops on Liberty that hosts a regular Thursday night build night. Fun crew that skews more towards electronics and art.

Finally, my spies indicate that a co-operative bike shop space is likely to get off the ground downtown, featuring tools and advice for maintaining your bike.

It’s good to see some permanent spaces established around town to provide continuity between the various events that get people out and involved in doing things like the Mini Maker Faire and Ignite. Speaking of which, the call to makers is open for the coming Mini Maker Faire in June.

ArbCamp08 was great, thanks to all the organizers, who had to scramble at the last minute to handle a huge turnout by changing the venue.  With more than 160 attendees, there was a wide variety of interesting breakout sessions and impromptu discussions.

I enjoyed the parallel programming session led by Jon Cohen – I hadn’t realized that graphics processors were up in the hundreds of cores, and that they can be utilized for scientific computing with the help of Nvidia’s Cuda compiler.  Users of this technology were first hand, including Eric Janikowski Jankowski, who agreed that this technology has revolutionized molecular simulation work.

Other sessions of note included a plan to set up a co-working space in the Arcadian Antiques location on Main Street, and a loose discussion of DIY photography.  Apparently the disposable digital cameras available at CVS are a good source of image sensors for DIY photography projects like kite photography.  Someone has even mounted one inside a volleyball to take pictures on each impact.

The event was, more than anything, a great opportunity to meet some of the interesting people in Ann Arbor, and for people in different disciplines to cross-polinate.