...and then there were 4

Back in February 2010 I happened upon this YouTube video and I'd been pondering a hacker space in Nottingham. I wanted a place where I could go and make stuff. I could go there whenever I wanted and get use of great tools, help and meet other people who just want to make stuff too.

I posted the group idea on meetup.com and eventually a few chaps got in touch and we had a meetup... just the 4 of us.

Now it's April 2010 and Nottinghack has 38 members and we've had 3 meet ups. Meetup.com has been an excellent virtual place to post, discuss, put pictures and manage the membership. It wasn't long before I decided to buy the domain names nottinghack.com and nottinghack.co.uk with grand ideas about a website for the hackgroup.

Ideas can remain just that, not having particularly good web skills myself, Nottinghack will live on meetup.com for the timebeing.

So far we've had a "show and tell" workshop, at least 30 hackers turned up to meet each other, talk about the future, have a beer and put the world to rights. Folk came with MBED and Arduino projects, Matt Lloyd brought his "nearly-finish" RepRap along... it was a great start.

I'm nutty about Mythbusters (the title of this blog is a nod to that fact) so sometime ago I'd purchased a load of the blue paper they use on the show for the "Blue Print" ideas. We stuck a whole roll of it to a table in the middle of the room and chalked ideas onto it (see image).

One of the ideas was to buy some toys and hack them. We did "Hack-a-toy" last week and it was a great laugh. Posting pictures and YouTubes of "hack-a-toy" online has helped us get another 5 members in the last few days!

This blog will be a place for me (Dominic) to personally splurge my thoughts and ideas about Nottinghack and a Hackspace for Nottingham. Just because I have the page access to Nottinghack doesn't mean I should swamp it. I'll swamp here instead. People might even read it!

I'm really excited about Nottinghack... maybe I'm still smitten with the idea. Perhaps one day in a distant future I'll read this blog and think... you were SO naive... I've always been naive. If you knew all the problems you were going to face and all the things you had to do or know to get a project started, you'd never reach step 1.

A motto of mine has always been "If your not make mistakes, your not making anything!"