WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congresswoman Doris Matsui (CA-06), Co-Chair of the Congressional High Tech Caucus, praised the launch of Sacramento first ever Tech Week which will run from Friday, May 10th through Saturday, May 18th.  Sacramento’s Techweek is designed to celebrate and promote the region’s growing technology sector and features over fifteen events focused on technology, design, and innovation.

“In our country, entrepreneurs have always been the driving force behind our greatest technological advances.  The Sacramento region has promising talent and Techweek is a fantastic way to celebrate and showcase the innovation that is happening within Sacramento’s technology community.  I urge everyone, whether you are a student or a professional, to visit Techweek’s website and find an event to participate in,” Congresswoman Matsui said.

Tech week is a collaboration among local startups, think tanks and co-working spaces including the Hacker Lab, SacStarts,SARTA, UpStart Sacramento and the Urban Hive. Last week,Congresswoman Matsui toured Sacramento’s Hacker Lab and saw how the community workspace is resulting in collaboration and fostering a tech culture in the region.

As co-chair of the Congressional High-Tech Caucus, and member of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Congresswoman Matsui is committed to providing greater access to technology for all Americans.  In April, Congresswoman Matsui introduced the Broadband Adoption Act of 2013, which would help bridge the digital divide by making in-home broadband services more affordable across the country. The Federal Communications Commission has estimated that nearly 100 million Americans still do not have broadband Internet services at home. The legislation reforms and modernizes the Universal Service Fund (USF) Lifeline Assistance Program to help connect all parts of America to the Internet.

I have a need. The world has a need. If we fill this need there is money to be earned.

I work with 3D printers. I run them, I talk about them, I have even been trying to design a better one. I am lucky enough to be consulting with the Sacramento Library to teach others to use them.

3D printers are a transformational invention. They change the perspective of the user. It doesn’t take long before you feel like you can build anything. You can make gifts for people that are beautiful and customized just for them. You become confident and feel closer to your social connections. It may transform the manufacturing methods of our society, bringing local what is now offshore. But there is something missing.

Now, the need:

What we are missing is a low cost scanner for 3D printers. You put an object on a turntable, and get out a CAD file that you can alter and print. These exist, but most are in the $5000 range and higher. Everyone that has a 3D printer wants one, but it has to be lower than $1000.

There are companies out there that have promised such a product, notably Makerbot (http://store.makerbot.com/digitizer.html) and a Kickstarter-funded project in the U.K.:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/621838643/desktop-3d-scanner?ref=live

The ingredients are a few cameras (or one that changes position), a turntable, and a computer. The difficulty is the software tool chain. I propose that we use the toolchain suggested on this site:

http://www.kwartzlab.ca/2012/07/3d-printable-models-photos-using-autodesk-123d-catch/

Which is this: Camera -> 123D catch -> meshmixer -> netfabb studio -> skeinforge -> repetier host -> marlin firmware

We need a way to automate this tool chain, perhaps having a wizard would be nice.

People:

We need investors, programmers, social media people, mechanical engineers and support.

I am not interested in running this project. I just want to help it get started.

Investor(s) – Perhaps offer prize money to get this thing rolling. $5000? I see a market of ten to one hundred thousand units if you can get this to market before August. I suggest a $50 profit per unit, or cut it closer to establish a brand in the market.

Perhaps tackle the most difficult steps first, which is to automate the process of taking a file of pictures, sending them to 123Dcatch (http://www.123dapp.com/catch), and receiving the CAD file back. I believe that it will be fairly easy to take 20 pictures and dump them into a file. I hope that it will be easy to push the CAD file into a program for inspection and then through a slicer and into a printer.

So I say that if we prove that we can make the hard parts work, then we run a kickstarter project to get prepaid customers. For kickstarter we need an absolute first rate video.

The second version of the product should have all of the software on board, perhaps use lasers to capture the image.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been slowly working on making my very own “Pip-Boy.” What is this exactly? Well it’s a computer of sorts that’s used by the main character in the Fallout series of video games. I’m currently at my 3rd version, which most accurately mimics the features and design of the in-game device. Here’s how the design has changed over time:

I would not have thought it possible had I tried to jump in all at once. Only by gradual iteration have I really begun to realize what goes into designing something like this (and I was just copying something in the first place). After my first initial failure I was nearly ready to give in, but I realized that I wanted this, and I wanted it badly, so I set down my goals and began to tackle them one by one until I had conquered all — well, nearly all — of the hardware and software demons that lay ahead of me. I’ve done a lot so far, but I’m still not finished! In fact, the more “done” I am, the more I want to redesign and rebuild, until I reach the plateau of awesomeness where the device I hold in my hand goes beyond what I ever imagined.

This is the deal, see. If you do everything I tell you to do here, you will be smarter and more creative. Do not read past this point unless you plan to read the whole thing because some of this knowledge is dangerous and using it incorrectly could cause you all sorts of problems.

1. Exercise

Stop reading and do as many push-ups as you can. Or, do crunches. Depends on what floats your boat. Why? Because you need to understand the idea of exercise. To get stronger, you have to push your limits as often as possible.  From this point on, you will do as many push-ups (or crunches) as you can, once or twice every second day. At least three times a week. Oh, and I don’t care if you feel self conscious about it. Do it. Now!

2. Memory

Close your eyes and remember everything that you did today up until the present moment.

In detail, you slacker!

Did you think about brushing your teeth? How long? Did you brush the left bottom molar?

How much of your memory is a blur, simply because you do it every single day?

A blurred moment is a waste of your life. You were alive, but you didn’t feel it. If you don’t remember a moment, it doesn’t exist.

The average person probably notices less than 10% of their time. If you notice 50% of your life, it is like living 5 times longer. I try to notice and feel every waking moment, and sometimes I feel like I have lived for thousands of years.

There are some basic tricks for making you more aware of the moment. First there is ‘odd’ body movement. Tap your left toe on the floor while brushing. Tomorrow, bump the right knee against the cabinet. Look in the mirror and roll your eyes. Try flexing your abs.

Next there is smell. Almost every memory is tied to what you smell at that time. Did the bathroom smell moldy? Did your driveway smell dusty? Try to consciously remember how things smell.

Linking memories. You probably found it easy to remember your morning because you do the same thing every day. So everything is done in a series, and you scan through it. At most you remember the differences. Your mind easily handles linked memories.

3. Navigation Memory

Do you know where you are? Do you know which direction is North? If you park your car in a huge parking lot, do you always remember where you left it? What if you are the passenger?

There is an entire section of our brain that is dedicated to keeping track of where you are, and where you left your stuff. It is amazingly powerful.

Easy exercise: remember everything in your house. In your mind, walk through your house and look in every direction. What exactly is on your kitchen counter?

Here is a list of objects: bicycle, duck, red, table, waterfall, tire, sky, campfire, worm, window, shoe, nail, purse, coin.

Memorize that list by imagining a walk through your house, and seeing each of these items, in sequence, on chairs, beds,  and counter tops. I will ask you to remember that list later, but don’t spend more than 20 seconds doing your imaginary walk.

OK, now I will try to diverge from anything you might have read before.

4. Feel Astonished!

Yes, that should be easy. You drop your jaw, widen your eyes, and take a sharp inhale of breath.
We can remember and even think in emotional states. Good actors play with this concept constantly in private (it would draw a lot of attention in public).
Feel as many emotional states as you can: happy, sad, afraid, confused, depressed, euphoric, sarcastic,etc. Do this often, in private so that you don’t scare other people. Most emotions have to show on your face, and are very obvious. Expand your list as much as possible.

Learn to communicate with emotional face expressions. There are no language barriers, everyone expresses their emotions the same way. Some signals are difficult to control consciously. That is, it is difficult to NOT send them. I blush sometimes, indicating embarrassment or shame, even though I don’t really feel very embarrassed. However, I can also send false signals by simply imagining a reason to be embarrassed.

Feel afraid. Then feel excited. Notice the differences.

These are very important feelings.They involve a rush of adrenaline through your body and brain. Adrenaline makes memories more vivid and lasting. If you are self-teaching or teaching others, remember that excitement is a necessary ingredient of learning. Fear is even better, but it causes the memories to link with other fear moments, so it can cause twisted mentalities.

So let’s push the envelope on excitement and fear. Do something soon (without alcohol or other drugs) that is a little dangerous, perhaps a little bit forbidden. With a few friends, wear dark clothes and skulk about quietly at 1 a.m. Walking on tiptoes at night, moving from shadow to shadow, brings part of your brain to a fever pitch.

5. Basic Meditation

Sit someplace where it is reasonably quiet and not too brightly lit. Try to think of nothing for as long as possible.

But don’t think about not thinking. Perhaps listen to your heart beat and the sound of your breath.

The main point of meditation is to turn off the inner voice, the personal monologue. There is a very active part of your brain that is constantly telling you a story about reality. If you stop all of the other processes, this voice becomes very loud. If you have no input, it starts spewing total nonsense.

You must stop this voice. Some people spend years or even their entire life trying to stop this voice. Why? If you stop this voice you can start seeing reality directly, you can use other parts of your brain that have been lulled to sleep by that soothing input. That voice was created by your parents and teachers, and it’s job is to explain all of reality as they were taught to view it. In very profound ways, that voice is wrong. It can not be explained; it has to be experienced. Realize that Schizophrenics are people who can’t control the voice at all, and talk back to it in public (at least it seems that way to me).

6. Grace

Turn on some music and move gracefully.

You can dance, do martial arts or anything else that might fit your personality. Just try to flow from one position to another, nothing jerky. Do not think, turn off the voice as much as possible.  It may take about 5 minutes of such movement to feel ‘in the moment’.

Label this part of your mind ‘Grace’. Try to remember this state, and move to it whenever you are doing something physical. Practice grace daily.

7. Perception of gaps and other ways of thinking.

Gaps – Sit in nature and listen to all of the sounds. After about 20 minutes, after you are used to all of the sounds, start listening for gaps. A gap is when input stops. Perhaps the birds stop singing for a second, or the wind pauses. Our minds pay attention to these gaps, but we don’t realize that we pay attention. If birds stop singing, there might be a predator nearby, so we have evolved to notice.

Melding inputs –  sit somewhere that you can see two very large objects that are very similar, like two trees, two rocks, two buildings. While staring at the objects, cross your eyes and focus on the middle image, the merging of two images. If they are very much alike, you will perceive the differences as glowing. There are puzzles of the same nature, where they ask you what is missing in the second photo. By crossing your eyes, it becomes very obvious.

Our brains constantly merge the images of our eyes, the sounds from our ears, and we detect the differences. We don’t even notice. If someone drops a small object behind me, I will turn around and look right at it, no searching. Just because of the slight difference in time when each ear heard the sound.

Foreground/background perception –  While staring at a tree, stop looking at the leaves and look at the shadows of the leaves. Try to perceive the tree as a dark image on a bright background. It will look totally different.

Imagination training – look for patterns where there are no patterns. Every kid stares at clouds and tells stories about what they see. When’s the last time you did that? Stare at a stucco wall and try to visualize faces.

Shake loose your perception, your imagination. This is once again a way to stop the voice in your head, which tells you that a cloud is just a cloud, and a wall is just a wall.

OK, memory check: bicycle, duck, red, table, waterfall, tire, campfire, worm, window, shoe, nail, purse, coin

Which word is missing? Did you walk through your house?

8. Lighting up your brain

We have all heard that we only use 10% of our brains. That is not true. We use all of our brains, but seldom do we use all of it at once, and only occasionally do we try to reach full speed.
It is possible to use several parts of your brain at the same time. For example, you can walk stealthily in a new area (navigation) while expressing a vivid emotion and looking at dark areas instead of lighted areas.

Attempt to activate as many parts of your brain as possible, as often as possible. Switch through similar but different areas as swiftly as you can. Turn on your memories at high speed. Imagine shapes and colors that aren’t there (but always under full control!)

Good fiction writers create entire worlds filled with characters, places, and events. It is normal for us to have a huge imagination. Use it.

9. The Story

When people talk, they generally tell a story. So our heads are full of stories that people have told us. If you think back to your childhood, you might remember who told you a certain story, and you can even hear their voice. Or, you might have read the story.

This is linear knowledge. The story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It follows certain rules. You know what a story is, and as you get older you realize that there are only slight differences between them.
What came first, stories, or minds that remember stories? It appears that the complex brains that we have now have been created by the stories we have heard and passed along.
That is, about 50,000 years ago, humans suddenly started being smarter in many places. Evolution doesn’t work that way. One conclusion is that the tool of language exercises your brain, making it larger and more complex. The basic structure of language is the story.

OK, start telling stories. You have hundreds, even thousands of them stored in your brain. Better yet, turn an event of your life into a story.

Learn to capture an audience. Paint a picture with your words. Always give them an exciting conclusion, maybe even a cliff hanger.

Use those emotions and facial expressions that you have been practicing. Speak loudly, use hand gestures. This is a big expansion of your mind and your personality. People may start perceiving you as bigger than life, an authority figure. It’s a good thing. Tell good stories, useful stories.

10. Beyond the Story; Symbolic Systems

So if storytelling created the modern mind, what can we do to go beyond that?

I believe that any symbolic system that we can manipulate in our mind makes our brain grow more complex. Writing, other languages, math, music, physics, electronics, programming, etc.
Symbols that can be moved around, connected in many ways, and expressed to others.

So learn a new system.  Learn as many as you can. Learn to think within that system, following all of its rules.

Learn to keep an entire project in your mind, tinkering with it, repairing it, expanding it.

Learn the terminology of the system. There is always a way to communicate details to others using the system. That is part of being Meta.

11. Other things

There are a lot of ways to exercise the mind. I am always looking for methods that work. If you think that you have a good method, tell me a story about it.

From February 18th to April 19th, the orange room near the front of Hacker Lab was crammed tight with bustle. Michael Kaiser-Nyman, founder of Epicodus, had selected the space for a pilot run of his intensive, 9-week Ruby bootcamp. I was one of the students.

The lot of us were chosen out of the pool of applicants for what I can only guess was a mixture of verve and weirdness. In our midst was an accordian-playing world-traveler, a professional soccer player, and a software engineer from Boeing, to name but three.

I couldn’t have asked for a better way to reconnect to my would-be coder roots. After veering so far away from it that I honestly thought I would never be back, I’m now further along than I’ve ever been. Michael Kaiser-Nyman is a fellow autodidact and a TDD nerd. At one point he saw that the ex-Boeing programmer had written untested code and *deleted* it. At one point he did it to me and I shook my fist to the high heavens. Secretly, I relished it. If I got anything out of this course, even in the initial weeks, it was moving beyond my tendency to write illegible, untested code. By the end of it, testing was simply a part of the way I did things, and OOD something that I grasped intuitively. Because web development deals so much with the negotiation of complexity under rapid change, it’s proven to be a reassuring foundation.

The weekly curriculum looked like this:

• Week 0 (prep) – Simple algorithms and utilities (to learn control flow, git basics, Ruby syntax)
• Week 1 – Terminal games in pure Ruby (to learn OOD principles)
  Week 2 -  Terminal games with unit testing (to learn Rspec)
• Week 3 – Database apps from scratch (to roll our own postgres and learn about associations)
• Week 4 – Database apps with ActiveRecord (to not have to do it anymore, and learn more complex associations)
• Week 5 – Build clients for RESTful API’s (to learn the Rails API functionalty,  HTTP basics, RESTful, etc.)
• Week 6 – Build simple RESTful API servers (to learn heroku deployment and better understand the server side of the equation)
• Week 7-9 – Build our own and our team members projects (to learn project planning, git merging and branching, front-end basics)

There was one thing that we did in Epicodus more than any other thing, and that was pairing, two people to a terminal. In practice, it added a fascinating layer of cooperative negotiation and shared knowledge to the coding process, while affording a surprising level of stamina and focus. In Epicodus, we each had over three hundred hours of this. I learned a tremendous amount about myself and the people around me from the experience, the sort of communication skills that can manifest in subtle little ways even in domains that have little to do with programming. This, too, will pay dividends, I suspect.

Epicodus, and the developer’s bootcamp model in general, has prompted a wide range of opinions in the conversations I’ve had over the past nine weeks. Several of the developers running around, bearing frequent witness to the living diorama in the orange room (perhaps mistaking it for a help desk at some point,  if they happened to come into Hacker Lab for the first time after the start of the course) have given me very encouraging feedback. Others have been more skeptical. Do dev bootcamps even work? Is it snake oil? Are people who take these Rails courses, as one pleasant gentleman asked (though I paraphrase,) money-grubbing luddites who have no business coding because they lack attention to detail? How many brogrammers does it take to screw in a light bulb? (Answer: None. That’s a hardware problem, brah.)

After the course, Michael came in and cleared the room almost immediately, leaving an odd stillness where the bustle had been, yet another story among many under this broad little roof. I, for one, am very much the better for it.

I’ve found that the most common question people have when they hear about Hacker Lab tends to be “What is it?” And in some ways, it can be a difficult question to answer. I had never heard of something like it, and I can honestly say I didn’t understand what it was fully until I walked through the doors for the first time. Once I did, I found one of the most fascinating and engaging places in Sacramento for any small business or creative individual.

When SearcherMagnet was founded in August 2012, we were so small that we couldn’t afford an office and I didn’t want to work out of my house. Coworking provided us an alternative to leasing an expensive office and paying for space we didn’t need, while offering a scalable environment in which to grow our business. The lack of a rental contract or deposit, avoiding the need to have keys made or open and close the office gave us flexibility and the ability to grow comfortably. The options are some of the most competitive you can find for what you receive, and having a place that you can dedicate to work can be extraordinarily helpful while getting off the ground. We now rent an office, and there are so many small expenses that add up over time. Phone lines, rent, utilities, signage, insurance, and more are a financial black hole for a young company that can be avoided with HackerLab’s unique space.

Most importantly however, and unique to Hacker Lab, is that you find yourself in a space that is designed in every way to foster the growth of your business. You are surrounded by other entrepreneurs, small business owners and people facing the same challenges you do every day. The concrete benefits of interacting and working with other people and being able to benefit from their experiences are monumental. If you are looking for any kind of talent, from programmers to videographers to designers, there’s always someone floating around at Hacker Lab. They are individuals you can trust because you’ve already met them and worked alongside them. This lets you avoid the nightmare it would be to hire someone on Craigslist or Odesk, because you are simply surrounded by trustworthy, qualified people all the time.

As a B2B company focusing on online marketing and advertising services, we found a surprising lack of referrals and business from coworking. This was not our motivation for choosing a coworking environment, but we were surprised to not pick up much business directly. However, this experience allowed us to hone in on our true customer and market niche. Operating in coworking provided us instant feedback on our own internal marketing techniques, and company strategies from seasoned entrepreneurs with decades of experience. This feedback and information was invaluable in the first six months of our business’s growth. I would have to say that without the environment at Hacker Lab, it’s difficult to say how our business would have grown. At the very least we are richer for the experience and we are grateful to the amazing people who run Hacker Lab and make it into a useful “lab” for entrepreneurs to birth and grow young companies. I directly credit coworking and specifically Hacker Lab for our company’s success and growth.

We try to participate in as many hacks as possible through either mentorship or entrance and support HackerLab on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SacHackerLab). Bottom line, HackerLab and its organizers are a driving force behind the growth of Sacramento entrepreneurship and an incredible asset to the community. It is overall a very authentic and good-hearted effort. If the time comes that our business ever needs to take advantage of coworking or if I am ever in need of a place to start or grow a business in the Sacramento area, Hacker Lab would be my choice. So long and thanks for all the fish.

With our economy in the state that it is in and with education declining in our country we must create a new paradigm with innovation. With Meetups, YouTube, and online courses such as Udacity, the tools and education we need to invent our at our disposal.

Do you want to change your life, the society you live in, or even the world? Build, create, or invent something. Innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship are economic climate changers for the world as well as the answers to many social issues.

Everything from repurposing and upcycling to programming and building can make a difference, change the world, and create income.

With so much available to us that is low cost, open source, and even free we can literally create something out of nothing with just the desire to learn, create and share.

Here are some cool resources to get you going! Join in on the technology revolution and change the world!

Udacity.com
Codeacademy.com
Instructables.com
Buildsomethingtogether.com
Codeschool.com/courses

Of course Hacker Lab!

We have woodworking and small power tools such as table saws, miters saws, sanders, dremels, drill presses, metal benders, and welding equipment. We have a variety of hand tools and an electronics room with tons of things to get into.
We have oscilloscopes  soldering stations, and tons of spare parts for your next hack.

For you hardcore builders and fabricators. We recently got our hands on an awesome industrial Mill and that will be up and running in a couple of weeks.

Hacker Lab also has tons of spare parts, wood scrap, metal scrap, and PC parts for use in hacks. We even have a motorcycle and a treadmill to hack. So we are personally challenging you to come and find something to make or build!

Come make something great

We need to band together to create a strong ecosystem of technologists. So how can you help?

Give a class and share your knowledge.
Attend local tech Meetups.
Host or start a Meetup (Coding, Robotics, Lean Methodology)
Join a coworking space
Evangelize the need for the latest technologies to be taught in public schools
Attend tech mixers, events, and hackathons
Blog, tweet, and social media your little hearts out.

Our community is growing and it has been super awesome for Sacramento! We are stoked to see a startup community taking off and it is all because of you but there is so much more work to be done.

If you are interested in doing any of these things listed above and need some help. Give us a holler and someone from Hacker Lab can help you get it going!

Rock on Sacramento startups, hackers,  and makers!

We have a great mix of designers, coders, engineers and makers here! Today as I am sitting here writing this I am looking out at a full lobby of awesome people!

Whoo hoo for our first post and come on down! We have a couple weeks left of free co-working and making at Hacker Lab!