This past week, I spent a lot of my time at Tog. As if I haven't spoken about Tog at length before, Tog is a Hacker space on Golden Lane, just around the corner from Daft's HQ.
If you are in anyway nerdy or geeky and want to hang out with other people like yourself, take a look at Tog. Hacker spaces often, fill in the gaps which traditional education leaves open, its well worth a visit.
Dublin Science Hack Day
There's nothing really to add here, it was all covered in last week's post. It just so happened that one event spanned two weekly updates.
Although, I must say that It took a couple of days to recover after the 30hour hack-a-thon. Shocker, huh.
Tog Craft Night
More tog awesome with the craft night. People just come in and craft things, I think they were doing knitting mostly this time, but for reasons I cannot go into, I ended up spending most my time digging into MonoTouch and MonoDroid while working on the Tog mobile App (cleaning the git history etc.)
Dublin Beta at National College of Ireland
Kind of bizarre for me.. I have spoken publicly and privately about my issues with NCI at great length so when I heard that Russell Banks of Dublin Beta fame had put together an awesome group where students get together and share knowledge, I jumped at the chance to find out more.
I ended up giving an adhoc talk about getting into mobile app design, from sketching out an idea to self-educating yourself and targeting key skills in the market place. Who knew I actually had that kind of info stored in my head? It was mostly a brain dump, but they were very receptive.
Unity Workshop
The second meet-up of the Unity users group met up for a workshop in Tog, hosted by Mark Ahern of Simple Lifeforms. I don't really go to these kinds of workshops to learn much, because I don't usually, but I do tend to pick up a few nuggets which I use in my own code, or at the very least, makes me think differently about the way I'm doing things, which is invaluable.
I spent most the time listening to Mark while working on my own UnifiedInput class to detect gestures between platforms, which incidentally is coming along nicely!
Tog Wireless Security Workshop
This was a workshop on 802.11x security hosted by Martin Mitchell in Tog. I already had pretty extensive experience with wireless security but it had been almost two years since I last looked into it, was a great refresher and people seemed to enjoy the evening.
We all had a chance to hack into WEP access points, and if we had forever and a day, WPA. It as good fun.
MIT Online Electronics Course 6.002x
MIT has begun its online electronics course, dubbed 6002x (whereas the real world equivalent is 6002). I've only started it so I dont have too much to say about it, but its looking like a great course and I'm having too much fun speeding up the lecturer to 1.5x regular speed. I don't know why, but it makes the content much more digestible at that speed.
There has been some talk that Tog may hold a meet-up for those taking part in the course every two or so weeks to share notes, chat about the course and the usual stuff.
MonoTouch / MonoDroid
Through means and reasons I cannot elaborate on, I was given a copy of MonoTouch and MonoDroid so that I can continue development on the Tog mobile app in my spare time.
Free time is increasingly becoming a rarity for me, but I will endeavour to continue working on the App to a point where at least version 1 can be published in the app stores.
Unite 2012 (Amsterdam)
All signs are pointing to me attending this year's Unite conference. Unite is the meeting event of hobbyist programmers, indie game developers and professionals interested in the Unity3D tool chain. Unity3D is a multimedia, cross platform development tool which enables you to simply and easily create 3D (2D with some 3rd party tools) games and simulations and deploy them to practically every platform that matters: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Web, Consoles (Xbox360, PS3) and so on.
Unity differs from MonoTouch/MonoDroid in the sense that MonoTouch/MonoDroid is targeted at application development, with exposed 2D/Graphics API's if you wish to hook into them, while Unity provides all the tools you need to complete a fully functional game or interactive simulation. So there is some overlap, but not much.
Unity 2012 will be taking place in Amsterdam this year, you can find more information here: Unite 2012.
Enterprise Ireland Competitive Start Fund
So Enterprise Ireland finally got back to us regarding feedback for the Competetive Start Fund applications. Without going into any great detail, the story is that nothing is broken, some items they identified as being items that need work, were also items that I had identified beforehand so I am quite pleased with that. Other areas were scored highly apparently, so I think some further development and another application might be on the cards.
Teneo Ventures
I just learned this morning that my company's LLC has finally been registered with the CRO. I will speak more on that topic when next week's summary comes around.
And, finally
of course, typical developments continue. Work on Fandom and other projects continues.
Monday, May 14, 2012 at 8:38AM 
