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Makers Mail June 2026

🇺🇸 · Lowell Makes · admin

Get makers Mail Delivered to Your Inbox! Sign up for our mailing list to receive our monthly newsletter. Sign up Happy Pride Month! This month and always, we celebrate the makers, artists, innovators, and creators of the LGBTQIA+ community who help make Lowell Makes such a vibrant and welcoming place. We believe everyone deserves the freedom to explore their creativity, share their ideas, and be their authentic selves. Thank you for helping us build a community where all are welcome and everyone has the space to create, connect, and thrive. We have so much happening at Lowell Makes in June! IN THIS ISSUE: Monthly Social Bike Ride in Nashua WAS Block Party Summer BBQ Potluck Brew Poll: Fruit Edition No July Member’s Meeting Teach a free class at LM Free Stained Glass Workshops Fairy Houses & Wheel Turning Machine Shop Classes Upcoming Classes Committee Meetings & Meetups Read the Full June Newsletter The post Makers Mail June 2026 first appeared on Lowell Makes .

Newsletter

Better Option for Bottle Opener Collection

🇺🇸 · Workshop 88 · D. Scott Williamson

I collect bottle openers, one for each vacation destination or brewery visit. They’re kept in chronological order on a rack I made in 2017 from the oak cabinetry panel of our old kitchen refrigerator. To be honest, it was 80% full the day I finished it nine years ago. Keeping them under the 3D printers and over the PCs in this high traffic area is problematic, they are frequently knocked down. I needed a new sensible extensible solution. It makes more sense that they’d be kept on the “beer fridge” so I designed a modular magnetic rack system for them in FreeCAD . The rack is a 290mm x 25mm dovetail that just barely fits on the Prusa2 (Klipper/RAMPS modified Prusa i3 MK2s) print bed. My original design was 300mm long but didn’t fit on the bed, so I shortened it in the spirit of “design for manufacture”. I printed the hooks below on Sam Bell 2 (a home built i3 clone functionally identical to the Prusa2). I chose blue and white to match the colors of the München Biergarten magnet already on the white refrigerator. After some iteration to determine adequate spacing, tolerance for mounting the 4mm x 2mm magnets, and a few more iterations to get a good fit for the hooks on the dovetail, I started cranking them out in PLA. The hooks print best one at a time so I spaced them out and for the first time I configured and used sequential printing. Sequential printing can print multiple parts but it prints each one after the other instead of all at once. They all turned out great. Side note: My fathers father, William “Herbert” Williamson fixed clocks, watches, and jewelry. He had many unique and interesting tools. When I was four years old I always wanted to play with his brass and rawhide hammers. I remember occasionally seeing them when he opened the lower left drawer of his workbench and I think I only got to touch them once. I can hardly imagine the stress level while handing a four year old a hammer in a small clock workshop. I’ve since inherited them and it gave me great joy to finally be able to use the rawhide hammer to drive in all the magnets. It’s all done and it turned out better than I expected. Note: The silver bar on the freezer door contains nine promotional bottle openers from one visit to the 2023 Design-2-Part manufacturing trade show, whereas on the refrigerator door the bottle openers are each unique to a trip in chronological order. Bonus Content If you are curious, this is what the inside looks like. I occasionally like to take a picture after restocking which is roughly annually I realized after digging up these photos. This is probably my biggest fitness headwind but it brings me joy. I’ve veered waaaay off the topics of design, making, and 3D printing. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. What will you make next? Workshop 88 makerspace is sponsored by Comparion Insurance . Local agents who know insurance inside and out, able to easily guide clients through the complex process of finding policies to match their unique needs. Benefits: The right coverage at the right price Insurance options from a wide variety of carriers A local expert looking out for their exact needs Use the QR code or this link get a no-commitment insurance quote and save money today: https://www.comparioninsurance.com/workshop-88… The post Better Option for Bottle Opener Collection first appeared on Workshop88 .

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Meetups/Infra/2026-06-08

🇺🇸 · Noisebridge · Mcint

uploadin' notes New page (Preamble: = Meetup - Infra = https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra/2026-..-.. ) 2026-06-08 m [[Meetups/Infra]] {{meetups/infra}} <!-- header --> (TODO summary) == Welcome == To the weekly infrastructure meetup FOSS, self-hosting, Noisebridge's infra, post-mortem (Kippling adapted poem:) We discuss FOSS (free and open source software), ... noisebridge infrastructure, == Introductions == * [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore] * Loren - background in cloud engineering data engineering, * Ciara - likes kubernetes, self host, check out my fedi server : ) pl.catboyindustries.co/doti * Mark - software engineer, working on context and multi-agent systems * Dave - curious what people use for database hosting. How do you host your Postgres DB? * Victor - dev tools, postmarket os * Kevin - lately developing in agentic code generation around obervability and used recently * Meghan - full stack web dev, aspritational ops * Brandon - dabble in code, * Derek - working on developer tools, would like to hear about multi-agent use, tools * Relay - open software fanatic, interested in building .. * Henry - interest in local models * Max - SE background, interested in local models with NAS and custom hardware * Renaud - SE, interested in programming, OS and hardware * Eugene - deploying locally agentic models using, temporal com net? long train time? hmm. * Heather - software dev, "the linux person" on the team, intrested in local * Erik - mostly hardware, model pipelines. * Jet - needs to get rid of email. * WeZ - learning a lot about data licenses, No GPL. * Robert - Interested in programming, maybe hardware soon. * Null - that's about it * Elan - seeking...found: happy reunion with headphones, interested in provisioning a VPS to run a headscale & auth instance * Alex - graphs == Self-Hoster's Hymn == <div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"> The managed plane will tell you the uptime you can buy— No pager wakes to fell you with failures from the sky. But no SLA will measure the 3 A.M. cascade, Or what it means to treasure the stack that you have made. We own our own replication, our write-ahead, our thread— The failover location is documented, read. The VACUUM runs at midnight, the replica in sync— We held the line in dim light and did not let it sink. PostmarketOS is living on handsets others binned— The kernel, still forgiving, finds drivers in the wind. The firmware blobs are severed, the patches merged upstream— No vendor bond is tethered to what we build and dream. The agents share their messages across the local wire— No hosted cloud assuages the orchestration's fire. The beads link one to other, the Rust-borne viewer turns— Each coordinator, brother, observes and waits and learns. We run the weights at midnight, on GPUs grown dim— No token sent to satellite, no API's whim. The logits fall internally, the context cold and clear— We built the thing eternally: the model stays right here. The load, the lock, the latency, the write that didn't land— We held past all insanity by our own tired hand. The breaking strain is human— no manifest describes The infra-folk communion that holds what midnight hides. h/t Claude Sonnet 4.6 </div> == Tools Reccs == * Can we run models on a * Can replace some coding-agent tasks on local inference? ** Ollama. LLamafile. vLLM, (more control && more config) *** LLM performance? *** pick two: fast, local, good *** Thinking huggingface for local models? **** non-profit, unsloth often release quantized version of popular open models **** instead of FP4, released down to 1 or 2 bits **** 1.58 bits **** 8-bit best bang for the buck, 35GB VRAM ***** How can the model work with what I have ***** the most popular model wont run on home hardware ***** quantization lowers precision of weights (more than just truncation) ***** Is it good advice to run local models on virtual machines? ****** ** Open Router for one-line configuration * post text embedding information - null has questions ** feature vectors, or steering vectors * Reading list? ** Andre Karpathy has a course too: Zero-to-Hero (https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html) ** Lots of interest in inference, KV-cache ** How to deploy vLLM? *** spinning up matter port? *** self hosting, cloud storage? *** keycloak *** * Elan Pitch ** THE Science Foundation *** starting an HPC cluster, high performance computer from 10 years ago. *** meteorology (300 TB) *** let's build something for researchers who can't get their code on national lab machines. *** Bang/$ *** * SCUBA? Honeycomb? (Superscalars?) ** scuba, log management, tracing platform *** honeycomb: spin out of above product. **** Open Telemetry *** xg = X-Googler *** xf? ** If operating at industrial potentially overengineered tools ** * Eugene & Zaccae have standing compute setups ** For displays - X-Reals $700 AR-Glasses ** Typing from the hip! (Literally) ** NixOS on 4090 setup / 64 GB RAM ** 7-8 hours batteries ** Compute anywhere, ** Blue light bad for sleep? Nope, it deals with it. ** hardware is proprietary, connects to phone, *** wife absconded with previous device **** got another one *** Corne 5 Column instead of 6 * Null Flying with VisionPro, it's good ** Eugene prefers the X-Reals, light weight. *** Gloves? Really expensive. *** nb.wrf/infra (look for jitsi) *** mobile operating system *** more pixels! **** compute anywhere in any position. * Victor ** PostMarket OS, alpine based os for old tablet ** Piece of junk? No! run mainline linux on it ** some parts of the phone are not GPL, the android kernel is. *** display drivers are not **** kernel side of drivers are open source **** user space is not open source *** Samsung Galaxy tab with unlockable boot loader *** Wrote a display driver for the kernel **** Got the digitizer driver to work, can draw stuff with hover detection **** Postmarket wiki is really good **** how to flash partitions **** Lineage? is still based on android kernel drivers **** PanelLite DSI Driver panel generator, generates a mostly working driver. ***** Why not ubuntu touch? ****** mostly still android, ideologically tainted ****** Uboot is integrated boot loader (Das U-boot for chain loading) https://u-boot.org/ ***** Runs inside samsung hypervisor ***** Signal, don't use it because it's great, but because it's the best! *** Graphene OS dev says: **** PostMarketOS is good if you want to use linux **** Graphene for security **** Standard linux distro. ** FuriPhone? *** runs linux, helium based, still android, has modern battery life, decent phone ** pine phone, libre phone, etc, potato cams. ** writing drivers -- spits out a mostly working *** https://github.com/msm8916-mainline/linux-mdss-dsi-panel-driver-generator * Why is there no decent linux based mobile more of a thing? postmarket is a go to pressure release valve for people who would otherwise roll their own or start more robust projects. * Q: What about typical apps one might expect on a phone? They work, ???, text and call and mobile data works fine * Zachae has to setup an intermediate service to get texts * Eugene, successfully set up a nix-os Loren: for our broad audience. Why did you want to use nix, what drew you? What did you expect to be biggest issues in getting set up? What turned out to be (biggest issues)? And what are you most happy with, now that you're set up? with nix, orginally, using nix user space reproducible builds local agent workflows feels better if it's instant provisioning in sandbox generally enjoyable nixos can dir-env dev-env nix-flakes - for composable derivations? * Why doesn't gentoo adopt nix like features * nix faults exist. * ZLUDA is real fake CUDA - https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zluda-update-q4-2025/ * Global Nix Infrastructure? how big is the nix binary cache? 70 TB * ARM doesn't have great support? * Big Nix Energy. * https://www.qubes-os.org/ * NAS * doti == == Closer topics, invite to participate == * Elan - Open sci - hpc cluster lawrence berkeley cluster? call to action? trying to build a non-national hpc folks who are interested in getting involved need to find customers Julius? (Weather data is big) Doug? * elan - NB -- intro to NB systems in development - discussion self-hosting, starting to have a reliability declarative setup have some colo locations would like to get VPS running tonight, w/ keycloak and wireguard interval for noisebridge services privacy focused hosting noisebridge infra == Outros == * Loren - postmarket os and how nix can be worked into data worflows * null - postmarket os++ driver hacking stuff, reverse engineer with LLMs - let's do * ciara - learn more about postmarket os * mark - excited about the VR step for relaxed, body respecting computing * Erik - nix install day, hardware knowledge expertise * Dave - appreciates the Karpathy Notes, ex-google for ex-google, github: xg4xg * Victor - seeing the enthusiasm for nix meetup * Kevin - interested in hearing more about postmarket os, have not been satisfied iwht nix os and device types * Meghan - infra 4 infra, gm * Brandon - self-hosting, excited to hear more * Derek - What is Qubes?! * Relay - looking forward to ttesting own infra for local infrerecene * We-z - likes column 5 corne keyboard * Robert - mostly things realted to linux, nix? desktop? one thing missing, can't use VPN? * (MJ) - not yet * Eugene - looking at postmarket getting a modern phone, looking forward to followups. * LX - wants to try nix on qubes, * Jet - ngmi, * Elan - tried out the awesome XReals glasses, messing around with mobile linux, willing to do some legwork to get more philosophically aligned. Noisebridge member portal project Home automation signup

Mentorship Thrives at the Makerspace

🇺🇸 · Vector Space · Mollie Walsh

Vector Space congratulates Margot Marcais, a recent graduate of Amherst County High School, who, in her final semester, represented the region at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this year.

Celebrating Ten Years of Making

🇺🇸 · Vector Space · Mollie Walsh

We could not have felt more supported or more grateful for the way Lynchburg showed up for our 10th Birthday Celebration on Saturday May 30th —and for the way this community has supported Vector Space over the past decade.