Laboratory B

This post is an excerpt/cross-post from a blog post on Zettelwirtschaft

April 28th, 2025 I finally gave in to my long coveting of the cylindrical Mac Pro. I bought one on eBay for $69, upgraded it to 12 cores and 128gb of ram and spun up a home AI server. I named it Jai. You can interact with him just like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever via a chat interface.

I am slightly obsessed with this computer; it’s so elegant. A silent steel canister, breathing warm air when he’s…

Some months ago, lessons learned from my previous adventures with managing summer cooling in the passive solar building where the Lab calls home sent me down a rabbit hole in the opposite direction: maximizing thermal gain in the winter time!

One of the main trade-offs with traditional passive solar design lies in the sizing of the south-facing windows. On the one hand, the more glazing a building has, the more solar heat it can capture and store on sunny days. On the other hand, when night…

The building Lab B occupies at 12-22 North Street was built in 1979/80 as a state-of-the-art passive solar demonstration project. With R-40+ wall insulation, a large brick thermal mass bisecting the building, and large arrays of south-facing windows on both the first and second floors, 12-22 gets and stays toasty in the winter.

While the front overhang helps a bit, it also gets toasty in the summer-time (particularly the southern…

We just put up a page that lists the items the Old North End Repair Cafe is looking for. If you have any items on the list you’d like to donate please bring them by! Thanks!

List of things the lab is looking for

The post Repair Cafe Donations appeared first on Laboratory B.

We realized we hadn’t updated the site to note that open hours have resumed!  Come hang out with us every Thursday from 7pm-9pm (and probably later) at our space at 12 North st. (up the stairs at the side of the building.

Folks will be there working on personal projects, fixing things, chatting, eating, playing games and just hanging out. Come through!!

The post Weekly Public Hours Every Thursday Evening! appeared first on Laboratory B.

We set up a Mastodon account. Toot @ us here.

• Public Hours happening every Thursday from 7pm – (at least) 9pm in the space.
• Repair Cafe 3rd Saturday of the Month from 11am-3pm. Volunteers and broken things welcome!
• Monthly Member Meeting 2nd Saturday of the Month at 7pm, sometimes a potluck starting at 6pm. Drop a line about attending if you are interested in learning about joining the Lab.
• Our most frequently active public online space is our Discord Server.

The Laboratory B membership has voted on December 12th, 2021 to introduce the following new policies in the interest of COVID-19 safety:

• Anyone attending a public event in-person will be required to wear a properly-fitting respirator rated to at least KN95 filtration without exhalation valves. N95, P100, and PAPR respirators are also acceptable.
• KN95 respirators will be available at no charge at any public event
• Open Hours will be held virtually on Discord until further notice

We appreciate…

Thanks to everyone who came out to the dance party on Friday night and helped raise a bit of $$ for the Repair Cafe! It was a blast, and we’ll likely do another one at some point.

If you want to swing by while we’re fixing things rather than flailing about wildly with glow-sticks, swing by the next Repair Cafe on Saturday, Nov 20!

https://www.facebook.com/LaboratoryB/posts/4867207663291740

The post Old North End Repair Cafe – 20 Nov 2021 appeared first on Laboratory B.

Join Lab B every Thursday night at 7pm for FOSS (free + open source software) (or sometimes closed source but free) game nights. Meet up on our discord and we’ll go from there. If we’re planning on a specific game it will be listed on our events page

EDIT: regular (weekly, unstructured, in-person) open hours have resumed!

The post Free and or Open Source Game Night appeared first on Laboratory B.

Next Old North End Repair Cafe is Saturday September 19th from 11am till 3pm! Come by with your stuff and we’ll see if we can get it fixed! If you’re interested in volunteering (or just being alerted when these are happening) please fill out our volunteer interest form.

See ya there!

The post Next Repair Cafe Saturday the 19th appeared first on Laboratory B.