Weekly Public Hours Every Thursday Evening!

screenshot of an image on wikipedia of a few guys standing around a table with ice cream on it with the caption 'people eating ice cream at a lan party'

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!!

February 2023 Activities Update

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

Regular Activities:
  • 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.
Possible Additional Activities for the Spring
  • Revival of the bike glow-up and ride (late April)
  • Some folks are talking about a monthly textile night

New Mask and COVID-19 Safety Requirements – December 2021

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 your cooperation in helping keep our community safe and healthy.

Old North End Repair Cafe – 20 Nov 2021

May be an image of text that says 'Repair Café Toss it? No way!'

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

Free and or Open Source Game Night

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!

Third Old North End Repair Cafe this Saturday August 15th!

The next Old North End Repair Cafe is this Saturday, August 15th from 11am-3pm. Come on down and volunteers will do our best to repair anything you can carry in! And if you’d like to help out, please fill out our volunteer interest form (free snacks for volunteers!). This is an outdoor, socially distant event and masks are required.

Also, going on concurrently will be Degrowth Fest which Repair Cafe will be a part of. We’ll have a poster illustrating the merits of repair 🙂

More info on our Repair Cafe page.

 

Second Old North End Repair Cafe this Saturday!

Hello everyone, here are the results for our first Repair Cafe last month. 70% success rate is pretty good! Especially for our first repair cafe. It looks like 29% bicycle but that’s actually sewing!

The next Old North End Repair Cafe is coming up THIS SATURDAY, July 18th! Come on down to 12-22 North st between 11am and 3pm (we can only accept new repairs until 2:15pm)

More info on our Repair Cafe page

Repair Cafe June 20th

Laboratory B will finally hold our first Repair Cafe this weekend on Saturday June 20th. Assuming the weather is clear (we will decide Thursday night whether to postpone) we’ll have tables socially distanced apart for volunteers to repair whatever people show up with! Whatever you can carry with you, electronics, bicycles, furniture, small appliances, etc,  we’ll do our best to repair it for you. All for free!

If you’d like to volunteer please fill out our volunteer interest form.

  • Saturday, June 20th
  • 11am-3pm
  • 12-22 North st

The main Lab B Repair Cafe page is here

Join us on Mumble!

Come hang out with us on our Mumble server. Mumble is a free, open-source, encrypted voice chat application and we’ve been using it to host our virtual member meetings and open hours. We’re online every Thursday from 7pm-9pm, we’d love to have you drop in and say hi.

Getting Started

Start out by downloading the Mumble client for your device. There are even clients for Android and iOS so you can connect from your phone.

After installing, you’ll want to grab some headphones, and get set up using Mumble’s Audio Wizard. If you run into audio issues after setup, you can always re-run the wizard from the Configure menu dropdown. This step is important so everyone can hear you clearly, and your mic only turns on when you’re talking.

Get Connected

These instructions are designed for the desktop Mumble client. If you’re using your phone, they’ll be slightly different, but the connection info is the same.

You’ll want to add the Lab server by going to the Server menu, then clicking Connect, and Add New. You’ll be prompted for a username, this can be anything, and others will see it when you join.

Mumble "Add Server" dialog

In the Add Server dialog that comes up, enter the mumble.laboratoryb.org in the Address field and press OK.

A list of servers will show up. Double click the new mumble.laboratoryb.org server you just added (under Favorite), and a message will come up prompting for a password. You’ll need to enter the password “laboratoryb” – without quotes.

That’s it! Any time you’d like to connect, load up Mumble and connect to the server you added.

Connection Info

Address: mumble.laboratoryb.org
Port: 64738
Username: this can be anything you’d like!
Label: this can be anything, adjusts the server name in your list