Tog Hackerspace – The Dublin Hackerspace

19/11/2025

📚 TOG Sci-Fi Book Club — A Look Back at Our Reading Year

What a fantastic year of reading it’s been at the TOG Science Fiction Book Club! From far-future civilisations to classic monsters, philosophical puzzles, military epics, and the occasional extremely opinionated cat, we travelled across a huge range of worlds together. As always, it wasn’t just the books that made it great, but the chats, the debates, and the friendly faces around the table each month.

Here’s the full list of what we read in 2025:

📅 Our 2025 Reading Journey

**January — Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky**

An epic opener to the year, full of evolution, uplifted spiders, and big moral questions.

**February — A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.**

Post-apocalyptic monks preserving knowledge through centuries. Deep, thoughtful, and surprisingly lively in discussion.

**March — The Peace War, Vernor Vinge**

Physics, rebels, and pocket universes. A classic slice of high-concept sci-fi.

**April — Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Stanisław Lem**

Confusion, paranoia, and bureaucracy — nobody knew what was happening, and that was half the fun.

**May — Starter Villain, John Scalzi**

Light, clever, and funny. An absolute hit — especially the unionised cats.

**June — The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Peter Watts**

A revolution unfolding over millennia on a ship that never stops moving. Short, sharp, and dense with ideas.

**July — Pattern Recognition, William Gibson**

Branding, conspiracies, and early-internet noir. Very different from Gibson’s usual fare, but a brilliant read.

**August — The Forever War, Joe Haldeman**

A timeless anti-war classic that sparked one of our biggest discussions of the year.

**September — Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky**

A polite robot butler tries to keep civilisation together. A funny, thoughtful crowd-pleaser.

**October — Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley**

The original science fiction novel — perfect for spooky season and still incredibly relevant.

**November — The Word for World Is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin**

Short but powerful. Ecology, colonialism, and dreamers refusing conquest.

**December → January — The White Plague, Frank Herbert**

A chilling biothriller that bridges our reading year into 2026.

☕ A Community of Readers

We had new faces, returning regulars, and plenty of evenings where the chat ran long past closing time. And as always at TOG, nobody minded if you hadn’t finished the book — it’s the conversation that matters.

If you’re thinking, “I should go to one of those…” you absolutely should.

No need to be a sci-fi expert, read every month, or even like spiders (Children of Time tested a few of us!). Just bring your curiosity — biscuits optional.

🚀 Join Us in 2026 — First Book of the Year: The White Plague

We’re kicking off the new year with Frank Herbert’s The White Plague:

📅 Monday, 27 January 2026
🕢 7:30 pm
📍 TOG Hackerspace

A dark, gripping tale of biotech and obsession — and the perfect start to another year of great chats.

Come along, bring a friend, and help us grow the book club in 2026.
Here’s to another year of stories shared around the table at TOG.

18/11/202518/11/2025

A Real Jam

We’re big into our jams at TOG….. Linux, Python, Finish-a-thons… you name it. Last Saturday at our regular monthly Open Social, we ran a real jam… blackberry and apple to be precise!

With 3.2kg of blackberries collected from the Royal Canal in Dublin and Kildare, and apples from one of our members’ trees, we made a huge pot of jam which filled about 24 jars.

Our Open Social is usually a foodie affair anyway, with our pizza oven going. This one was especially busy with both the pizza and jam. Everyone got to have a stir of the pot, and we all got to take a jar home…. still piping hot.

If jam making and other foodie things interest you, get in touch. We might do another session soon. Check out our gallery for even more photos.

14/11/202514/11/2025

Tog Hackerspace at PyCon Ireland 2025

We’re delighted to share that Tog Hackerspace will have a community table at PyCon Ireland 2025, taking place in UCD O’Reilly Hall, Dublin, on November 15th–16th, 2025.

PyCon Ireland is sponsoring a number of Community Tables this year for local tech groups, and we’re chuffed to be one of them. You’ll find us alongside:

Python Ireland
Coding Grace / PyLadies Dublin / The Python Software Foundation
Tog Hackerspace 🛠️
The Celbridge team (Chris Gregan)

Drop by our table to:

Find out what actually happens in a hackerspace
Chat about electronics, hardware hacking, 3D printing, IoT, amateur radio, and Repair Cafés
Learn how to get involved with Tog, whether as a member or a casual visitor

Tog members on stage

As well as minding the table, some of our members will be speaking at the conference:

Jeffrey Roe – “Stopping Time with Python: Building an Interactive Art Installation”
Peter Nolan – “Flattening the Curve: How Ireland Modelled COVID”

Check out the full schedule and all the details on the PyCon Ireland 2025 website.

If you’re heading to PyCon, be sure to swing by the Tog table and say hello – we’d love to chat about your projects and how a hackerspace might fit into them. 🐍✨

11/11/2025

TOG on RTÉ Radio 1 from the Tullamore Repair Café

Delighted to share that our Tullamore Repair Café was featured on RTÉ Radio 1’s CountryWide. The 5-minute clip captures the buzz on the day with voices from across our fixer crew and visitors.
👉 Listen back on RTÉ Radio 1: “A visit to the repair café in Tullamore”

For context on the event, see our original post:
👉 Tullamore Repair Café – Event Details

And check out the photos from the day:
👉 Tullamore Repair Café – Gallery

Big thanks to everyone who came along and to our partners in Offaly for the support. Onwards with more repair!

10/11/202511/11/2025

TouchDesigner Dublin back for a 2nd meetup in TOG

Wednesday, November 19th, 7-9pm

We are delighted to be hosting the 2nd Touchdesigner Dublin meetup at TOG on Wednesday, 19th of November 7-9 pm. Each session runs for around two hours in a relaxed, hands-on setting. With multiple rooms available at Tog Hackerspace, we can host beginner and advanced activities simultaneously, ensuring everyone gets the most out of the evening.

Join us in the space for the second in a series of monthly meetups for anyone interested in TouchDesigner, from complete beginners to experienced creators. Whether you’d like to learn the basics, share your projects, or connect with others using the software, this meetup offers a welcoming and supportive space to do so.

Expect an informal, community-driven environment where the format adapts to participants. You’re welcome to bring a laptop to follow along, showcase your work, or simply join the discussion. The event is a great opportunity to meet other creative technologists and artists, and to continue building the growing TouchDesigner community in Ireland.

We’ve also set up a Discord server for ongoing discussion and planning. Join us there to share ideas for future sessions or to express interest in presenting your work: https://discord.gg/UPCh4ywV9p

The meetups are hosted each month by a group of artists and creative technologists:

https://www.tog.ie

Ciaran Eaton

Ciaran Eaton is a Creative Technologist and Educator based in Dublin. With a background in audio and visual arts production, Ciaran integrates visual programming environments such as TouchDesigner with open-source software and aims to foster an active community around creative workflows.

Website

Serdar Buhan

Serdar is a software engineer based in Dublin with a curiosity for creative technology and building interactive experiences. In his spare time, he explores tools such as TouchDesigner, Processing, Blender, AR, photogrammetry, pen plotters, and generative AI.
Instagram

Cailean Finn

Cailean Finn is an Irish media artist, researcher, and creative technologist from Waterford, Ireland. His practice investigates the idiosyncratic nature of human–machine relationships, drawing from computational histories and engaging with technologies and practices such as creative coding, artificial intelligence/life, game development, and physical computing.

Website

Pauric Freeman

Pauric Freeman is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin, working across audiovisual performance, sound, and installation. His practice explores translation, using data collected from live instruments as the basis for real-time audiovisual compositions.

Website

Instagram

Louise Nolan

Louise Nolan is a multidisciplinary artist and designer working in glass, print and digital media. Her work is transmedia integrating digital techniques with physical installations to create an interactive multi-sensory experience for the viewer. She is a visiting lecturer at NCAD and TU Dublin in physical computing, creative coding and emerging media practice.

Instagram

10/11/2025

Fix All The Things

If you follow Tog, you’ll know that we’re no stranger to Repair Café. It’s become a bit of an institution around here. We never know whats going to come in our door on the day. We’re probably well into 4 figures in terms of the number of items that we have fixed over the years. Repair Café also embeds a culture of repair in all those who get involved with them.

When is the last time you darned a pair of socks however? This is an easy fix, and probably one that most of us will have the means to do at home. Sadly however, we’re too inclined to just throw our old clothes away. This morning, we read that Ireland consumes more than double the European average of textiles.

These socks, bought on the Aran Island of Inisheer in 2024, were a bit too young and too nice to throw away. So out with the needle and thread, and in no time they’re good to go for another while. Now just need to keep those toenails trimmed!