Author: tdr

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Repair Café At Leixlip Library

Bring broken bits from home to Leixlip Library for a morning of repair, chat and climate action with volunteers from TOG Hackerspace.

On Saturday, 13 December 2025, from 10.00 to 13.00, Leixlip Library will host a Repair Café in partnership with TOG Hackerspace and the Kildare County Council Climate Action Office. Skilled volunteers will help you give worn and broken items another shot at life, instead of sending them to the landfill.

Multiple 30-minute slots run through the morning. Booking is through Leixlip Library, so contact the library desk or check the library website for full details.

What you can bring

• Clothes and accessories
• Toys
• Small electrical appliances and electronics
• Small furniture

If you are unsure about an item, bring it along on the day. Volunteers will take a look and see if a repair is possible. Safety testing (PAT) for electrical devices will be in place.

What happens at a Repair Café

You arrive with an item, sign in, then wait for a fixer to free up. A volunteer sits down with you, opens things up, and talks through options. You get to see how the repair works, ask questions, and pick up a few skills for next time.

The aim is not a drop-off service. It is a shared repair session where everyone learns something, has a chat, and heads home with more confidence and, hopefully, a working item.

Why take part

Repair Cafés support a circular economy in a simple, local way. Every item repaired keeps resources in use for longer, cuts waste, and saves money. Events like this also build up local skills and give people a chance to share knowledge across the community.

Where and when

Date: Saturday 13 December 2025
Time: 10.00 to 13.00
Venue: Leixlip Library, Captains Hill, Leixlip, Co Kildare
Cost: Free, booking required for a 30-minute slot

If you would like to help out as a fixer on the day, drop us an email at TOG and we will be in touch.

This event runs in partnership with Leixlip Library, TOG Hackerspace and the Kildare County Council Climate Action Office as part of local climate action work in Kildare.

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📚 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.

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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:

  1. Python Ireland
  2. Coding Grace / PyLadies Dublin / The Python Software Foundation
  3. Tog Hackerspace 🛠️
  4. 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. 🐍✨

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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!

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High-voltage Vector Display ⚡️🧪

At last night’s Electronics Night in Tog Hackerspace, one of our members brought in a brilliant build: an old oscilloscope CRT tube running at ~750 V (stepped up from 12 V) with a custom deflection circuit.
An ESP32 drives the X/Y plates with ~200 V deflection signals, running a tweaked open-source vector clock. They even used AI to analyse photos of the circuit and suggest fixes—super handy for fast iterations.

What’s next?

  • Build a wooden/perspex case
  • Add a weather display mode 🌦️
  • More vector art experiments

Huge thanks to everyone who dropped by to brainstorm and test. If you’ve a half-finished idea, odd component, or smoky breadboard—bring it along!

📍 Electronics Night: every second Monday, 7pm at Tog Hackerspace
📸 Photos in the comments.