Some say that doing something two times is tradition. Well on Monday the 21st of March we organized a lock picking workshop for the second time and we hope we can make this a recurring event for the coming years. The workshop was given by Walter Bergers from Madison Ghurka, who is a world champion in the field of lock picking.

Since lock picking is an interesting subject for students we had more than 20 enthusiastic participants for this workshop. Walter explained that however it is fun, lock picking should only be done on your own locks and preferably on locks that are of no real importance, since there is a small chance of “Locking” the lock where you can’t open it with a key.

The workshop started with general info about locks and keys, and that tiny imperfections in the locks or the pins from the lock cause locks to be pickable. A lock with perfect pins and pinholes would in theory be unpickable.

With enough courage and some tips from Walter the participants started with picking their first cheap locks and with some time and practice the first locks started to open. Even locks with special pins were picked by some participants. At the end of the interesting workshop I think that everyone picked at least one lock successfully.

There are some activities that you have to do each year. One tradition of our student branch is to give 2 LaTeX trainings, a beginner and an advanced. We started by giving the beginner course and since we made extra promotion under the students who are doing their bachelor end project we had more than 20 participants.

In contrary to last year we decided to renew the course which was already a few years old and based on an old course given by the math department, so it was a kind of try out to work with a new set of slides, so obviously we forgot to add some things that could be relevant like margins. But all-in-all it was a good workshop with a lot of positive feedback, we hope to see some familiar faces at the advanced workshop.

Having organized the new years diner previous year, it was again a challenge this year to arrange a date and a restaurant to feed 27 people at once. This year we started again with the traditional drink in het Walhalla beforehand. We had an informal drink there with some old board members, present board members, members, friends and also 2 honorary members.

After the drink we went to the restaurant, which was lounge 8 this time. They had reserved a whole room just for us so we could sit close together. After 3 hours of eating a lot of sushi, grilled meats, fish, and desserts the evening finally came to an end and we returned home from a good start of the new year.

Photos will follow 🙂

It all started on Tuesday 5th of January. It was just a normal Tuesday for most of the people. However during this warm winter day 10 ladies and Frank were brave enough to join the salsa workshop together with their (dance) partners given by Footloose. Some of us had little experience while others had never been on a dancefloor before.

Around 18:00 we started by learning the basic steps individually. But soon things got interesting since salsa is of course a dance for a couple. This was the moment of which some of us had dreamt about: Finally dance with the dance partner you choose. However, it would have been a bit boring if you would dance only with one person the whole evening and thus we had to chance a lot. Of course this led to some funny situations, for instance couples at which the difference in body length was enormous.

While we changed partners very often, we learned also some fancy turns for both the men and women to add something cool to the basic salsa and when the time passed most of us actually had improved their skills.

All together this WIE activity, where men were allowed for once, was a great success and we had a lot of fun.

Marcella Gunther

Dear member,

If you are thinking about graduating in the embedded systems/electrical engineering direction we might have something for you. This project will give you the chance to make a big contribution to the new IEEE testing standard for 3D integrated circuits and work together with IMEC in Leuven.

If you are interested or just want to check it out, see the details in the pdf file attached to this post or mail: H.Jiao@tue.nl

MasterProject-FPPGeneration