So. What’s Up With All These Crazy Event Networks Then?

November 11, 2021 by Jenny List 21 Comments

As an itinerant Hackaday writer I am privileged to meet the people who make up our community as I travel the continent in search of the coolest gatherings. This weekend I’ve made the trek to the east of the Netherlands for the ETH0 hacker camp, in a camping hostel set in wooded countryside. Sit down, connect to the network, grab a Club-Mate, and I’m ready to go!

Forget the CTF, Connecting To WiFi Is The Real Challenge!

There no doubt comes a point in every traveling hacker’s life when a small annoyance becomes a major one and a rant boils up from within, and perhaps it’s ETH0’s misfortune that it’s at their event that something has finally boiled over. I’m speaking of course about wireless networks.

While on the road I connect to a lot of them, the normal commercial hotspots, hackerspaces, and of course at hacker camps. Connecting to a wireless network is a simple experience, with a level of security provided by WPA2 and access credentials being a password. Find the SSID, bang in the password, and you’re in. I’m as securely connected as I reasonably can be, and can get on with whatever I need to do. At hacker camps though, for some reason it never seems to be so simple.

Instead of a simple password field you are presented with a complex dialogue with a load of fields that make little sense, and someone breezily saying “Just enter hacker and hacker!” doesn’t cut it when that simply doesn’t work. When you have to publish an app just so that attendees can hook up their phones to a network, perhaps it’s time to take another look . Continue reading “So. What’s Up With All These Crazy Event Networks Then?” →

The Hackaday Remoticon 2 Badge: An Exercise In Your Own Ingenuity

November 10, 2021 by Jenny List 7 Comments

The twin challenges of the pandemic and now the semiconductor shortage have been particularly hard on the designers of event badges, as events have been cancelled and uncertain supply issues render their task impossible. When an event goes virtual, how do you even start to produce a badge for it? Make the badge and rely on enough stalwarts buying one? Or maybe produce a badge that’s a fancy take on a prototyping board?

For Hackaday Remoticon 2021, [Thomas Flummer] has produced a novel take on the second option by distributing a badge as a set of KiCAD files that can either be ordered from a PCB fab as a prototyping board or used as the canvas for a PCB to use whatever components are to hand. To demonstrate this, he’s produced an example badge that’s a MicroMod carrier.

So if you’d like to chase the full Remoticon experience with a badge there should still be enough time to order a set of boards, but to design your own electronics you’ll need to get a move on. What you might build upon it is up to you, but if you have an ESP32 module lying around you might wish to consider cloning the SHA2017 badge or its successors with the badge.team platform.

We’ve seen Thomas’ work before more than once on these pages, most notably as the man behind the BornHack badges.

Got Anything To Talk About? These Dutch Hackers Want You To Say It To Them

November 7, 2021 by Jenny List 2 Comments

As we head into another Northern Hemisphere pandemic winter and hope that things won’t be quite as bad this year, next summer seems an extremely long time away in the future. But it will be upon us sooner than we might think, and along with it will we hope come a resumption of full-scale hacker camps. One of the biggest will be in the Netherlands, where MCH 2022 will take lace at the end of July, and if you’re up to casting your minds ahead far enough for that then they’re inviting submissions to their Call for Participation. Their events are always a memorable and relaxed opportunity to spend a few days in the sun alongside several thousand other like-minded individuals, so we’d urge you to give it some consideration.

If you’ve never delivered a conference talk before then it can be a daunting prospect, but in fact a hacker camp can be an ideal place to give it a first try. Unlike a more traditional technology conference where most of the attendees file into the auditorium, at hacker camps there is so much else on offer that many talks are delivered to only that sub group of attendees for whom the subject is of real interest. So there is less of the huge auditorium of anonymous crowds about it, and more of the small and friendly crowd of fellow enthusiasts. The great thing about our community is that there are as many different interests within it as there are individuals, so whatever your product, specialism, or favourite hobby horse might be, you’ll find people at a hacker camp who’d like to hear what you have to say.

If you’re still seeking inspiration, of course you might find it by looking at the schedule from SHA, the last Dutch camp.

ETH0 Autumn 2021: Tiny Camp Manages COVID Precautions Indoors

November 5, 2021 by Jenny List 13 Comments

It’s tempting despite news of stubbornly higher-than-ideal COVID infection figures, to imagine that just maybe the world might be returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality. Where this is being written we’re a largely vaccinated population long out of lockdown, and though perhaps some of the pandemic pronouncements of our politicians are a bit suspect we’re cautiously able to enjoy most of life’s essentials. Visiting the supermarket and having a beer might be one thing, but the effect of the pandemic is still being felt in our community’s gatherings. BornHack went ahead this summer, but the headline MCH hacker camp was put off until 2022 and the upcoming CCC Congress in Germany is once more to be a virtual event.

But some events manage to put together the right mix of precaution and size. Such was the case with ETH0, a hacker camp which I was happy to attend last weekend.

Continue reading “ETH0 Autumn 2021: Tiny Camp Manages COVID Precautions Indoors” →

Three More Remoticon Speakers Complete The Lineup

November 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

You know, it’s hard to believe, but Hackaday Remoticon 2021 is just two weeks away. Every year, we work hard to make the ‘con a little better and brighter than the one before it, and this year is no exception. We’ve already got a star-studded list of keynote speakers, and our list of inspiring talks seems to get longer and more exciting every week. With todays announcement of three more speakers, that list is complete and available along with their scheduled times on the official Remoticon website.

Come and see what we’ve got in store for you on Friday, November 19th and Saturday, November 20th. Remoticon admission is absolutely free this year, unless you want a t-shirt to commemorate the event for a paltry $25. Tickets are still available — in fact, they’ll be available right up until Remoticon Day One on the 19th, but if you want a shirt you’ll need to grab one of those tickets by a week from today. Go get yours now!

Okay, let’s get on to today’s announcement of the speakers!

Continue reading “Three More Remoticon Speakers Complete The Lineup” →

Shall We Play A Game?

November 1, 2021 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

A game show just for hackers like you is coming to the Hackaday Remoticon for the first time this year. Everyone is invited to take part in Hacker Trivia on Friday November 19th at 5 pm Pacific time.

Think of this as a very specialized type of bar trivia. You’re welcome to grab some friends and form a team, or play as a solo act. The biggest difference here is that all of the questions have been drawn up by the wonderful people who write the articles you read every day on Hackaday. To say there is a geeky flair to this is a gross understatement.

Game show host and his producer asking geeky questions — Lewin and Justin during last week’s Hacker Trivia test run with the writing crew as contestants.

Your host for Hacker Trivia is Lewin Day. A staff writer for Hackaday, Lewin has for years dreamed of wearing powder-blue velvet suits, holding note cards full of esoteric questions, while speaking into an oddly-shaped microphone.

We managed to convince him to update the look to that of a modern game show host, and he didn’t disappoint with plans to broadcast from a secret location in Adelaide, Australia along with his producer, Justin McArthur. We’ve made it through a practice run, and I assure you, the game is delightful!

You can tune in live to Hacker Trivia to play along, but we want to make sure that you don’t forget. Sign up for a free ticket to Hackaday Remoticon and we’ll send you a reminder, along with information on how to take part in the online Bring-a-Hack social hour that follows the game show. Beyond these social events, Remoticon also has three keynote speakers, sixteen talk presenters, the Hackaday Prize ceremony, and a Saturday evening party. There’s even a conference ticket purchase option that includes a T-shirt.

A vintage supercomputer with unique dual screen display

VCF East 2021: The Early Evolution Of Personal Computer Graphics

October 29, 2021 by Chris Wilkinson 12 Comments

The evolution of computer graphics is something that has been well documented over the years, and it’s a topic that we always enjoy revisiting with our retrocomputing readers. To wit, [Stephen A. Edwards] has put together an impressively detailed presentation that looks back at the computer graphics technology of the 1960s and 70s.

The video, which was presented during VCF East 2021, goes to great lengths in demystifying some of the core concepts of early computer graphics. There’s a lot to unpack here, but naturally, this retrospective first introduces the cathode-ray tube (CRT) display as the ubiquitous technology that supported computer graphics during this time period and beyond. Building from this, the presentation goes on to demonstrate the graphics capabilities of DEC’s PDP-1 minicomputer, and how its striking and surprisingly capable CRT display was the perfect choice for playing Spacewar!

As is made clear in the presentation, the 1960s featured some truly bizarre concepts in regards to cutting edge computer graphics, such as Control Data Corporation’s 6600 mainframe and accompanying vector-based dual-CRT video terminal, which wouldn’t look out of place on the Death Star. Equally strange at the time was IBM’s 2260 video data terminal, which used a ‘sonic delay line’ as a type of rudimentary video memory, using nothing but coiled wire, transducers and sound itself to store character information following a screen refresh.

These types of hacks were later replaced by solid state counterparts during the microcomputer era. The video concludes with a look back at the ‘1977 trinity’ of microcomputers, namely the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80. Each of these microcomputers handled graphics in a slightly different way, and it’s in stark contrast to today’s largely homogenised computer graphics landscape.

There’s a lot more to this great retrospective, so make sure to check out the video below. When you’re finished watching, make sure to check out our other coverage of VCF 2021, including some great examples of computer preservation and TTL-based retrocomputing.

Continue reading “VCF East 2021: The Early Evolution Of Personal Computer Graphics” →