[12am] We hit the opening keynote by Cory Doctorow. He had some interesting things to say about patterns in eula agreements and the restriction of rights to enforce business models.

[Simple Nomad] followed up with his talk called ‘State of the Enemy State’ – his observations regarding government security, just how advanced real time encryption cracking probably is and predictions on some forthcoming laws and how they’ll affect the security industry. The most interesting one: encryption key escrow was enacted a couple weeks ago by Blair in the UK, and it’ll probably come to the US next.

The talk on the apple airport security flaw was canceled, so it was replaced by ‘lightning talks’. Think open mic night on the floor of a security conference. Johnny Cache opened it up with some observations about why the talk was canceled. He had to skirt around the issue to keep from getting in trouble, but he was definitely pissed.

There were a few others, but I’ll leave it there for now.

A decent signal generator is handy for tuning electronic projects. [SC] sent in this AVR signal generator. The parts count is really, really low. An ATMega8 is the core, and a shift register runs the LCD. Everything else is is built from simple components. The PCB is double sided, so it’s probably the biggest stumbling block. (But you can probably get away with making jumpers instead of etching both sides.)

[We’ll be heading out to Toorcon later this week, so send if tips early if you got em.]

I finally managed to pick up the 7×10 mini-lathe (on sale!) I mentioned in the diy dive light post. Seriously, there are more mods for this thing than a DS. There’s a great introduction to this handy tool over at mini-lathe.com. I’ve been looking over the mods for a while to build up my buying furvor. Bill exploited the cycle of florescent lighting to make a simple tachometer. Dave streched his (Now there’s a kit for this from the little machine shop.) I’m thinking that I’ll whip up a pic/LED tachometer for my first mod.

Jared at inventgeek did aninterview and HAD got some screen time. You can catch it here. We get mentioned near the end. Jared, your office is way too clean.

Today I’m jonsing for my mig welder that was lost during a move. Remember the microwave oven foundry? If you’ve got a few old ovens around, you can gut em and build an arc welder. The transformers generate the voltage, and an SCR circuit makes the arc adjustable. Of course if arc isn’t your style, you can build your own TIG welder. Since you can score an arc for $150-300, but a TIG costs more – I’d go TIG.