Break out your tuxedo or your evening gown, we’re going to take in some highbrow culture. A night at the opera perhaps, some Tchaikovsky from the symphony orchestra, or maybe a bit of Shakespeare? No, we’re going to a demo party, because the demoscene is the latest art form to be accepted as officially a part of the national cultural heritage of the Netherlands. This builds on successes adding the scene to the cultural heritage registers of Finland, Germany, and Poland, and should provide a boost to other bids in countries such as Switzerland and eventual UNESCO world acceptance.
It’s all very cool that one of our wider community’s art forms is at last being taken seriously rather than being dismissed by the establishment, because along with greater recognition comes other benefits. Sadly we don’t expect any cities to shell out for a demo auditorium next to the shiny new opera house any time soon, but we can see that it could be used to the benefit of for example a hackerspace chasing grants. meanwhile, feast your eyes on a bit of cultural heritage courtesy of the Dutch Centre For Intangible Cultural Heritage (Dutch language, English translation).
After three years, it’s odd to think back to those few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic morphed from something on the news into an immediate and ever-present threat which kept us isolating for so long. For me, some of the last moments of normality were a trip to the Netherlands for Hacker Hotel, a hacker event in the comfort of a resort hotel. Now three years later and after two cancelled events, Hacker Hotel is back, and I made the same journey to Garderen to hang out for a weekend with a bunch of hacker friends over some good Dutch beer and a lot of bitterballen. Continue reading “Hacker Hotel 2023: Back Again!”→
It’s not often that events in our sphere of technology hackers have ramifications for an entire country or even a continent, but there’s a piece of news from the Netherlands (Dutch language, machine translation) that has the potential to do just that.
Enschede is an unremarkable but pleasant city in the east of the country, probably best known to international Hackaday readers as the home of the UTwente webSDR and for British readers as being the first major motorway junction we pass in the Netherlands when returning home from events in Germany. Not the type of place you’d expect to rock a continent, but the news concerns the city’s municipality. They’ve been caught tracking their citizens using WiFi, and since this contravenes Dutch privacy law they’ve been fined €600,000 (about $723,000) by the Netherlands data protection authorities.
The full story of how this came to pass comes from Dave Borghuis (Dutch language, machine translation) of the TkkrLab hackerspace, who first brought the issue to the attention of the municipality in 2017. On his website he has a complete timeline (Dutch, machine translation), and in the article he delves into some of the mechanics of WiFi tracking. He’s at pains to make the point that the objective was always only to cause the WiFi tracking to end, and that the fine comes only as a result of the municipality’s continued intransigence even after being alerted multiple times to their being on the wrong side of privacy law. The city’s response (Dutch, machine translation) is a masterpiece of the PR writer’s art which boils down to their stating that they were only using it to count the density of people across the city.
The events in Enschede are already having a knock-on effect in the rest of the Netherlands as other municipalities race to ensure compliance and turn off any offending trackers, but perhaps more importantly they have the potential to reverberate throughout the entire European Union as well.
The North Sea in a winter storm is a spectacular sight, one of foam-crested waves and squalls driven on the gale. It’s not a place to spend a lot of time if you are a land-lubber, so to cross it twice in a few weeks must mean there is something very much worth seeing on its other side.
More of that exotic cruise ship lifestyle.
But one of the best antidotes to February weather in the European hacker community was Hacker Hotel 2020. Around 350 people came from all the countries of the northwest of the continent to the comfort and hospitality of the Westcord Hotel de Veluwe in the eastern Netherlands, to experience a hacker camp with all the convenience and luxury of a resort hotel rather than a muddy field.
Three days in this environment results in a camp that’s just a bit special, and one that’s very much worth a visit if your range extends this far.
An Upscale Hotel Gets The Hacker Treatment
The Hacker Hotel badge 2020 has many hidden depths
Our small party of Brits arrived a day early, on a damp Thursday morning ready to lend a hand with the set-up. Slowly an upscale business conference centre was transformed into a hacker camp venue, with conference rooms turned into lecture halls, lighting and video equipment in place and 3-phase power cables snaking along the skirting boards. A large hardware hacking area was set up in one wing of the building, then the EventInfra people came in and laid out a hacker-camp-grade wireless and wired network that delivered connectivity everywhere. The contrast between the two worlds is significant, but together they make for a unique experience.
One by one, hackers arrived from all points of the compass, bearing crates of the usual cool stuff. An amateur TV satellite earth station, a brace of oversized delta 3D printers, a coin-pushing game that’s familiar from other camps. And smaller projects; little roving robots, indoor-sized multirotors, and several crates of outdated Chinese photo-frames that it’s said can be hacked to run a Linux distro.
This is the lifeblood of a hacker camp, but of course the signature piece of hardware for any hacker camp is its badge. In this Hacker Hotel 2020 didn’t disappoint, with a beautifully designed Ancient Egyptian-themed badge that concealed an array of puzzles across multiple levels. We’ll cover the badge in detail in a separate piece, but suffice to say that it is something of a tour de force. For now let’s jump into all of people and activities on offer at the con.
The Dutch organisation eth0 has run a series of informal small camps over the years, never with an attendance too far into three figures, and without pre-planned events or entertainment. What happens is at the instigation of the attendees, and the result is a weekend of much closer socialising and working together on projects than the large camps where you spend your time running around to catch everything.
The largest of hacker camps offer all the lights, robots, tschunk, and techno music you can stomach; they can be a blast but also overwhelming. I made my way eth0 over the past week weekend, enjoying the more intimate size and coming away having made friendships from spending time with great people at a large private camping hostel near Lichtenvoorde. This is in the far east of the country near the German border, to which in the company of a British hardware hacker friend I traveled in the tiny European hatchback. Netherlands roads are so easy to navigate!
A prototype tensegrity structure. Image: Igor Nikolic.
At the event was the usual array of activities, though since it was a restricted photography affair I’m short on wider shots that would include people. This year’s hit came from surplus flipdot displays from retired German buses, with plenty of glitches as their quirks were figured out by our friends Lucy Fauth and Jana Marie Hemsing. Something tells me I’ll be seeing a lot of those fluorescent circles in the future.
I’d brought along the nucleus of a textile village, and RevSpace in the Hague had added their embroidery machine to my overlocker and sewing machines. Its operator was Boekenwuurm from Hackalot in Eindhoven who was kind enough to embroider a Wrencher for me, and now I want one of these 600-Euro machines even if I can’t afford one. She and RevSpace’s Igor Nikolic were experimenting with inflatables and tensegrity structures, creating prototypes with an eye to more impressive installations at future camps.
An entertaining tale of a couple of days hanging out with friends in the Netherlands countryside could probably be spun into a reasonable tale, but there was something more interesting still at this camp. It had a badge, courtesy of the prolific badge.team Dutch badge crew. It didn’t come with their trademark ESP32 firmware though, instead in keeping with the budget of the event it was a prototyping board on which attendees could create their own badges. What came forth from that was extremely impressive, and continued after the event.
Imagine a weekend of opulence in which you meet your companion at the railway station and whisk away across the continent in a 190mph express train for a relaxing couple of days enjoying the ambience of a luxury resort hotel in the fresh surroundings of a woodland in midwinter. Break out the Martinis, it’s a scene of elegance and sophistication from a byegone era! This is the general idea of Hacker Hotel 2019, and I had a wonderful time!
On a recent February weekend I broke out the Club-Mate instead stea of a Martini. My companion for the Eurostar and Thalys trip was my local hackspace friend Matt “Gasman” Westcott with his keytar in a bulky suitcase for a chiptune gig, and we were heading for the Netherlands. It’s a pivot from the summer’s hacker camps as over 200 hackers fill a resort hotel for the weekend, scoring comfortable beds instead of dust or mud!
There are a series of stages to coming down from a festival. After the hectic rush of travel there are the several days of catching up on lost sleep and picking up the threads of your life again, then once a semblance of order has been regained there’s that few weeks of emptiness. Your life will never be the same again, it’s all so mundane.
I’m pleased to say the Hackaday and Tindie stickers were very popular.
It’s now a couple of weeks since the SHACamp 2017 hacker festival in the Netherlands was in full swing, and the write-up below has slowly taken shape over that time amid the other work of being a Hackaday scribe and editor. It’s early morning here in Southern England as I write this, so on the equivalent day while I was at SHACamp at this time I would have been carrying a large pack of stickers for distribution on the swapping table through the rising sunlight of a camp still largely asleep after the previous night’s revelry. Past our German and Dutch immediate neighbours, down the ramp from the dyke, the cardboard tent depot on my left and the food court on my right, to the information tent. Greet the bleary-eyed volunteer at the end of their graveyard shift, and spread plenty of Hackaday and Tindie stickers on the table for the masses. And then? Find a coffee, and sally forth into the field for another day among one of the most stimulating communities on Earth. My community. Your community.
The sticker table is a good place to start if you wish to get a handle on a large hacker camp. On it you will find the logos of a cross-section of the diverse organisations and groups present. There are a few commercial ones like my Jolly Wrenchers and Tindie the puppy, there are some from voluntary organisations or interest groups, but mostly they are the logos of a continent’s — even the wider world’s in some cases — hackspaces and makerspaces. Here you see the breadth of the attendees, as the logos of spaces from thousands of miles away you’ve never encountered before mingle. This isn’t quite a global gathering, but there is a sense of global community around it.
How Do You Describe a Hacker Camp?
You shall find us by our clearly superior yet dangerous to barefoot pedestrians fused right-angled mains connector.
So before I take you through my experience of SHA, it’s best to start by describing a hacker camp in more general terms. When I’m describing a camp like SHA to the kind of people who don’t read Hackaday, I put it as similar to the music festivals they are used to but without the bands. Instead the audience provides the entertainment through the work they bring to the event or do at the event, and through a comprehensive program of talks and lectures. Oh — and this is the bit that makes their eyes open wide — every structure on site from the smallest one-man tent to the largest marquee has mains power and high-speed Internet. Sometimes people grasp what SHA is from this description, sometimes they don’t.
Different groups, be they individual hackspaces, people from a particular country, or other special interest groups, congregate in villages, collections of tents, marquees, and gazebos in which they set up whatever cool stuff they’ve brought along. My tent with its Hackaday flag was in a village composed of a mix of British hackspaces up on the dyke, which [Michael] from MK Makerspace had marked with a sign consisting of a huge BS1363A mains plug. More than one person pointed out it would have been better lying flat on the ground with pins in the air, ready to catch an unwary Monty Python foot.
