This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

SoutHACKton aims to bring together liked minded people who are fascinated in taking things apart and learning how they work. Then of course exploiting their dismantled object for a completely different purpose.

This was the first event I had attended and I had no idea what to expect. It happened on the afternoon of Saturday the 29th of August.

Informal Arduino 101

The event was focused on arduinos. There was an opportunity for an informal 101 as well as lots of projects people were working on.

Hacking Lou Lou the Furby to become a notification device

There were a huge variety of projects from Furby hacking, robots that followed lines drawn on paper, zigbee interaction and my own power metering work (more to follow when/if it gets finished). All the projects were based around arduinos some by people who had been doing this for and some like me who had only started recently.

It was a great event that really showed off the talent around the Solent area.

My only comment, how did the time go so fast?

The next event is a Hack Day, on the 4th of October. Click here for details.

For more information about SoutHACKton please visit http://www.southackton.org.uk/

Bar Camp Brighton 4

Arriving at my second barcamp though I knew the format I was a little unsure about how it would all pan out.

During the introduce we each had to say a secret, these varied from “I have a pointy head” to “Last night I was caught stealing some fluffy grass from a garden”. My secret was “I was paid to call my self Earl for the day during TweetCamp”. A different way to lighten the mood and start the day.

The first session I attended was Tom M talking about the philosophy behind URIs. This took place in the Ninja Turtles Sewer. An interesting look at the philosophy of having perminint links to data online.

The second session in Honk Kong Fooey’s Filing Cabinet on Blogging Tips and Tricks. Miss Geeky (http://www.missgeeky.com) giving an interesting outlook on how she drives her blog. Two posts a day is but one example. Also the opportunities that have arisen through blogging are pretty amazing. Blogs are usually just for a small niche but to be popular blog about everything.

Lunch consisted of sarnies, various odd combinations including Turkey with Avocado and Ham with Egg.

After lunch there was an introduce to Android and the application development. IT gave a veyr braod over view of android and a basic hello world During this session I attempted to flash the latest google code drop on. This bricked my phone.

I spent the following session un bricking my phone.

After the coffee break it was my time to talk about Android. I started a discussion if Android was really open source. This continued into the android interface on a HTC Hero Android Source veruss traditional, and why Google is really not all that different from Apple in the terms of Phone OS Owner.

/Dev/Fort
What we did on holiday, a discuss a dev-fort. An interest take on barcamps. The idea of 5-20 people attending a camp in a fort with NO internet access. A brave thought for many people. More information can be foundhere http://devfort.com/

The final session before dinner covered hacking tweetie to work with groups. This appears to be by hacking tweetie binary in hex editor changing the urls used to request the twitter updates from a local server. The local server modifies the calls being sent to twitter and caches the tweets. Then tweets are sent to tweetie as required.

This pretty much sums up the talks I attended during the day. The evening continued with 152 pizzas to feed us and a hell of a lot of beer available. I crashed out quite early, possibly the first

I didn’t take any notes during the days as I was streaming the event into OpenSim from my laptop with my isite camera. I dont recommend this for future events. Nor was this intended before the day. Below are few of the talks that I took away with me.

• Martin Dix (@martindix) from currentcost spoke and suprised us all with his free gift  (More about this in a future post) and some statistics about how many current costs had been produced.
• The Aimee API
• Electricity 2.0 by Tom Raftery link for a previous video of this talk

There were lots of other areas discussed over the course of the day making it very interesting. I attempted to present some of the work I had done in OpenSim as well as my twittering flat.

I drove the two guys from theAttick who agreed to do the filming and sound for the day, great guys, slightly insane but great. I hope to get some of their videos on here soon.

Sorry for the lack of information, in this post next time I will make sure I can take some notes

Attended talks on PowerShell being better then Bash, RedHat, Front end Testing and the new ways socal marketeers are working.

Its still unclear how I ended up in the RedHat sales pitch.