I have been working on building the fonera images for the Agora Link project. I have a dev system at my home, and my image is now in use at NYC Resistor, PS:One, and Noisebridge.
More info on that Image here: https://wiki.hamburg.ccc.de/index.php/ChaosVPN::Fonera
We have 50 or so nodes connected, and we’re growing. Fairly awesome IMHO.
So, I spent last weekend at TechCrunch’s awesome Hackday. I do love a good hackathon. One long stretch of hard work, small teams working together, and just plain good old fashioned hacking FUN. I had a great time. So did most of my friends from NYC Resistor. The thing that gets me about these events though is how many of these like lunatic hacker fanboys show up. They call themselve’s “Venture Capitalists”, or “Angel Investors”. Truthfully I’ve always been a little alarmed by their presence. Every time I’ve encountered one the same thoughts roll through my head: “Who are you? Why do you look like you are going to eat me? My god it’s like a velociraptor crossed with a used car salesman… run.. don’t freak out man… RUN…. just nod politely and hope he eats someone else… RUNNNNN!!!!!” Seriously this is EXACTLY what I think every time I see one of these freaks. And I say freaks because there is something wrong with these people. To quote Heinlein, I “grok a wrongness” here.
Now apparently these people are wealthy or something, or maybe just using someone else’s wealth. And they lure you into their nightmare with the siren song of riches. Then you become like them. Fallen shadow people bereft of soul and joy, doomed to a miserable life of feasting upon the lives of others. To me there is no worse fate. And yet, for some reason they are drawn to hackathons. It’s like moths to a flame. It’s terrifying. God I can’t stand when these guys show up at hackathons. One of these guys gave me his card the other day. I went to the website on it. It looked EXACTLY like a squatted domain, full of spam links to shell businesses and everything. I was disturbed. I mean on one level it made sense, but, I guess I didn’t expect it even though I should have. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their web presence. I wouldn’t call it a window to their soul, far from it… more like one stained glass portrait of a persons aspirations gleaming in the light of the internet itself. When you see this edifice to petty greed and find that the person behind it really is some form of monster, well it leaves you changed. It’s like being stabbed by the blade of the Nazgul. The continued exposure to these soulless wretches saps you and turns you slowly into a wraith. I get shivers just thinking about it.
Man, I love hackathons, but these crazy fanboys that show up, scare the ever loving crap out of me. We need to do something about that shit and right quick.
Video of our presentation at Hackday:
In the video,
Ben Combee is speaking, Max Henstell is working the stabster’s pneumatics and Mark Tabry is standing by to protect bystanders, and I am off camera to the left looking pretty for the cameras.
Not in the video is Bill Ward, Charles Pax, as well as the original Max.
* Special thanks to my friend Adam from Twilio who provided us with some assistance in the effort.
For the blow by blow of the event check out our time lapse. Trust me it was 24 hours of tedium just as grueling as watching this 2.5 minute clip.
As you can see this was an pretty large effort by NYCR and a hell of a lot more went into this project than is readily apparent. Just getting the equipment there was an event all its own. Max and Charles worked tirelessly to repair Stabby’s pneumatic stabber arm. Max also worked on wiring up the actuators and accompanying arduino code to link up with Ben, Bill, and Marks twilio interface code base. I worked with Mark on a display that showed debug info from the arduinos ( blogarythmic cred ) as well as caller ( aka stabber ) id when stabbing.
We finished up about 5 minutes before time was called… literally. Came down to the wire. Stabby was awarded a runner up award, and supposedly will be on display at Tech Crunch on Wednesday some time during the day.
We had a hell of a lot of fun, and were excited to present a functioning project ( a first for me =P ). Even more exciting was winning a runner up award in a contest that didn’t actually have runner up awards. I guess they were afraid of being stabbed.
