By and large, work has been, well, work. Lots of hours at the office, lots of hours stuck in traffic sweating like Kevin Mitnick during a traffic stop. When I haven't been logging time behind a console, I've either been trying to get my head back into Python coding (try as I might, I just don't understand GUI programming in general or PyGTK in particular), reading data sheets, reading up on the Arduino microcontroller, or pulling a Tesla while pondering the best way to build my latest obsession, a laser synthtar.
I’ve been sitting on some photographs that have piled on Windbringer’s hard drive up over the past couple of weeks and finally found the time to get them resized and uploaded.
A couple of photographs taken at P. W. Singer’s presentation at HacDC. There are also a couple of shots of fun with night vision goggles later that evening in that set.
Forget moblogging. It’s too much hassle to be workable because it never works, and it wrecks my formatting.
I just got back from HacDC, where tonight Peter Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century presented on the topic of applied military robotics. While it seems a bit cliche’ to say this, they aren’t science fiction anymore, military robots are actually recent history. Drones and teleoperated robots have been in use in Iraq and Afghanistan since the get go, and the last official count has over seven thousand robots in use …
Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
Thursday nights at HacDC for the next couple of weeks have been taken up with a nifty new class courtesy of Elliot - a basic electronics course in the guise of building noisemakers. From basic oscillator theory we moved on to... I couldn't make it to the second class due to a scheduling conflict, truth be told, so I don't know what was taught. Jade and I did make it to the third class which was about low-pass filters (which allow low frequencies to pass (the definition of 'low' is highly situational) but filter out high frequencies), how to vary the …
The Sunday edition of the Washington Post ran a surprisingly good article on HacDC that you'll want to check out if you've never heard of hacker spaces before, or if you're not sure that you want to get involved with one.
I should note, persuant to the photography policy of Shmoocon, that all people I photographed gave explicit permission for me to do so. Shmoocon doesn't permit photography in any of the presentation areas, and they don't like you taking pictures of people anywhere else unless the subjects give the OK. Taking pictures of inanimate objects, however, is permissible.
It's been six hours since I got back from Shmoocon, and I'm still readjusting to a low information density environment. Shmoocon is DC's premiere hacker con, held early every February by a security research outfit called the Shmoo Group, which seems to have an odd interest in moose (judging by the repeating moose motif all over the place, from the free stickers to the laser cut acrylic convention badges). I've wanted to go for a couple of years but various and sundry things kept me from attending, so when I finally was able to score a ticket I jumped at …
A couple of weeks ago at HacDC Dave Monachello, an electronic artist and frequenter of the infamous gather known as Burning Man presented one of his latest works, an animated electroluminescent wire sculpture depicting Martin Luther King, Jr. Multiple layers of EL wire were attached to a translucent backing material depicting parts of different facial expressions associated with the act of speaking. The EL wire was rigged up to a bank of microcontrollers which triggered the different layers as a frame animation in time with a recording of King's I Have A Dream speech.
