I'd beg the forgiveness of my readers for not posting since early this month, but chances are you've been just as busy as I've been in the past few weeks. Life, work, et cetera, cetera. So, let's get to it.
As I've mentioned once or twice I've been slowly getting an abscessed molar cleaned out and repaired for the past couple of months. It's been slow going, in part because infections require time for the body to fight them off (assisted by antibiotics or not) and, depending on how deep the infection runs it can take a while. Now I …
Last year a new genetic engineering technology called CRISPR - Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - showed up on my radar at a local conference. Long story short, CRISPR is a highly precise technique for editing DNA in situ which follows from the discovery of short sequences of DNA which allow for precise location of individual genes. It's a fascinating technology; there are even tutorials (archived copy, just in case) online for developing your own guide RNA to implement CRISPR/Cas9. What you might not have known is that CRISPR/Cas9 is being actively studied as a theraputic technique in humans …
Well, I'm back from DefCon in sunny and hot Las Vegas, Nevada and more or less reinserted back into my everyday life. I'm just about caught up on everything that happened at work and finally finished the notes that are going to comprise this article. I'll type up the notes I took during the talks at DefCon in a couple of days; they've voluminous and I want to get the experience out of my head and into external storage before the memories fade much more. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to any of the villages so I don't have anything …
I was unfortunately ill-prepared for the interview because I ran home from work and jacked in without taking the time to get my head or my notes together, so I made quite a few gaffs. I hate it when I'm operating half in work …
Behind the cut are the notes I took during DefCon 22, organized by name of presentation. Where appropriate I've linked to the precis of the talk. I make no guarantee that they make sense to anybody but me.
I haven't seen this get a whole lot of love recently, so I thought I'd boost the signal in some small way.
On Sunday, 29 September 2013 between 1200 and 1700 EST5EDT there will be a Mini Maker Faire in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you've never heard of Maker Faire, it's a series of events organized and thrown by Make Magazine that are collectively billed as the Greatest Show-and-Tell on Earth. At a Maker Faire you can see everything from 3d printing demonstrations to singing Tesla coils, combat robots to kite photography, and everything in between. Mini-Maker Faires are, as …
There seem to be a couple of problems inherent in the tech field of prosthetic design. First and foremost of them is that comparatively few people need artificial limbs, so not enough of them are manufactured at once to bring the cost down. A second problem is that because so few people tend to need them, designs don't seem to improve very rapidly. When enough of anything are not constructed, there isn't enough pressure for bugs to be ironed out rapidly, nor for designs to evolve in positive directions so relatively simple advances may not appear soon. Business and industry …
Rather than stay home for my birthday (which I've done for the past few years) I decided to make things interesting this time 'round the sun. Sitwon and Haxwithaxe had secured a hotel room and passes for Shmoocon in downtown DC last weekend, so I threw my hat into the ring more or less at the last minute. Shmoocon is an excellent hacker conference, don't get me wrong, but I don't ordinarily get much out of it. It is, as they say around here, above my pay grade. That said, I decided to go solely to see what I could …
As a result of the damage done to New York City by Hurricane Sandy the week before last, Project Byzantium was contacted by representatives of several NGOs and non-profit organizations we've been in contact with as a result of our work on community wireless mesh networks. We were asked if Byzantium Linux might be useful in assisting relief efforts in New York City by restoring communications on the local level. As this is one of our primary use cases, we responded in the affirmative, and were told that we might be asked to go to New York City to help …
