In August of 2013 the wonderful folks at Geeks Without Bounds held an unconference at the MIT Media Lab called Catalytic Converter. I was invited to both attend and present, and when I wasn't in session I wandered around Cambridge as well as the Media Lab. Cutting to the chase, here are the photographs I took during my visit. I saw some very impressive things there, and I wanted to share them with all of you in the hope that you'd partake of some of the wonder I felt.
Oh, there was also an active Byzantium mesh at MIT for …
A couple of weeks ago, HacDC added a new tool to the workshop, a laser cutter from Full Spectrum (which, I've just discovered, was a Kickstarter campaign). We've been saving up for it for a while, but one of the nights I was there I got to see its unboxing and (with the permission of the folks there) I took some pictures.
A couple of weekends ago Lyssa, Laurelindel and I did something that we've wanted to do for months, which was visit the International Spy Museum in downtown DC. This year their big thing is a 50 year James Bond retrospective, where they had props and models from the movies on display in addition to their other exhibits. Unfortunately, my camera was in macro mode the whole time so not all of the pictures I took came out the way I'd hoped. I kept the best of the photographs.
A couple of months ago we ported Byzantium Linux to the RaspberryPi. I took a couple of photographs during the development sprint and then promptly forgotten that I'd done so. While cleaning out my camera's SD card a few days ago I rediscovered them.
As before, much of my spare time in the past two weeks has been spent making two more Scalemate plushies so I could give one of them to my little nephew Brandon this weekend as a "Hi, welcome to the world" present. I wanted to make two of them in case I messed up, and also to have a choice of which one to give him because they weren't going to be identical or perfect, but ideally better than the first one I sewed. I wanted them to be fairly bright and cheerful looking, the better to get his attention …
I still find the most disturbing thing of all how much of Manhattan was still without power. It's a little unnerving to see huge corporate towers completely dark - nobody working late, nobody fixing them up, just... nobody home.
I finally got around to uploading the pictures I took at HOPE 9 - you can look through them here. As has been the trend in the last five years or so, I didn't take very many pictures because more and more people in the hacker community are simply not comfortable being photographed anymore. We don't have a whole lot left in the way of privacy and being snapped by one of your own just feels... wrong.
I asked everyone in the pictures if I could photograph them and they gave their permission. People who did not were not photographed.
I realize how late this is in coming, but I haven't had time to go through the photographs on my phone in several months. Here are some pictures of the last flight of the Space Shuttle as it passed over the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on 17 April 2012:
Yes, they're kind of crappy, I took them with my cellphone.
