Massive props to the record number of people who showed up! We hacked, picked locks, played with microcontrollers and met a whole bunch of really cool people. Oh, and we learned stuff. Apart from the formal talks, everyone there seemed to have information to share on one subject or another. Personally, I walked out of the meeting knowing more about coding, microcontrollers, digital security and copyright protection, and I’m sure the feeling extends to most everyone in attendance.
As you’ll note in the pictures, the event took place at the Nutty Club, home of Les.net. Les was kind enough to let us use his awesome ISP room to host our event. Not only did the place look really cool, it was located in the heart of downtown! Watching trains go by from the windows was pretty sweet too.
Les has all sorts of cool RC stuff, but I couldn't find any pictures. Just imagine the stool is Quadracopter or an awesome RC car:
The Goldeneye tourney was some retro fun, though the game doesn’t seem to have aged all that well. The pixels were the size of our heads! It seems the single-joystick control also took some getting used to, and to think that we used to be impressed… But I digress.
Ron pwning n00bs:
Mark’s combination talk and challenge was really interesting. He discussed vulnerabilities in Plone web software. It was my first time watching hackers do their thing in real life, and though I didn't quite get what was going on I'm sure I absorbed some of the information by osmosis. Mark led us through the issues in Plone, and offered a prize for whoever could exploit it over the course of his talk. Stef ended up winning the challenge and took home an energy drink! Here's a skullspace simulation of the talk, reconstructed from photographs:
I covered some basics in Arduino, for anyone interested I have the powerpoint, so just send an email to the discuss list. I learned there's a few other people involved with skullspace that are into microcontrollers, which was really cool. I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about the Launchpad, as it's a system that I'm not at all familiar with but it looked really cool! I know I talked to two people, but since I'm terrible with names I've already forgotten...you know who you are though. If you guys would like to give a talk about micros or the launchpad at the next hackathon that'd be wicked!
Here's me, not talking about the arduino:
The talk I enjoyed most was FuckYeahNouns, skullspace’s most profitable project to date. Burke led us through the process of creating the site, as well as some awesome statistics from the moments the website was posted to Reddit. As a result of the talk, I have a little more respect for Yahoo, and know a little bit more about web hosting, (as well as what happens to your server when content goes viral).
I also ended up talking to the people behind the Winnitron, the indie game machine, and as it turns out they are working on an exciting new project! I’m not at liberty to disclose the details, but it’s shaping up to be an impressive sequel to the popular cabinet. If you liked the Winnitron, you’ll love what they have planned next.
As usual, our next meeting will be on Tuesday at Seccuris, 321 McDermot Avenue. Updates on the space and voting on the wishlist will take place. Oh, and after seeing the raging success that was FuckYeahNouns, skullspace has decided to branch out into meme production, with the goal of 1 meme per month. If successful, we may sustain our business model through the propagation of viral internet content. Feel free to help us either with hosting space, idea donation, coding expertise and whatever else you think could spread like wildfire through the internet.
And some more pics from the meet:
The rest of the pictures can be found here
