Thursday, June 09, 2016

Toorcamp - Third day - Thursday - Part 1

After the last post, I walked over to the volleyball court to the wood-gas generation project, which connected two trashcans with air ducting to extract wood gas from burning wood chips to power a generator to power a heater. Again, interesting implementation with a somewhat pointless end result. After that, I walked over to the Pop-up cafe to get some club mate, which is concentrated sweetened mate syrup mixed with seltzer water. It's pretty good, and I got another before the introduction to the talks occurred. I sat next to a group from Las Vegas, the Psychoholics, who run a hacker/makerspace called Syn Shop. Great people, and I spoke for a while during the keynote presentation with a quilter and model house maker about gardening. She is in the middle of building a 1:12 scale model of a house, complete with working plumbing, bricks, and wooden jousts all the way down to the details. It's fiddly work.

After that, I walked over to the Lower Camp and met someone from RCCGroup which is sponsoring toorcamp and also supplying free beer. We talked about hacking webcams and other embedded devices. I also got a "stamp" on the information passport all the attendees have been given from 98.3 "the lol", which I'll have to check out with an actual radio, or when they start streaming online. Afterwards I was encouraged to find a kosher solution to cooking at Milliways, which is the cafe/restaurant at the end of the universe (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a hacker manifesto among others).

Afterwards  I hung out with J, who showed me his large hacking box with various Arduino equipment and moisture and temperature sensors, as a side project to possibly integrate that into gardening applications. Shortly after the hard-drive launcher was put into action, and the quadcopter that came with my bag was also used to see if it could be destroyed by a flying hard-drive platter.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

What was the kosher cooking solution?

Unknown said...

So cool Yosef!!

yosef said...

The only cooking solution I could think of, given my non-encyclopedic knowledge of kosher kashrut laws, was to purchase new aluminum pans in the store in town and use those, but there was no way to go to the store.