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January 21st, 2009
shevek
 | 12:39 pm
We're in the run-up to the new TechAdventure on 28th February at the Trinity in Bristol. I have a set of known talks and an inbox full of people writing to me about their toys. I've done most of the discussion on the google-group, but this news page needs some updating.
Posters: Tristan has designed us http://www.techadventure.org/pdfs/techadventure.pdf which will be going up in a few places.
O'Reilly! That wonderful organisation is supporting us with publicity and will most likely be attending to announce the UK Maker Faire!
It sounds as if we might have some video editing stuffs this time. Lots of software and hardware and games goodies as usual, and a little more hacking on-site than last time.
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November 13th, 2008
shevek
| 06:47 pm
... and we're on! The web site at http://www.techadventure.org/ has been updated and there is now a google group (email list/web/etc) for announcements. Please do join in and encourage others you think might be interested, things will start happening in a couple of days.
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October 3rd, 2008
shevek
| 08:55 pm
The next TechAdventure will provisionally go ahead on Saturday 28th February 2009 at the Trinity Centre in Bristol, as before. My feet haven't really touched the ground after the USA trip, so this is a save-the-date note. For all those who want to come along or want to get involved, let's get together and see what we can bring or build this time!
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July 1st, 2008
shevek
| 05:13 pm
More TechAdventure photographs are available at http://picasaweb.google.com/bristolwireless/AdventureInTechnology
If anyone has a written report on the day, several people would like to publish one! Please let us know.
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June 26th, 2008
shevek
| 03:13 pm
Well, one and a half days to go, and here we are:
We will be doing a get-in from 9am, aiming for an opening time of 10am, so we're comfortably running by 10:30. If you need set-up time, please arrive early so that we can organise space before crowds arrive. We will be playing musical projectors, I think we only have 2 unless anybody brings one. So far, talk slots are only arranged in the sense of "morning" or "afternoon". There will be at least one major hack going on in the car park, and we will be attempting to relay it by video to a projector. I have several large crates of stuff for the swapshop, and a few boxes of other toys have been left with me. (No, I haven't spent the last 2 days playing with them, honestly!)
The web server died this morning so I restarted it. My apologies for the outage. 3Ware have already UPSd me a replacement RAID card which I might or might not have time to install before the weekend.
If anybody needs help or more information before the event, please email webmaster@techadventure.org and I will do my best to help!
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June 23rd, 2008
shevek
| 03:37 pm
If you've ever wondered what your erstwhile organiser looks like, you can see a video of me describing the event to Craig from O'Reilly at http://www.oreillygmt.co.uk/2008/06/adventure-in-te.html
It's a bit noisy because the BBC were doing a get-out for Mashed behind us, and most of us hadn't slept for the last 36 hours, but expect to hear more from us and O'Reilly. The wobbling of the camera was caused by a crew member trying to de-rig the table from underneath it!
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shevek
| 02:05 pm
Two large boxes marked "For TechAdventure" have appeared in my house while I was away at the BBC.[0] The boxes appear to contain logic challenges, bent-nail puzzles, "get-the-ball-out-of-the-box" games and so on. I haven't explored yet, but they should make an appearance near a social area. If you have any fun ones, please bring them as well.
[0] I hope this doesn't become a major theme, I live in a very small house!
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June 18th, 2008
shevek
| 04:24 am
TechAdventure posters finally available for download from http://www.techadventure.org/posters.html !
If you want to display posters of your own at the event, bring them along. Please ask a member of the crew where to post them!
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June 17th, 2008
shevek
| 02:45 pm
Adrian Bowyer, from the department of Mechanical Engineering will be bringing reprap, a self-replicating 3D printer! He can only make the morning, so if you want to see this incredibly cool toy, come early!
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June 16th, 2008
shevek
| 12:58 pm
Colin Butcher plans to present "A brief history of computer system engineering", starting from Colossus and Whirlwind through to modern big systems. There's a pretty consistent set of problems people have been trying to cater for when it comes to performance and reliability. In general there's only a few ways to attack such problems and the same kinds of issues keep cropping up. Those issues are current problems we're still having to cater for - bandwidth, latency, jitter, scalability, timing, synchronisation, serialisation etc. They all affect how we design machines, operating systems, networks, storage subsystems and application software.
He has a background in VMS clustering and distributed locking, amongst other fields, and can probably also be quizzed on how many of the older systems worked, but don't tell him I said that!
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June 13th, 2008
shevek
| 03:01 pm
Tim writes:
"I'd like to bring along Asterisk (telephone exchange) running on an eeePC and show how you can make calls from a Nokia E series phone without a SIM card."
Asterisk is another of those technologies which has been around for a long time, but it's complicated and like many other people, I simply don't have the time to dig into it. A practical demonstration will answer many questions, like, "Should I do this at home?" and "How!"
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June 12th, 2008
shevek
| 01:02 am
I've been back in the country for a four days now and I'm suffering convention overload. I've just stopped buy to update with some rumours of things which might turn up on the day:
Modifying electric vehicles. The Prius has a core data bus called (I think) the CAN bus. Anyway, from what I hear, it's possible to hack into this bus and do dirty things to it, and someone might be doing that on the day!
Building a virtual world from scratch using commodity languages and hardware. I've seen the bits, I've not seen it all come together, but there's a definite rumour, and we hope it happens.
I've not nearly caught up with all the emails I got while I was in the USA, I'll post some more here as I get them sorted out.
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June 2nd, 2008
shevek
 | 03:56 pm
Talk idea: "Things which Did not Not Happen". Why not, and how do new inventors avoid these pitfalls in the future?
* Virtual reality - will it ever happen, or is it just something which we don't need?
* DRM - can consumer demand or outrage kill even the record studios' monopoly?
* Transmeta - right technology, wrong time? Is VIA now doing what Transmeta tried to do 2 years earlier?
* HD-DVD or Betamax - who do you REALLY need onside to make a success?
* Anything else?
Which of the following are going to happen, and which are going to fail?
* Household automation? It's cool, but do we NEED it, or is a light switch really the best way of turning off a light?
* 3D metaverses? It's shiny, but what does it DO? (I know some speakers and demos are aiming to answer this!)
* Anything else?
Have any user interfaces which TRULY diverge from a real-world model become successful in the mainstream? But if a light switch is the best way of turning off a light, why has virtual reality not been a big hit so far?
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shevek
| 04:03 pm
We have had several requests to disassemble and explain particular pieces of computing equipment, most of which I am hoping we will find on freecycle so that we can freely cut them in half and get the insides out. Some people are bringing things which they will cut in half for us. Please do keep the requests coming.
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shevek
| 03:51 pm
Back on the ground here in England, I've been talking to lots of people about what they're going to bring. I'm trying to avoid posting anything here which isn't absolutely confirmed, but there's a distinct possibility of seeing several robotics workshops using different technologies, and I've recently been shown a lot of very shiny virtual reality equipment. Hold your breath! Once upon a time, I build a very poor prototype of a VR glove, which might be useful (if I can find it) for showing how they work inside.
Given a 3D laser-scanner, and a 3D printer, can one build a 3D photocopier? Has this been done? Can we try?
John Honniball has a large collection of old video recorder and player equipment. I have a vague recollection of some capacitance-disk readers from the very early days, but some of the equipment he has in his museum is astounding. We need volunteers to help him set up and run this demo.
We have reserved a large part of the upper floor for robotics exhibits, since they require space to run around and play.
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May 29th, 2008
shevek
| 04:13 pm
It's been a slow couple of days for updates, as I've moved countries, but I have some news:
I went to dorkbot and met Alexander Thomas, an absolutely stunning Theremin player. I think we've convinced him to come along and perform and explain the theremin, we will also have an oscilloscope so that you can see the waveform change as the instrument is played, and understand how it works. I know several people at the event will also be able to explain workings of the various effects units, perhaps also with the 'scope. There will also be an opportunity to try a theremin yourself and see what you can play.
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May 25th, 2008
shevek
| 06:09 am
Ariane van der Steldt will be talking on the high-tech track. She writes:
"Computers with multiple CPUs are fairly common. Most of these computers use a single memory controller, so each CPU has the same view of its memory. Opteron CPUs however, have their memory controller built into the CPU. Each CPU has a different view of the total memory in the machine. Such an architecture is called a NUMA system.
"This difference in layout has potential for better performance, but only if the software on the computer, in particular the kernel, takes these different views into account. This talk will take a look at different NUMA designs and will have a look at how a kernel would have to be adapted to take advantage of this architecture."
I will be getting on a plane today, so no more updates for at least a few hours.
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May 23rd, 2008
shevek
| 03:15 pm
Andrew Holway has offered to speak in our high-tech track on "Super computing for the Masses". He has recently been involved in the installation of a 3500-node supercomputer cluster, and he writes:
The availability of Cheap commodity hardware and cluster software stacks reaching maturity has pushed clustering ahead of traditional supercomputers and a way of solving large complex problems. Venturing where your desktop dares not these parallel processing behemoths can achieve over 1^9 fps on Quake.
It's not just about Quake. The US government designed the DES standard to be sufficiently strong that nobody else could crack it, but sufficiently weak that they could. Computing advanced so rapidly that a practical DES cracker became available very shortly thereafter. The security implications of this kind of computing power being available on the street might be worth discussing.
Andrew is flying out in the evening, so his talk will be scheduled earlier in the day to give him time to get to the airport.
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shevek
| 03:07 pm
If you haven't met the demo scene, you really should. The idea is to construct the most impressive synchronized video and audio extravaganza possible, frequently under some restriction, such as "It must run on an Amiga 500" or "You can only use 4Kb". Recently I've seen a demo which runs on an iPod, and lots which run on the C64, and it's amazing how much modern technology can do with 4Kb when you have NVidia's Cg toolkit to play with.
BitFellas, an international demoscene collective, have posted TechAdventure on their web site at http://www.bitfellas.org/ and we are hoping to hear more from them at the event!
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shevek
| 01:36 pm
Alex Smith (who understands facebook much better than I do) has created an event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=18041956605
We are also listed on upcoming.org: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/702288/
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