And that’s another day over at EMFcamp. A full day this time, with talks starting as early as 11 am. I arrived a bit later, just in time for the talk on TiLDA, the camp badge that happens to be an Arduino board. Unfortunately, the boards were not ready yet and hence the talk had to be rescheduled later (or was is eventually canceled? I’m not sure). I wondered around the camp until the talk on high altitude ballooning, which was followed by the launch of a balloon outside the tent. If you didn’t make it to EMFcamp, I bet you now wish you had booked a ticket.
A balloon is launched shortly after the talk on high altitude ballooning
I then spent part of the afternoon in the workshop tent, helping out with the badges. I first had to flash the bootloader with an ISP programmer, then helped sticking the batteries to the boards and getting them ready for distribution. Eventually the badges were distributed in the afternoon, and I think everyone was happy with their new toy. The boards feature 2 LEDs, an IR received and a transmitter, as well as a wireless card for boards to communicate with each other.
Meet TiLDA, the EMFcamp badge
I then went to see Ben Goldacre‘s talk on Big Pharma. He is a great public speaker and did an amazing as well as horrifying talk on how some pharmaceutical companies conveniently forget to publish results of drug trials that do not look too good for the drugs they’re selling, which is the subject of his new book, The Drug Pushers.
Ben Glodacre
I then got some food and a beer, before attending the lightning talks session, followed by Tef’s Programming is terrible. Lessons learned from a life wasted. It was a funny (and true) account of the horrors he has seen in his life and how programmers (mis)behave, to finish with a rant on how poorly programming is taught in schools and universities.
Playing music with synthesisers and a radio theremin between two talks
After that was a talk on safe cracking, Safe cracking from back in the day to the present day by Warren Rockley. Not only did Warren avoid inflicting death by PowerPoint upon us (by not having any slides at all), he proceeded to walk us through the history of safe making and safe cracking, from the early days of heavy wooden boxes to present day safes and vaults. His talk was interesting and full of funny anecdotes. The tent was full, people were grouped outside to watch, and the questions session went on for over an hour, with contributions and live lock picking demos from other locksmiths as well. After that, it was time to call it a day and go home for the night.
No post would be complete without a picture of the bar, under the M1.