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Yahoo!’s Open Hack London was held at the TUC Congress hall on 9th and 10th May. It was another great opportunity to learn about APIs, hacking stuff together and generally geeking out.

[Yahoo! boss David Filo welcomes the geeks to Open Hack 2009]

I had a play about with the BOSS search API, but wasn’t in an actual team as such. I also enjoyed an evening bike ride on the Flickr Bikes – which automatically took a photo every minute when the bikes were in motion. Riding round central London on a push bike was a bit of a hairy experience, but we returned unscathed to tell the tale!

[The two Flickr Bikes were available for a ride]

There was, of course, a little problem with the wifi (isn’t there always?) but the team from Yahoo soon sorted it out. And the was, of course, plenty of fuel for hacking geeks:

[Essential supplies for the hacking geek]

It was great to be in the company of such innovative minds (and a little intimidating too!). There were some great ideas put together during the session. Mr Duck was even on the winning team for Best Harware Hack! Clever duck…

Day two of the event was a “hack day” style event, where lots of geeks gathered with the speakers to try and build something useful. There were lots of mini-projects on the go.

I did a bit of hacking with some bookmarklets and javascript to switch to user-defined style sheets, giving the option of looking at any website as reversed video with much larger text, for instance. Here are a couple of screenshots:

[Regular video Flickr,  but with large text]

[Reversed-video style sheet is easier for users with some visual impairments or other disabilities]

I hope to be able to use some of the techniques in future projects.

I was also rather amused  by the tshirt one of the other geeks was wearing:

[Clueless!]