[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…

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!]