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Leeds Hack 2

Caz M — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:21:35 +0000

Dom The Hodge pulled off another very successful Leeds Hack event this past weekend. Some great things got built (sadly none by me!) and much fun was had with bubble wrap, pick ‘n’ mix and kinects etc. Here are my best pics from the weekend:

Culture Vultures

Caz M — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:31:05 +0000

I made the journey up to Newcastle for the first Culture Grid Hack Day last Friday. It was held in the fine Vitorian Great Hall of the Discovery Museum. There were short presentations about the Culture Grid API and data and we had a few hours in the afternoon to pull something together.

I’m afraid I’m not very quick at hacking things, so I didn’t actually produce anything worthy of presenting at the show-and-tell, but there were some great ideas. My favourite was by @onion2k and @robkilby who put together a system for users to scan QR codes next to art exhibits in galleries or museums with their phones, and then they would be able to Tweet a link to the artwork’s info page on the relevant museum’s website. Although Chris hasn’t had time to write up the hack yet, you can see the basic app here.

Hacking in the Great Hall

A very enjoyable day, and big thanks to John Coburn for his organisation of the event, which went very smoothly – despite an interruption mid-afternoon for a fire alarm!

Open Hack London

Caz M — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:09:18 +0000

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…

Scripting Enabled Day 2

Caz — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:08:05 +0000

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!]