I made it to and from the Electromagnetic Field . It was quite an experience to return to a hacker large event after so many years.

A real review of the event will appear in the FreeBSD Journal this summer and I rambled a little at the end of BSDNow 459.

I don't think I could have articulated before hand exactly how much I missed the massive influx of energy being around people doing things gives you. To be honest, it probably explains why I spent so many years running things myself. The sheer magic of other people doing things seems to relax my brain and lets it fill up to the brim with new ideas.

In the vein of "“Make 50 of Something" ( which I learned about from Vi Hart making 50 fizzbuzzers ), I thought it was finally time to write down the ideas in the aftermath of the event and have a record of them.

50 is a lot of things, but I don't think this list actually captures everything that popped into my head. Much of this list is ideas I have been having over the last decade of going to hacker events, but unexecuted ideas can still be good.

1. ID Badge
2. Buckfast FM
3. Buckfast FM badge
4. BBS serial network
5. Government style news distribution network with backdoor leading to a bbs
6. TIC-80 simulator for the badge
7. shit camera ID printer
8. badge tamogotchi thing
9. "Cyberman" led outfit
10. kit dome of trees
11. web bbs
12. retro bbs
13. web bbs serial links to esp consoles
14. demo display on a dome
15. longest serial transmission competition
16. internet of buckets
17. network of floaty led things in lake
18. posters!
19. stickers!
20. sticker: The Internet is Bullshit
21. sticker: Computers are a fuck
22. sticker: "I'll drive if you feed me cheese"
23. sticker: a big pile of tofu
24. talk: 10 years of Scotland as performance art
25. Old Unix BBS
26. something targetting the badge
27. "set" mainframe backdrop
28. weather reports
29. Scotcon TV
30. An actual good computer book shop
31. BSD meet up
32. hacker breakfast
33. 'drugwars' with real location integration
34. CTF coffee puzzle
35. folding bikes!
36. portraits with a camera
37. portraits with a paint brush
38. computer church
39. beacon hunt
40. demo party
41. paiting party
42. talk: Learning a place by drawing its buildings
43. SBC colo
44. deerocracy
45. tshirts
46. sticker: No one hsa found a good use for a networked computer
47. sketching workshop
48. thicknet, network
49. industrial quantities of mauve
50. $5 electronics macro photo workshop
51. silent journalling with [tj]

Yes, It is super vague. There are thousands of words of explanation behind some of these. That you will have to invent for yourself.

Steal what you want, I won't remember publishing this and will love seeing your implementation.

The irony of writing a links post containing a bunch of links about productivity as a form of procrastination isn't lost on me.

• Mission Statement | Revue
• How To Not Suck At Writing | Defector
• Fifty Fizzbuzzes | Vi Hart
• Work with the Garage Door Up - Wild Rye
• Structure | The New Yorker
• The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan | WIRED

part of the process means doing sub-par work to get to the good work

There are a couple of themes in here, I have been writing a lot recently and especially this year. I feel like I am starting to come across advice that makes sense to me, if you want to do things you need to well, do things. There is no substitute for practice.

While I am not going to write daily posts again, I miss the format I used before. I will look at resurrecting the tools I used to generate the daily posts before, maybe a weekly update post would be nice to do.

I plan to return to 'Work with the Garage Door Up', but I have also adopted a policy of not talking about work in progress, so you will have to wait and see.

• Castor and Pollux/samd21g18a.ld at main · wntrblm/Castor and Pollux
• Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?
• MIPS Assembly Programmming
• A Dual Processor VAX*11/780

Here are some links on lower level stuff. I have only read the linker script and the paper on the dual processor VAX. The other two are books that I want to get to one day and this blog is as good a place as any to keep them stashed away.

MIPS is going away in FreeBSD so this is a great time to read about MIPS assembly.

The 1982 paper on the Dual Processor VAX is excellent and you should read it. Papers aren't that interesting anymore.

Some Sunday evening reading about keeping old computers alive.

• A Continuous Integration Pipeline for the PDP-11 (2.11BSD) - Aaron S. Jackson
• Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network – Matt's Tech Pages
• Mac SE/30 odyssey
• Internet Access with System 6

Once a month for the podcast I read through about 20 articles so I know what to talk about on the show . This week when I was reading the article I thought 'this is really easy, maybe I can do this for all my browser tabs'

This isn't really a fair comparison because the articles for the show are mostly short and the articles that fill out my tabs are the ones that were too long to read immediately or I wanted to keep them around.

Instead of keeping them in firefox I am going to try doing link posts again :

• LISA21 - Computing Performance: On the Horizon ( also a blog post
• Pocket POCSAG Transmitter | SOLDIERX.COM
• Vintage Apple
• The Home Office Eudaimonia Machine
• BLIT - a short story by David Langford

I think they should have just left it alone and kept calling it eBPF.