The CCC put together an excellent track of talks about Science and Space technology. I chewed through a lot of them yesterday, they set a really great tone and are aimed really well at their audience.

I have been thinking recently about organising events locally that have much more technical content than the current things that happen. Up here there isn't the density of expertise required to run a monthly or even quarterly event without running out of fresh speakers very quickly.

Techmeetup Aberdeen really struggles to bring speakers in, very have many times falling back to a set of 'known good' speakers from the local hackerspace .

Sessions by experts in a field with technical content, aimed at Non Cyber Muggles from other fields (similar pitching as the space track talks) could work very well. I will have to play with this idea and see if people from other fields are interesting in taking part.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes

bunnie has a long history of doing really cool things in hardware hacking, his book Hacking the Xbox is a great read (he has another book in the works too ). bunnie and xobs presented a complete tear down and reverse engineering of sd cards at 30c3, at 33c3 they were back talking about their education project chibitronics .

bunnie's talk is about the project it self, technical design and motivations, if the front matter of the talk turn you off believe me when I say it is worth powering through and watching the whole thing.

xob's presents an excellent session of bit banging out usb from a low power Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. This talk is a great introduction into the low level details of the usb protocol.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes

God damn it! I won't be downloading all the 33c3 talks this year to watch offline, instead I will stream them from the excellent media.ccc.de . No good reason, I am only doing this because when making a list to feed to wget I did:

$ cat 33c3list.txt| grep -v deu | wc -l > tmp.txt
$ mv tmp.txt 33c3list.txt

I didn't really have the disc spare to store 100GB or so of talks anyway. I will stream the videos in my browser instead. I don't really have set approach to watching the CCC talks. I normally work through the list watching things that other have said were good, or talks whose title catches my eye.

Reading: Nemesis Games

Chaos is an important part of CCC, most of the best things that happen are pranks that only a small number of people experience. The Fnord News Show has a large audience German speaking audience, I am pretty sure this awesome 'event' is unknown outside of the German crowd.

Reading: Nemesis Games

14 hours of sleep, I feel like I have woken up in another dimension.

There is a ton of congress stuff floating around twitter, Here is a list of talks ranked from the number of tweets and retweets mentioning them. If you are only going to watch a couple of sessions from 33c3 that list is probably great.

I caught an awesome article classifying the MacOS malware found in 2016. I am glad there is so little malware aimed at this platform.

Reading: Nemesis Games