I was hoping to write the first blog post of this year from the airport, but time conspired against me. With BA moving my flight 24 hours I had to decided between having a quiet New Year and a fun one.

I certainly did not go to 'There is No Party' which was not held somewhere in HH. The music was excellent, the crew that did the lighting and audio did amazing work. It makes me wonder what could happen here if there was space where people could play.

From the party I headed back to the apartment, packed and set off for the airport. I turned a long day with a weird sense of time into an adventure across Hamburg at New Year and through the Airport.

By the time I made Heathrow I was on about 4 hours sleep in a 36 hour window, I opted to nap instead of writing..

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Nemesis Games

HAM->LHR->ABZ

An abundance of particles in the air forced BA to cancel my flights home. They knocked my flight back 24 hours without any choice in the timing of my new flight. This means I get to spend an extra night in Hamburg and I get to move all of my new year plans to somewhere in the future.

Congress is done for another year, it has been any amazing event. There really is nothing like it on the planet, attempts at describing the event and conveying that different world always seem to fail.

The Chaos Communication Congress really is a place that must be seen, with the CCH being knocked down next year the event you go to will certainly be materially different that the one I have attended for the past three years.

I cannot wait to see how the deal with loosing the CCH and where CCC ends up in the future.

Reading: PO-14 User Manual

Presented with out comment are the books I read in 2016, ordered with the most recently read first:

* All Tomorrow's Parties
* Idoru 
* Virtual Light
* Excession
* Cibola Burn
* Reamde
* Abandon's Gate
* Seveneves
* ELEKTROGRAD
* Ashes of Victory
* Little Brother
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 3
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 2
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 1
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 10
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 9
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 8
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 7
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 6
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 5
* Transmetropolitan Book Vol 4
* The Cuckoos Egg
* Networks of New York
* Hydrogen Sonata
* Surface Detail
* Matter
* Look to Windward
* Inversions
* Use of Weapons
* The Player of Games   
* Consider Phlebaa
* The Man in the High Castle
* Overtime
* Eqoid
* Down on the Farm
* Neuromancer 
* The Soul of a New Machine
* The Wise Man's Fear
* Name of the Wind 
* Zero History 
* Spook Country 
* The Atrocity Archives
* The Fuller Memorandum
* The Jennifer Morgue 
* The Apocalypse Codex
* The Annihilation Score
* The Rhesus Chart
* The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul
* Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
* Titus Groan
* Next Stop Execution
* Mona Lisa Overdrive
* Pattern Recognition
* Gormenghast
* Cunning Plans
* Tubes

Day 4 is the sad day, at a certain time this evening a switch will flip, everyone will stop what they are doing and start packing up. Right away the hackcenter will go from being another world back to a boring hall.

Reading: Fahrplan

Blinkenlights are really big in hacker culture, the hackcenter where our table is located is completely full of led strips, installations, projectors and a ton of other things that glow, flash or blink.

ATTENTION
This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only!
So all the “lefthanders” stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies.
Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere!
Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.

The obvious think to do with blinkenlights is to get them onto the network, my udp panel continues this glorious tradition. There are loads of awesome blinkenligths on the network:

The Milliways sign is made from addressable led strips mounted on a frame. There is an awesome ethernet connected controller board that drives all of the leds.

There is a group of hackers sat in front of the flipdot sign day and night playing with it. The flipdots are small electromechanical modules that can be either white or black, the modules take a fraction of a second to swith and make an awesome sound as they do.

The flipdot sign is controllable from a (probably tempory) website .