Congress is a great place to try out apps or networking things that require a lot of people involved. All over the building there are posters up with apps, network services, political action, calls for poets, puzzles, manifestos. Following up on these ideas could fill your time at congress.

One poster than caught my eye was a call to use a decentralised mesh networked micro blogging service. The post links to an app called Rumble that is available with Android and iOS. There are enough people willing to try things out at congress that a meshed messaging app could be great fun to use.

Unfortunately it seems the app can't handle the network conditions at congress. The meshing can work over wifi or via bluetooth. I suspect the mesh over the wifi uses something like mdns for neighbour discovery. We found when we tried the SlowTV that multicast is blocked on the wifi for performance reasons.

The bluetooth option for the app seems unable to find any neighbours in the hackcenter either. It might be that the rf conditions are making this nearly impossible.

I will keep trying to play with the app after the event, but it would have been awesome if it had been usable at congress.

Hackaday are covering 33c3 , mostly talks so far, but there may also be articles about the all the amazing projects that fill up the CCH. There are so many awesome internet controlled projects around here that it is probably impossible to see all of them. The contents of the rooms in the hack center is changing all the time as well.

I think today I am going to see how many network blinkenlights projects I can find and make a little catalog. A metablinkenlights controller would be awesome to build out.

Reading: Fahrplan

Day 1 became Day 2 with the industry standard partying all night transition. This morning was a very slow start, with my lightning talk somewhere in there, talk came out okay I think.

Keeping track of time in here is really difficult, the leds sort of merge everything together, windows would ruin the atmosphere so that isn't available as a measure of time. We know that day lights hurts hackers brains.

So far things have been a flop on the project front. The congress network doesn't support multicast on the wireless, the wired segment is fine, but it has caused us to run out of steam. Multicast traffic on the wifi has to be sent at the lowest rate connected clients support, this burns a lot of airtime leaving multicast blocked on wifi access points.

The UDP panel hasn't been set up yet, the projector didn't make the trip across.

Reading: Fahrplan

The first day and their are some excellent sessions lined up. All of the talks are recorded, I normally catch up with the talks that catch my interest after the event.

At congress it is best to hit the self organised sessions, they aren't recorded and are almost always excellent. Because they are excellent they are really hard to attend, loads of other people show up. The good sessions are standing room only with the corridor completely full too.

- [Are_decentralized_services_unable_to_innovate][1]
- [Mechanical_Keyboard_Meetup Tryout][2]
- [We Fix the Net][3]

In the past I lined up a busy schedule for the congress and ended up not going to any of the sessions. This year I am going to try and drop in and out of events, the sessions above are more of an intent that a plan.

The We Fix the Net session is really interesting, instead of a single event they have an afternoon of panels lined up. They are more focused on security aspects than transport, it should be a highlight of the event.

Reading: The Fahrplan, if anything

It starts!

Flight worked out well, the delay I had setting off from Aberdeen shortened my transfer, but it didn't hold anything up. I made it into the congress center around half three and was too early to get a ticket.

Rest of the day went into setting up blinkenlights and other important projects. Tomorrow I will explore the place and see what is going on.