Went up a hill today.

It was a change from sitting inside, the view was really nice. On the way up I was thinking about photography and finding the right equipment. It is pretty clear my J1 with a 10mm pancake lens isn't ideal for landscape photography, but I am not really sure how to get a set of gear to make the photos I want to take possible.

Sitting down with books and reviews are the obvious way to figure this out, but maybe there is a more 'fun' solution. Here's an idea for free:

• We take in the camera equipment you already have.
• You go through flickr, 500px or something else and tag photos you wish you had taken.
• We parse out the lens/camera used
• We recommend the gear to help take the photos you want

Skill will have to be provided by the user.

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

Reading: Babylon's Ashes

What do you do when you find a USB stick on the ground?

Clearly you take it to work, plug it into a computer with network admin privileges to make sure there is nothing funny about it.

I guess something could go wrong, I saw a documentary once where criminals dropped a load of USB sticks on the ground which an unsuspecting prison guard used in a computer. They probably put some malware on that USB stick and all, not cool.

Anyway, at congress I saw this sign, sans stick. I hope there was both something horrible on it and something that made it worth the hassle.

Reading: Babylon's Ashes

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