I'm all atingle that I've received an invite to Hack Day in London on June 16 and 17. I'll be joining over 500 other developers, artists and makers to build some cool stuff in a 24-hour frenzy of much pizza and little sleep.
Sponsored by Yahoo and the BBC, Hack Day is an anything-goes creative tornado where participants mix, mash and mangle web data and APIs to excellent and often ridiculous effect. For example, a team of three clever women produced the winning hack at last year's US hack day with a handbag that takes photos and uploads them to flickr.
Event organizer Tom Coates describes other hijinks from last year's event:
The other projects ranged from the sublimley useful to the
ridiculously fun. Cal Henderson knocked up a digest-maker.
You could go to a web page, type in a word and get back a
digest of information about that subject that would
automatically print itself out of a nearby printer. That
one used Flickr, del.icio.us and Wikipedia. Another guy
called Mo Kwaken made something called Blabber which
unfortunately I can't find any more information about
online. It was supposed to be able to use absolutely any
face from Flickr but in the end just used Patrick Stewart.
You drew a line where the mouth was and then whenever you
talked into a microphone, his mouth would open like
Canadians on South Park. So you could pretend to be
Patrick Stewart, which was fun.
There was an awesome Upcoming hack called gutentag which
added a different social layer to the service, and an
awesome flickr-based project called The Color Field Camera
which would identify the colour of the thing it was
pointed at, access Flickr and source pictures that matched
that colour using the Flickr Color Pickr.
If you'll be at Hack Day, too, please be sure to say hello in London. Meantime, let me know if you're interested in working with me on a hack. I'll hit the Hack Day Wiki later this week to look for some collaborators there, too, but meantime, give me a shout at jclark@globalmoxie.com if you'd like to put your mighty brain together with my little one.
In particular, I'd love to work with one or two others to make some kind of groovy physical device that interacts with the web in some way. Could take the form of a fluffy stuffed bunny rabbit, a retro radio receiver or, if we must, a sleek modern device. Let's figure it out together.
Whatever this thing might be, I'd love to make something that's not just bits and bytes. I'm pretty clever with web services and interfaces, but I'm helpless when it comes to sewing, soldering or sawing. Help wanted, ideas welcome.
Tags:
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I just read about Hack Day on Friday. It sounds like fun. Can't wait to hear what you and your team dream up!
Physical hacks are somewhat beyond my capabilities (I got a "D" for design technology in my schooldays!) but best of luck and perhaps we'll bump into each other on the day :)
The wiki is a great place to start (and find people) and I also wanted to recommend the unofficial (but officially appreciated) Hack Day forums over at HackDayForum.com. It's a good place to put out the call for other people, ask questions about accomodations, etc, and should get a lot busier towards the event.
This might not be a great tip, but I've heard a lot of good stuff about using Lego Mindstorms to make practical stuff without too much practical knowledge (and lots of tech know-how). I've seen some different language bindings for it all too, including Java and, I think, Python? Might be too much of an easy way out though!
Thanks for the links and pointers, Peter. I saw Tom Coates' post about the community of sites that are springing up to support Hack Day planning. Looking forward to digging into it all this week.
I've always thought that the Mindstorms kit looked mighty fun, but I think you might be right that it's a little bit too packaged for this. I'm thinking instead of something like a toaster that etches a weather icon into your toast based on the current weather. I dunno, though, I'm so helpless when it comes to the mechanical end of things that I may wind up playing to my strengths and sticking with a strictly online hack.
Looking forward to it, whatever I wind up with. I'll look out for you on the day.
If you're thinking about a retro radio receiver then look out for the team from BBC Audio & Music, we'd love to help you...
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