#codebits

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For three days, 400 people created projects, attended presentations, and made cool things at Codebits, the annual hacker conference in Lisbon.  It is put on by SAPO, the Portuguese phone company.  They flew me out here to set up a Hardware Hacking Area.  And they asked me to give a presentation.  I asked if I should do a talk on hacker spaces or on making a living doing what you love.  They asked if I could do both.  I did.

The Hackerspace Movement:

http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/93

Make A Living Doing What You Love: How to Bring You Project From Idea to Reality:

http://codebits.eu/intra/s/session/95

They were both very well received.  Many people told me they were inspired by one or the other, which is about the best compliment.  The videos are at the above links.

I also set up and ran a Hardware Hacking Area throughout the three days of the conference.  49 people out of the 400 attendees made one of my kits — about half of them TV-B-Gone kits.  So, there are currently more TVs being turned Off in Portugal.

Now I get to hang out in Lisbon for a few days, before heading to Singapore on Wednesday, where I’ll talk about hackerspaces again.

It’s Portuguese Independence Day, and as I write, fireworks are going off like crazy outside my window, overlooking what looks similar to the Golden Gate Bridge, but was called Salazar Bridge, after the scary dictator (but renamed to 25 de Abril Bridge, in more recent finer times).

I got here today.  Rather than sleep, which is my MO on planes, I worked on my presentations for Codebits, which I’ll be giving Thusday and Friday — the one Thursday is about how to start a hackerspace, and Noisebridge will, of course, be the focus.

The CNET story about Noisebridge hit the interwebs.  It’s a very decent story:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10405255-245.html

I met up with two friends and managed to stay awake, and even have an hours-long coherent conversation.  Now I get to catch up on some emails…

This year our usual group occupied the usual couple of tables at Codebits and split up into three projects - Pew Pew Pew!, an attempt at building a portable VR experience of a First Person Shooter with an Oculus Rift, a Kinect and a Raspberry Pi; Wolf of Codebits, a stock exchange built on top of the Meo Wallet infrastructure using the "money" that was distributed for testing to everyone at Codebits; and Nelo, the winner of the event's top prize, a Knee Lock for Polio patients to replace the metal harness that they traditionally have to use, using free and open technology like Arduino, Bitalino sensors and 3D printing and based on the idea of a chinese finger trap.

Andreia perfectly summed up how this year's Codebits was like: Awesome as always!

I was part of the Wolf of Codebits project as well as a cameraman for the Pew Pew Pew! project.