Technical Topics – Made by Mikal

BonkersCon video: something introductory about radio

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 23, 2017
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

Michael Carden kindly gave a talk at BonkersCon about the origins of radio at my request. Tim Ansell was there during the day to record these videos with his bonkers home brew video capture hardware. Sorry about the sound quality at the end of the video. We had some issues on the day with the radio mics, so these videos were recorded with a conference microphone which did admirably as long as the speaker was facing in the right direction. There are a few of these videos that I'll post in the next little while as I have time to make sure the recording worked out (by watching the video).

Event wrap up

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 11, 2017
Post category:TT December 2016

Thanks to everyone who made Technical Topics 2016 a success. I enjoyed the talks, and I think the turnout was much better than I expected. I've also given up on convincing people to use the big boy name for the event, and have accepted that "BonkersCon" has stuck as a name. So congratulations on that! A special giant thanks to those who agreed to speak, video record the event, or flew all the way from places-that-are-not-Canberra to attend. Your commitment to a random idea is impressive to me and I appreciate your efforts more than you can imagine. I've included some photos of the event below, with almost all of these having been taken by Richard Jones, so thanks to him as well for documenting the event. Tim Ansell made some videos of the talks, and I'll put these online separately in the next day or two. Having asked attendees if they'd come to another BonkersCon, the answer was a resounding yes. So, I'm thinking mid-2017 is about the right timing, and you'll hear more details about that soon.

Technical Topics weekly update, week starting 31 October

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 2, 2016
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

(This just got emailed out to registered attendees of Technical Topics). So, I went quiet for a while because I got busy with other things, but now its time to focus on getting Technical Topics [1] ready for action. There is a program of things people are currently talking about at this URL: http://wiki.madebymikal.com/index.php?title=Technical_Topics:December_2016 If people who are down for a talk can ensure that they are happy with their nominated timeslot, and have added at least some information to their linked wiki pages for each talk what would be cool. We also still have two full slots free, and some space for lightning talks if anyone else is interested in telling us what they're hacking on at the moment. I'll keep pinging people I think might have interesting things to talk about, but having other people suggest things would be cool too. Finally, it would be cool to have a few more people at the event. I'm not worried, but I figure the more the merrier, so if you haven't let your geeky friends know yet that would be cool too. Thanks, Michael 1: Or BonkersCon as some of my co-workers have named it.

Technical Topics weekly update, week starting 5 September

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 6, 2016
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

(This got emailed out to registered attendees yesterday). Oh you few, you glorious, trustworthy and foolhardy few! Thanks to all of you who have registered for Technical Topics. I think it is cool (and a bit bonkers) that we’ve gone from idle idea to a conference with a venue, delegates, speakers and insurance quotes in a week. I think a lot of that is because of you super great people who went out on a limb to register early. So far we’ve announced three talks, which leaves us with four more to announce. I assume now that the schedule is a bit firmer and venue confirmed we’ll start to see registrations pick up. That said, I’m happy if we make it to 50 people -- this doesn’t have to be an event for thousands. A few things you should know: You should have been emailed out a wiki URL, username and password automatically as a side effect of buying a ticket on eventbrite. If that thing hasn’t happened let me know and I’ll fix it for you. The basic idea here is that people can self-organize as much of the event as they want -- for example I am not…

Technical Topics in Computing, December 2016

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 31, 2016
Post category:TT December 2016

Recently I’ve been feeling like I’ve been missing the chance to hear about cool technical projects people are working on in a depth not possible at a CLUG meeting because of time constraints. I am therefore running a simple weekend meetup in Canberra on Saturday 3 December and Sunday 4 December. The Saturday of the event will be organised talks, with the goal of the talks being to inspire attendees to have a hack on a new project on the second day of the weekend. The second day would be an unstructured hackfest to explore whatever is interesting after the talks of the previous day. I think reserving the Saturday evening for board games and general “hanging out” sounds like fun too. More details can be found at the conference wiki, with tickets being sold at eventbrite for $20. These talks are currently signed up: Richard Jones, Hacking Minecraft in Python Alastair D'Silva, Getting started with MQTT and the ESP8266 Michael Carden, Introduction to radio Tim Ansell, Using FPGAs with Python ...and more to come!

Minecraft skeleton battle

A Technical Topics Status Update

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 30, 2016
Post category:Events Minecraft Projects Projects with the kids Technical Topics TT December 2016

(The featured image for this post is by hobbymb on flickr). So, its been a couple of days since I went mad and decided I should run a weekend conference. A bit has happened in that time, so here's a quick status update... First off, people have bought tickets! In fact, we've sold 20% of my original goal of 50 tickets, which is pretty impressive for a conference with no venue or agenda. Thanks to everyone who has made a leap of faith and done that thing. One of the things that I need to sort out is public liability insurance, and I am chasing quotes for that at the moment. Its hard to tell how many tickets I need to sell to cover the cost of that as I have no idea what the insurance will cost yet. In other positive news, a surprising number of people have offered to present as well. The current plan is to try and focus on talks which have a good chance of leaving people to want to have a hack on the Sunday. I'd love to be in a place where people have to make hard choices about what to hack on…

Technical Topics in Computing, Canberra December 2016

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 29, 2016
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

Recently I’ve been feeling like I've been missing the chance to hear about cool technical projects people are working on in a depth not possible at a CLUG meeting because of time constraints. Many years ago, AUUG used to run a weekend "summer conference" that was almost free and addressed some of this issue. That conference died a natural death when linux.conf.au got big, but I think maybe it's time to bring that back. So, I'd like to propose a simple weekend meetup in Canberra. I would make it free, but I feel like the no-show rate is lower for events which charge a token amount. I'm thinking something like $20 is small enough not to be painful, but enough that people will value their tickets. Any profit would be donated to some form of community group at the end, but I haven’t picked one yet. The Saturday of the event would be organised talks, with the goal of the talks being to inspire attendees to have a hack on a new project on the second day of the weekend. The second day would be an unstructured hackfest to explore whatever is interesting after the talks of the previous day.…