TechAdventure 2008 (by alaric)

Sarah and I went to TechAdventure in Bristol on Saturday.

It was fun! We'd both been rather sad about the fact that we'd not really gotten into the local geek scene. Almost all our nerdy friends are London-based. So we were keen to go to a local geek event...

So we swapped some EPROM programming and erasing gear for some books and a patch panel at the swapshop.

I was rigged for motion capture:

We have a video of me moving around with the rig on. It's rather dark, so you need to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up to see it properly...

We saw John Honniball and a tiny subset of his extensive collection of ancient computers.

We saw a guy who'd made a plotter from a turntable and a horizontal carriage from a printer.

And we saw and participated in a whole bunch of other stuff...

And we met loads of people. Which is great, since we want to meet more tecchie people from this neck of the woods!

We’re back! (by alaric)

We're back in our house! We just spent the first night back in it...

We've got upstairs cleaned out enough to move back in, but downstairs is still a pile of bags and boxes and furniture, waiting for us to put the furniture into place so we can unload all the stuff onto it.

Keysigning party – London, 2nd June (by alaric)

I've somehow ended up organising a keysigning party in London on the 2nd of June.

See the page for directions to the venue (it's in South Kensington).

So if you have a PGP keypair (or take part in CACert.org or Thawte's web of trust), come along. If you don't, but are interested in being able to exchange military-grade encrypted or signed messages, then set up GNU Privacy Guard - see their manuals for more details - and create yourself a keypair (your own digital identity) - or several - and bring along your key IDs and fingerprints to have them vouched for and vouch for everyone else's.

I've made myself some MOO cards to hand out my key details on:

The Camping Holiday Of Despair (by alaric)

The plan was simple: borrow Sarah's parent's campervan, drive down on Friday evening to the village where our friends were being married the next day, sleep over, get up in the morning, have a nice breakfast, explore the area a bit, do the wedding, sleep over, then have Sunday to do touristy things with a few of the others who were staying over after the wedding, sleep over, and come back Monday morning.

However, it did not go to plan.

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Stuck in the back of an out-of-control vehicle careening down a slope! (by alaric)

The scene: I, with my family, are in a Little Chef. Jean, bless her, has got food all over herself, so I go out to the van, in the car park, to get wet wipes.

I unlock the back, hop in, go to the box of stuff, and start rooting about for wipes. I feel a slight motion, and wonder if it's strong wind rocking the van, or if somebody bumped into it while getting into an adjacent car as I continue to root. Then I feel a bigger rocking motion, and look outside to, to my horror, see the world moving... the van's rolling backwards, with me in the cargo bay and nobody in the front!

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