Pre-Gaming and Pre-Hacking #rbcreation

The liquor has all be dranken and now it’s time to get hackin’!  Paul and the gang have made it back to the RV (this was no easy feat after being drowned in booze at the kickoff party) and have begun reverse engineering their electronic badges.  The badges appear to be banging out some Morse code to a single red LED.  Paul is trying to get past the fuses on the PIC to read the code inside while the others set up our Rigol portable digital oscilloscope and try to record the LED blinks to a file to decode the Morse.  Crazy but true, the wacky guys from Two Hands Project are hanging out in the HaHa RV right now.  Apparently they are covered with stickers?!?  You may remember them from a while back (over a year ago?) when they came to HaHa and filmed us for inclusion in a documentary about hackerspaces.  Hey guys, what happened to that film project?

The HaHa Gears Have Landed in Brooklyn! #rbcreation

After many hours of butt-numbing car rides and New York traffic, four intrepid HaHa hackers have taken on the wilds of Brooklyn to journey into the mouth of the caffeine-addled beast, also known as Redbull Creation. Dave, Paul, Jeff and Miles have arrived to bring the hack, Baltimore-style, to the soon-to-be-unwashed masses of McCarren Park. Our dedicated compatriot, Jason, will do his best to record all of our rants and photos here at HaHa central for all to see.  Yes, that photo is Paul in a sombrero; they are expecting it to be quite hot.  Warning: After over 72 sleepless hours, it could get ugly.  This should be fun…

TGIMBOEJ Redux

Well, we finally got around to opening the INTJ-22 TGIMBOEJ and took out some selected bits.  But, boy, did we fill it back up!  We packed it with all manner of miscellanea including motors, mysterious circuit boards, high-power LED’s, and other electronic bric-a-brac.  Now, it needs a new home.  Are there any Hackerspaces or Makerspaces out there who want to get in on a sweet box of junk?  Please keep it within the U.S. as heavy international shipments of questionable gizmos is frowned upon by Uncle Sam and his cronies after the toner cartridge fiasco.

Star Wars IV Played on Vintage ’77 Dumb Terminal

What are we going to do with our newly acquired vintage 1977 Lear Siegler terminal?  Why, we’ll play ASCII Star Wars Episode IV on it, of course!  Recently purchased at the 2011 Techno Swap Fest, this baby-blue beauty has classic 70′s styling, comfortable keyboard and gets 80 columns on the screen in a lovely white uppercase font.  It took some coaxing to get Baby Blue to play along with an Ubuntu-equipped laptop including tweaking some DIP switches hidden inside her chassis, some clever character substitutions in the ASCII Star Wars file, reading the datasheet for the terminal itself (thanks, Wikipedia!), and wiring up both a FTDI USB-to-serial converter and a MAX232 level converter IC.  But the results were worth a quick video.  Future improvements could include a way to hide the cursor (hardware modification?) and possibly speeding up draws by only painting the characters that have changed.  What do ya think?