Hack 31 – October 2022

The Halloween hack, which had a decidedly un-Halloween flavour…in fact, I don’t think we actually mentioned it once. On the other hand, we also set a new record for actual amount of hacking going on, since it’s STILL GOING ON RIGHT NOW AS I TYPE THIS UPDATE THREE DAYS LATER (see below)!!!!!

Things people did

• Piers and Ethan were creating a very spooky pumpkin, involving a distance sensor to howl at people when they reached for the candy in the bowl, all in MicroPython. This obviously involved a lot of hardware-esque concerns, like actually getting the sound loud enough. Come to think of it, this is precisely the sort of Halloween-themed hack we would have hoped for, so never mind what I said above about not mentioning Halloween!

• Hugh was noodling on his 3D printer, and told us tales about how he avoids burning his entire house to the ground while using it. He was printing some Ghosties, which is another exceedingly Halloween-themed thing to do, so really, I have no excuse for forgetting all the Halloween-ness afoot.

• Adam managed to avoid anything remotely Halloweeny, and just added a new project to his portfolio.

• Ryan re-appeared to inform us that his coffee machine is now fixed, and there is a very slim chance he might finally have it working by the next hack day.

• Joe turned in a monster performance (see what I did there!) doing a screenshare for the entire hackday about writing a battle snake in Factor, a programming language that claims to be “stack-based”, and also has a velociraptor as its mascot. It looked incredibly confusing, and there’s a 10% chance the whole thing was an elaborate Halloween prank.

…and we thought that was it…

AND THEN! The next day, we noticed that Ryan was busy beavering away in the General Discord Room, probably cooking up some hackery, FOR THE NEXT 3 DAYS!!!! He’s literally still in there right now as I type this, hacking around on who knows what, potentially getting ready for web7.