Hack 45 – January 2024

Welcome to a new year and a new you! Well, a new hackday anyway. We had all kinds of pent up energy from skipping the one last month, that this was a veritable cambrian explosion of hacking energy.

Things people did

• Piers led us off with a bang, discussing all the cool stuff with converting arduino to micropython, and then let us talk him into unboxing his birthday present early (sorry, Piers’s wife!), and it was a super-fresh 3D printer. Lots of oooh-ing and aaah-ing to be had all around.

• Ryan valiantly tried to follow that act by baking pretzels, and because that is technically a completely separate category, he won full points. This was also the only thing that actually got fully completed during this hackday, so that’s double points for Ryan-dor! He also showed us a dope split keyboard, and we got very jealous.

• Tom showed a VERY cool freecad helmet and then neglected giving any other tasty tidbits about how it went…the slow burn indeed!

• Hugh installed Arch Linux on a VM! It took a long time to figure out how to get the VM to run in uefi mode, but eventually, success. Well. Success in that it booted, failure in that it didn’t realize I would need a dhcp client to connect to the internet and download packages, and didn’t install one. Hugh had to use the livecd to chroot in and install dhcp. But THEN it worked! Maybe next time he’ll risk it on a real computer.

• Panda probably did a bunch of awesome stuff after Adam left the hackday midway through, and so Adam has no idea what to put here, but will @ Panda in the channel to get a PR contribution sorted here as well.

• Adam started messing around with creating a custom GPT, and quickly found out that there’s a limit of times you can query it within a given time-period, which is lame (though understandable). Then he had to leave and go eat lunch in St. Andrews, which was delightful.

Editors note: just re-read the discord channel, and it turns out Piers gave the game away…he clearly stated the day before that he would be doing a, quote, new 3D printer build, so actually, the whole thing was double bluff and he planned to unbox that bday present the whole time. Clever girl.