Sat, 03 Feb 2007
NZ Woo-Foo Baa Camp
Wow. Going to sleep last night was a little difficult as the the first night of Baa Camp (a.k.a NZ Foo Camp) was surprisingly and extremely stimulating.
The surprise was not that something at Baa was stimulating but the fact that the two sessions I went to yesterday both included the two New Zealand politicians attending the event (David Cunliffe and Judith Tizard) and rather than meeting my cynical expectations the two sessions were great. Implementation is a whole other thing of course but it was nice to see the views, concerns and ideas raised be listened to.
Sitting in the first session of the evening and listening to David Cunliffe discuss the New Zealand telecommunications issues and then hearing the conversations between him and others in the room left me with the distinct impression that Nat and Russell have done a fantastic job of getting the right people in the right place at the same time.
By the end of the evening I was feeling suprisingly optimistic...
Free Stuff!
Of course, the good mood might also have had something to do with the Free Stuff(TM) I picked up along the way too... :-)
First up, I managed to fight my way through the hordes of stampeding geeks to pick up a copy of Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks which from first glance looks interesting.
A while later I was scanning the schwag table for new stuff and spotted "A Piece of Hardware"(TM) with a note scrawled on the packaging essentially saying "b0rked, yours if you want to fix". So, my eyes lit up and quickly disappeared it off the table into my hands. Turns out the product in question is a Roku Soundbridge M500 network music player. The b0rkness in question was that greater than half the LCD display is non-working. I discovered the device has both wired and WiFi (by way of a removable CompactFlash card) and...a telnet-able command-line interface--all still functional. There's a whole bunch of accessible functionality but some of the coolest stuff includes access to the remote control and the remaining functional area of the display.
Day two continues....
P.S. Thanks Nat. :-)
Posted at: 11:56 | category: / | Comments ()