Author: FarMcKon

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Gameboy Hacking

tmp_gboy_classWe has a pretty awesome Gameboy Hacking class Saturday that got some good interest, especially following 8static the night before. We ended up with 9 folks walking away with an old school GameBoy fully decked out to be a sweet chiptunes platform. The folks from nonfinite electronics walked us through the mods, and made sure everyone walked away happy.

It’s good to put you money where your mouth is, so you want to grab some GBA parts, or USB Programmable cards for Gameboy, may I suggest buying from folks that run cheap classes for fans?

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Nintendo Hacking with nonfinite on Oct 11

8static has it’s one year party this coming Saturday night, Oct 10th, and they are bringing nonfinite of Nonfinite Electronics into town for the show. While he is here in town, we’re going to wring every drop of DIY and Electronics out of ’em, with a Gameboy Modding class ( Oct 11 from 5PM-8PM) at Hive76.

Gameboy’s are the chiptune machine of choice, with most artists doing the audio (or video) bending off of the tiny platform. This class will show you how to mod a gameboy (provided as part of the cost) so that you can create your own art with it, with one of the best gameboy modding experts in the USA. The $45 entry fee covers material costs, including one GameBoy as well as all parts needed for modification will be provided for you. Additional items, such as cartridges for loading music software, link cables, etc. will be available for purchase as well. If you want tickets, you should get them soon, they’ll move fast.

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WARZONE

PSOne, HacDC, and KKKCK have started Project Warzone. It’s a game of ‘capture the server’ with each hackerspace hosting a server and defending it against the others. We’d love to get Hive76 in on this game, and we are looking for some networking and security geeks to head up our Warzone team.

If you want to get into some network security games, let us know. This is a great chance to learn to defend (and/or attack) a server, and get some research done at the same time. Email Hive76@gmail.com if you want to join our team.

strangelove_warroom_grey

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Crazy Hacker Weekend!

The weekend of Aug 19th and Aug 20th is a crazy busy weekend for Hive76. Between stuff going on at Hive76, and things going on around Philly, there is a lot to do.

MakerBot 3d Printing Intro
Saturday, 1PM to 5 at Hive76 just $25
MakerBot founder Zach is in town, to teach a MakerBot 3d Printing class at Hive76. 3D printers allow people convert their digital designs into real world objects, and MakerBot is one of the most popular 3D printers. Bring your own 3d object designs, or lean how to design things on the spot. Once you’ve taken the class, you’re certified to use the Hive76 MakerBot, and can print things out at Hive at your own schedule. Get a ticket now, we’re almost sold out… More Info

Hackers Dinner
Saturday, 6:30ish to 8sih at Dahlak
Want to hang out with the infamous Nick Farr or the ineffable Zach Smith? Got questions about technology, the future, or making things that you need answered? Then come have dinner with us, and get to know a couple of the folks behind Philly, D.C. and N.Y.C.’s hacker scene. This is also a kind-of celebration of 3 months of Hive76, so come celebrate. RSVP to Hive76@gmail.com by Friday, because this is a dinner, and we need a headcount. More Info

8static (non-Hive76)
Saturday 8PM till ?? at Studio34
8static is a chiptunes show in West Philly, and it’s just blocks from Dahlak. So wander on over after eating and check out what happens when musicians start to reverses engineer their gear. More Info

Nick Farr talks about ’42 Points on the Future of Everything’
(Sunday 12:30 to 2PM) At Hive76. Free coffee and (pay) order-in-brunch
Nick Farr is known world-around for his advocacy for hackerspaces, and for pushing the edge of what spaces do. Because of his travels and experience, he has a unique and deep understanding of spaces, geeks, hackers, and where this whole thing is going. His talk is a recap of a SIGINT talk covering the future of everything. More Info

Guitar Effects Study Group
Monday the 21st, 7:30PM to 10PM at Hive76
The third Monday of every month is Guitar Effects Workshop at Hive76. We will build a simple musical gizmo and discuss how it works. Even if you have never touched a soldering iron (or a guitar), stop by and learn how to build simple musical electronics. More advanced mad scientists are encouraged to come show off their own guitar effect creations. More Info

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Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Although it’s hard to find info on, Buckmeister Fuller spent some of his best years working out of The Science Center, an incubator system/building/thing near the University of Pennsylvania. Around the time he died, the Buckminster Fuller Institute was founded, to do great projects, and in general make the world more, uhh, Fulleriene. Somewhere along the way, it moved to Stanford, and then to NYC, but something about it’s “We have to do it ourselves, no one else is going to” attitude still says it has some Philly spirit at heart.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge (BFC) is a competition that the institute runs for “Catalyzing the vanguard of a design science revolution” or in English “Make great things, because we’re screwed if we don’t.” BFC is awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that try to solve and invent our way out of humanity’s most pressing problems.

Continue reading “Buckminster Fuller Challenge”

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Holy petabyte rack Batman


Data storage is expensive, but raw hard drivers are cheap, and with big data centers measuring capacity in petabytes it’s become pretty clear storage is big money and big business. And when something becomes big business or money, some of those customers (who don’t want to pay big money) are going to get into the ‘Open Source The Thing And Make It Cheap For Me’ game. Which is exactly what backblaze has done with petabytes on a budget.

These guys have designed a fracking Rack System with 67 Terabytes of data in 4U for less than a small car. Then, to make sure it’s cheap and stays cheap, they are sharing the design. 45 Drivers in a 4U Rack, with room to spare. Also amazing is that they run their access to the system via HTTPS instead of something like Fibre Channel, SQL, or SCSI. So my main question is: How long till we get one at the hackerspace? For, you know. uuuhhh, Backups?

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Swiss ‘white’ Trojan programs

To make a short story shorter, Ruben Unteregger is a swiss programmer has spent the last 7 years working for a branch of the Swiss government (Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) ) to create a so-called ‘white’ trogan program to sniff and scan VOIP calls. Since much of VOIP (such as Skype) are encrypted, this means he was was writing a client-side Trojan, which would record calls to mp3 files without the computer owners consent or knowledge.

As usual, if there is a way to break encryption, it will be skipped in favor of grabbing the data before/after encryption happens. Being an awesome human being(tm), Ruben Unteregger released MegaPanzer to the public, and has done a good interview explaining in simple I-have-to-explain-it-to-my-mom language what the whole thing is about. It’s an interesting interview, and worth the read. Other coverage is also here.

Or you can watch the nifty ‘How to take over an e-banking session in 7 easy steps” video if you are lazy.


How to Plunder a Bank Account with Megapanzer 0.1 – I’m not such a fan of this web player……

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Photos from Open Hours

Hive76 on a WednesdayOne of the Atom (or is that Adams?) took some photos of our open hours last night. The place was packed with people working on our MakerBot, frabjous, LED lighting for our newspaper box, and all sorts of other trouble. We also spent some time deciding on new membership rules, which will be posted in a few days once everyone has had a chance to give some input.

If you want to see what 11 crazy hackers working on 4 separate projects squeezed in one 10×20 room look like, you should check ’em out.

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Hive76 Meeting (and stuff)

Wednesday we had a Hive76 scrum (a mini management meeting) and Open Hours, as we do every week. But unlike every week, this time we have a fresh in the box MakerBot to unpack and mess with. Also, I grabbed some photos of the occasion. If you are at least kind-of friends, want to help build this thing, and have some technical, software, or 3d modeling skill, come on out Saturday and help get our MakerBot put together and online!

Makerbot_Shot