After the success of the eventful Hack Day London in 2007 I was very keen on attending the 2008 generation of the event called Mashed. This was held last week in London’s Alexandra Palace again. The name change comes from the event being run and partly sponsored by the BBC, and the Hack Day brand is associated with the prior co-sponsor Yahoo.

This is an event where lots of people, be they developers, designers, engineers, or anyone else who creates stuff, get together and creates something in 24 hours. There are few restrictions on what you can do and although you have to use an API from on of the sponsors to enter the compassion you can produce anything you want.

One of the best bits about such an event is that it gives you the chance to work with other people who have different skills so you can create far more than you can on your own. I was asked by Euan Spence to join the Social Flight Simulator team and I was also planning on working on a hardware mashup with Pete and Brian, and anyone else who wanted to join in. Naturally there was not enough time to do all this, but the flight sim worked and we won something. I will blog about what we achieved in the near future.

The event was well organised again and there were many improvements. Strangely most of the improvement involved simplifying things. The only recommendations I can make is to reintroduce the welcome so new people know what is going on and so people can find others to help with there projects, and to introduce recycling bins.

There were free buses laid on this time from many places throughout the country and I thought this was a great idea to make the event less Londoncentric. It was a great shame that few signed up for them, even fewer turned up, and the Newcastle/Sheffield bus only had three of us on. One of the reasons was probably the 2am departure time, but I don’t have a solution for this problem.

The event was covered in part by the BBC’s Click and there are plenty or photos on flickr. Well done all involved, and hopefully see you next year.

I am typing this during the demos of what has been developed. Considering the small number of people working through the night, and the lack of time to work on stuff through the day, I am surprised at number of entries how managed to produce something.

Nigel and I have been doing some playing with our idea, although because we were so far behind we have not entered it for any of the competitions. We started out with the idea of producing a Bluetooth version of Geocaching. What we ended up with is an Arduino sampling data, a server parsing this in to EEML, that is being relayed through a public facing server, and being rendered by a JavaScript applet for presentation on a mobile device. The idea of the project is to allow people to monitor things (temperature, light, etc) at a remote location. Our next project will be to figure out why we need to do this.

The event is not completely over, but I suspect I will not have a moment to blog anything later so I thought I would blog my closing comments now. It was a good couple of days and now I just need to go home to bed.

This Friday and Saturday I am at Over the Air, an event hosted at Imperial Collage in London and supported by the BBC. The concept of the event appears to be a version of Hack Day crossed with a general conference, all with a focus on mobile technology.

There is a good number of the usual suspects here, and a lot of new faces as well. I have been to a few seminars and have been working with Nigel on a few mad ideas using the Arduino boards. A big thank you to tinker.it for the loan of the Bluetooth board, and we hopefully will be able to revile our work tomorrow, if we get it finished, if.

To be honest I am not enjoying the event as much as a BarCamp or Hack Day. Most people are not bothered about producing something unlike Hack Day, and as a result neither am I. Also there is nothing really wrong with the seminars, but most feel more like a sales pitch than something I can learn from, and nothing like the quality of knowledge transfer you get at a BarCamp. That being said I am happy to be here and hope that others are getting a lot more out of the event than I.

We have watched the TV on the big big screen, there is a Werewolf game going on at the moment, and we are all spaced out on the gazillions of comfy beanbags. Some of us are working on projects for tomorrow, but most of us are just chilling, blogging and working on personal projects.

I hope to conclude my brief summery of the event tomorrow, but there are plenty more blogs covering the event.

Yes, at long last we have a confirmed venue for BarCampNorthEast that is to first be held in The Art Works Galleries, Newcastle.

I see a BarCamp is a gathering of people who want to learn stuff off each other and generally socialise with new friends. To find out more about BarCamps check out the BarCamp wiki.

Already there a few good people are intending to come, and [free] tickets go online soon. It is all about the people who attend, so make it that bit better and come along yourself. All you need to go is give a presentation or run a session, and if you think you can’t do that then get in touch and I will explain just how easy it is.

Finally if you know me and need a floor or couch to sleep on on the Friday or Sunday then let me know and I will see what I can do. Also any other questions, no matter how random, please do ask.

Update: The first round of tickets are available at 11am on the 1st of April (and no, this is not a joke).

You may know that I am part of community radio station in the North East. We have been using IP to stream from the studio to the transmitter for many months now, and we have started to do more outside broadcasts using the Internet. We have done most of this using the Ogg Vorbis audio compression. It is my intention to blog about this in the future.

At the start of 2008 it cam to my attention that 3 Mobile had reduced there data charges and how now introduced a pay as you go service for the same cost as the subscription one. The dongle that acts like a modem cost £100.

After a previous broadcast from the Gateshead Swallow Hotel was complete disaster because the Cloud wifi let us down we decided to give 3G a go. For reference the problem was not the actual wifi connection that was good, but the Internet connection behind it being overloaded, and we did get a refund for the night.

Sadly the data rates promised were nothing like those theoretically possible but after a switching to SimpleCast to stream MP3Pro we managed to get by with a reliable 23kbps stream running. Not ideal for FM broadcast, but it was passable and most listeners would not have noticed.

Things went very well for almost 2 hours, and then it all went a little haywire. In the end, after many dropouts, I decided to move the dongle. I stuck it to the window with some tape and everything sprung back to life for the rest of the night. There was then even some bandwidth for me to do things like start this blog posting.

In the end this showed it can be done, but it is not yet 100% reliable. Since the broadcast I have learned that the bandwidth problem was because I only had a 3G connection and not a HSDPA (Turbo) connection in the OB location. I will continue to experiment and will report back on this blog. If you are interested in doing the same then do get in touch.

Over a year ago I blogged about how to protect your PC from viruses and spywhere. Time and technology has moved on and I will be updating this soon, but I thought I would note that I have changed the setup of my main laptop.

I was using McAfee VirusScan Plus (Special edition) that is available for free from AOL. This was doing a good job without hassle and I still recommend it as a free and simple solution. The problem was that it was slowing my commuter down, especially at boot time.

I had a look at Comodo that I found out about through a couple of podcasts. This looks like a very good “Intelligent” firewall, and the company now has a virus scanner is available in beta. Sadly my installation of Apache has a problem when it was installed so I have decided to leave it for now and test it properly later.

In the end I have rolled back to the Sunbelt personal firewall that was originally developed by Kerio.

For virus scanning I did not want a scanner that dramatically slowed down the computer and had almost resigned myself to having to leave any scanner disabled and enable it when I thought it was necessary. I am only prepared to do this because any email entering our network or stored on the server have already been checked. Interestingly the McAfee scanner only ever found things in the IE cache because of this.

I then read about the open source Moon Secure scanner. This scanner you can not actually turn off, but it is very fast, and appears to find the viruses found by the other scanners. This basic solution is all I need so I will be sticking with it for a while, seeing how it goes, and will report back later.

I have managed to get a ticket to BarCampBrighton2 being held at Sussex University Student Union next month. As in the past spaces went quickly, but there are still 30 being released on Monday if you are feeling lucky.

It will be interesting to see how this second Brighton event pans out as BarCampBrighton was my joint favorite camp, with BarCampLondon06 being the other. I believe that this was mainly because of the number of people, and who those people were. The venue also does make a big difference.

This time there are a whopping 150 places in Brighton, with some of the tickets being allocated to first time attendees, some geek girls, and some students from the venue. My gut reaction is the allocation for first time attendees is a great idea to keep things fresh without overly complicating things. The numbers are a little high, and a more public space like a university will not be as friendly as we are use to, but with luck the people will be what makes it and it will be another stunningly good event.