Dorkbot 38: Nightmare on Dork Street

Dorkbot 38: Nightmare on Dork Street

This month kicked off our residency at ND Austin, the official homestead of dork and nerd (as well as music, comedy, and film) happenings in Austin.

Monday, October 15, 2012
Doors at 7pm
ND Austin
501 N IH 35, Austin, Texas 78702

Christian Miller is a UT Austin Computer Science graduate student whom you may remember from awesome projects like the UberHoop. Aiming to impress his way into a sweet internship, he made a fancy business card that is a small portable video game system. nbd, just a retro game business card. *totallyabigdealy’all

For just over a century, amateur radio operators or “hams” have been working in basements and attics, taking things apart and putting them together to hear the crackle of a voice coming from the static. Austin’s Amateur Radio Society shared the magic ranging from the simplest homebrew, basically the technological Victory garden for modern communications to the advanced digital high-speed multimedia capability (i.e., The Self Configuring HAM Network) in use around Austin.

Damien Di Fede (@ddifede) rocked the socks off of the Fantastic Arcade with The Dancingularity and was willing to show Dorkbot how he did it, including using Processing to write the software, the reason for running it in Linux, and the hardware (ahem, electrical tape) used to create the web of mats. If you missed the magic you can check out the sweet write up in the Kokoromi blog for more details.