Supercon 2024
Welcome
Happy Holidays from The Bootloader! It's hard to believe it's December already and another year has passed by. With the Thanksgiving holiday in the US over just a few weeks ago we wanted to say how thankful we are for having you as listeners.
We're now on Bluesky! If you're not on Mastodon, we'll also post updates on Bluesky.
Listen to the Show
Show Highlights
The latest episode was all about Hackaday's Supercon, which Tod has been going to for the past seven years. We talked about the Supercon badge, add-ons for the badge, and shared some of our favorite talks by a variety of makers. You can find some of the talks on Hackaday's YouTube channel:
- Giving Robotic Friends a Voice: Jorvon Moss & Shawn Hymel
- Solving the Last Mile With 3D-printed Packaging: Christina Cyr
And if you just watch one video from Supercon, make it this one:
Here's a picture of Tod's Supercon 2024 badge with a few simple add-ons attached:
Leftover Links
Here's a few links that we wanted to highlight that didn't make it into the show because of our Supercon coverage:
- Back in October, Paul talked about Steph Piper's Maker Skill Trees. The book is now for sale - check it out!
- Speaking of Supercon, Chris Wilson shared on his blog what it was like going to Supercon for the first time.
- Paul is not embarrassed by his love of the BeeGees and this video of an integrated circuit chip walking to Stayin' Alive had him laughing out loud.
- Victoria Korhonen has created the world's smallest arcade machine. It plays pong and measures approximately 64 mm tall, 26 mm wide and 30 mm deep. (Via Hackaday)
- Dr. Angela Collier on Youtube: Tod's new favorite Youtube channel. Dr Collier is a theoretical physicist doing fairly unscripted and hilarious rants on physics and academia. Her "Magnetic forces do no work" answers a question that has always bugged me. But it's her almost 3-hour video "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" that I think will be her breakout hit. It shows how the cult-of-personality around Feynman detracts from his incredible accomplishments and has done a disservice science in general.
- FlatMac: This 49-minute video to recreate a 1980s concept sketch of an Apple tablet computer is a tour-de-force of hacking. It's got 3d-printing, hand-building, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, hacksaws to floppy drives, and more.
- ESP32 CYD - Cheap Yellow Display: There's a whole community of hacks and apps surrounding this cheap ESP32-based 2.8" touchscreen and its siblings. If you want to build some sort of WiFi-enabled something and only want to spend $15, this is the thing.
- Latest JWST image discovers aliens of the YipYip variety!
What We're Up To
Paul
What I'm watching: I haven't been up to much as I've been recovering from a successful surgical procedure. It has given me plenty of time to binge a few shows and catch up on a few movies.
- Tulsa King: Sylvester Stallone, in his first television role, stars as a New York mobster just released from prison after twenty five years. He's banished by his mob family to Tulsa, where he has to start over.
- What We Do in the Shadows: This show just wrapped up its sixth and final season. This mockumentary focuses on four vampires and their familiar who live in Staten Island and is laugh out loud funny.
- The Wild Robot: Yes, it's an animated movie. Yes, you should go see it.
What I'm working on I've also been 3D printing holiday decorations. Usually we don't do much for the holidays, but with the youngest two off to college this year, we decided to surprise them and went all out with the decorations this year.
Tod
What I'm watching:
- Skeleton Crew: Goonies goes to Mos Eisley. It's a Star Wars popcorn show and perfect fun. And while the kids come from "Space Suburbia" with its tract homes and car-centric society, I hope as it goes on we see that perhaps there's better ways to live.
- On the PBS app (or in Youtube), the wonderful shows "Eons" (natural history), "Reactions" (chemistry), and "Spacetime" (astrophysics). Each episode is 10-15 mins long and even if I know the topic, there's always some new aspect I learn.
What I'm working on I've been building my Music Thing Modular Workshop System kit. I just finished it! Here's the first sad robot noises I got out of it. It's a really well-thought out collection of modular synthesis functions (oscillators, filters, etc), plus the RP2040-based "Computer" that can of course be anything. I just finished building it and now am in the process of polishing up the Computer "cards" I designed for it over the summer, some written in CircuitPython!
For the last several years, my wife and I have been doing Advent of Code, a whimsical narrative of programming puzzles to solve using the framework of an advent calendar. These are not simple programming challenges, but often require deep knowledge of Computer Science topics I never was schooled on. So every day is a learning experience. The AoC subreddit is full of some genius programmers and very nice folk, so even if you can't solve the puzzles, you can learn new techniques. I'm using Python again, since it seems every time I think I know it, I find so much more I don't know. (for example, did you know that Python (and CircuitPython!) natively supports complex numbers? Try x=1+2j and you'll see you get a single value, and x*x == -3+4j!)
Coming up on the next episode
We'll be back in the new year on January 6th, and we'll each have three interesting things to share with you. If you enjoy the show, do us a favor and rate the show or write a review. Love this episode or email? Hated it? I want to hear about it! If you think there is something that could be improved, reply to this email because I want to know more!
You made it to the end! Here's a cat picture.
