oggcamp

I was passing through Manchester on the way back from Scotland, so decided to go to my second Oggcamp. This is my belated writeup of it (and an attempt to remember some of the talks I saw)

There was a scheduled track, as well as two unconference tracks. Some of the talks for these went up very late, and I missed (most of) a couple I’d have liked to have seen.

Some highlights, in no particular order:

I caught the tail end of William Morland’s talk on Home Assistant, and discussion of wiring up boilers to it. Apparently Dutch gas boilers have to have an Operntherm interface, so something to consider when mine needs replacing.

There were only a couple of lightning talks unfortunately. There was an interesting one about an LED score-board for unicycle hockey(!), and using DNS exfiltration to get save the scores (and get the time) over a locked down wireless network.

Next up was a great talk on keeping an 80s laser tag system alive

Margaret Low gave a good talk on Turtlestitch (essentially Logo for embroidery). She spoke on this at the last Oggcamp, which had inspired me to go down a rabbit hole of making this, so it was nice to be able to say thanks for the inspiration.

There was an incredibly depressing talk about whistleblowing and content moderation in Big Tech; really bleak.

The retro computing show and tell was good - mostly Psions and Z88s

There was a great talk on repairing Dyson battery packs (which involved writing custom firmware to unbrick them).

One of the highlights was Charlie O’Hara’s on infrastructure as code. It was a great demo of Ansible, and concluded with a spontaneous (and somewhat nerve-wracking) “shall I delete my website live on stage and restore it”? (answers: yes and yes)

The whole event was great; really friendly and interesting people. (Maybe ~150 in total?)

This year the main track was recorded.

A great warm up for EMFCamp :-)