!!Con 2020
2020-05-26..2020-05-28
-- online --
!!Con ·
[!!Con 2016, !!Con 2017, !!Con 2018, !!Con 2019, !!Con 2020, !!Con 2021, !!Con 2024]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote | Taeyoon Choi | 29m |
A guided walk through Nagwon Department Store shows karaoke-specific computer hardware, rows of every Boss pedal, and decades-old repair shops where masters… | ||
| The Taming of the Clue: Making a Crossword Solver Bot | Chloe Revery | 09m |
An algorithm cross-references clues with a historical database and auto-classifies clue types, solving about 30 percent of puzzles by exact clue matches. The… | ||
| Little Printing for everyone!!1 | Tamás Kádár | 10m |
History: the Little Printer servers shut down in 2015 and a revival appears in 2019; claim is concrete — anyone can turn any thermal printer into a Little… | ||
| Printing floating point numbers is surprisingly hard!! | Gargi Sharma | 11m |
Claim: converting binary floats to the shortest decimal that round-trips is subtle and many languages lack guarantees. The landscape is concrete: Dragon4 is… | ||
| Bringing back my 1998 by building an arduino that can recover a ... | Martin Gaston | 11m |
An Arduino using SPI reads an original PlayStation memory card by issuing the card protocol, iterating 1,024 frames of 128‑byte blocks, validating checksums… | ||
| Trapped in codepoints no more! I’m freeing Chinese characters | Gábor Ugray | 13m |
Project builds a machine-readable dataset of Chinese characters that records components, stroke order and function rather than single Unicode code points, and… | ||
| Reverse engineer your ski goggles for fun and profit! | Jonathan Kingsley | 10m |
Reverse engineering of Recon Instruments Snow2/Jet goggles pulls TI OMAP3 reference code and digs APKs to extract update URLs and package format, then crafts a… | ||
| Playing Breakout… inside a PDF!! | Omar Rizwan | 08m |
Claims a working Breakout playable inside a PDF when opened in Chrome by embedding PDF JavaScript, despite Chrome implementing only a weird subset of Adobe’s… | ||
| Obelisk and the Known Unknowns (Or: The Art of Fumbling Through your...) | Sacha Sayan | 15m |
Project Obelisk assembles cheap LED modules (32×16 panels sold for $10–$20 each, about 6000 nits brightness) onto a Raspberry Pi running Node/Express and a… | ||
| *Punch Card Love! A (Very!) Personal History of Computer Dating! | Amy Cash | 11m |
A personal account traces how a first-generation computer dating service used punch cards to match people and even produced the couple that led to a 1968… | ||
| Let’s implement DNS to learn history! | Dylan Nugent | 10m |
Over 256 RFCs define DNS so the exercise focuses on specific surprises: implemented a name server from RFC 1035, finds an erratum where the TTL is documented… | ||
| Recreating Photography of the 1850s in a Digital World | Phil Warren | 10m |
Analyzes why wet collodion-era portraits look high-contrast and sunken by measuring silver halide/tonal response and reproduces those effects by modifying… | ||
| EMAIL! | Char Stiles | 12m |
Shows concrete tricks and a small build: explains SMTP handshakes and how to send mail with telnet/netcat on port 25, highlights plus-addressing and… | ||
| Supercharged Dijkstra’s: Computing ‘shortest’ paths on large road... | Payas Rajan | 11m |
Claims a working Contraction Hierarchies implementation in Rust that answers shortest‑path queries on real road graphs (≈300,000 nodes, 800,000 edges)… | ||
| Quebec’s 735kv power lines can survive the apocalypse, but can they... | Nick Sweeting | 17m |
Quebec’s 735 kV grid survives extreme ice by design and by brute force: a 1998 storm shears off over 17,000+ poles after 2.8 inches of ice, forcing rebuilds… | ||
| Keynote: computational stichography! (or: connecting lines) | Allison Parrish | 41m |
A Gutenberg poetry corpus collects about three million lines (~52 MB) and feeds phonetic vectors (CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, feature counts, PCA to 50D) into… | ||
| Learning Your Aibisi s: Translating Chinese into Morse Code! | Franklin Hu | 10m |
This covers historical methods for encoding Chinese into Morse: the 1871 four‑digit codebook that maps thousands of characters to 0000–9999 (producing very… | ||
| The Making of a Mosquito.JS | Tim Holman | 10m |
Build uses the Web Audio API: oscillator node + gain node wired into an AudioContext, with sawtooth set around 750Hz (and notes about 10,000Hz for dog-only… | ||
| Using font shaping to put commas in big numbers EVERYWHERE!! | Tristan Hume | 10m |
Uses OpenType reverse chaining contextual single substitution to work right-to-left on digit sequences and duplicate digit glyph sets to hold counting state… | ||
| Sparking Musical Joy at Home With Magnetic Stripe Swipe Cards and... | Helen Hou-Sandí | 14m |
Raspberry Pi runs Pi Music Box to play Spotify URIs triggered by tactile magnetic stripe swipe cards, using a USB card reader that only reliably returns… | ||
| Bang Bang!! My Interpreter Shot Me Down! | Julia Tufts | 10m |
Covers exactly what !! returns and why, lists the actual falsy values, and traces parsing and interpretation in V8 so the double-bang’s evaluation path is… | ||
| Repair a Commodore 64 in just 64 Months!! | Matt Clawson | 23m |
Claims a thrift-store Commodore 64 goes from dead to booting after 64 Months of intermittent work documenting steps and dead ends; shows measurement with an… | ||
| 89 characters of base-11?! Mobile networking in rural Ethiopia! | Ben Kuhn | 14m |
Building a client‑server app that actually works in rural Ethiopia means replacing HTTP/TLS/TCP with hacks that fit real networks: squeezing requests into 113… | ||
| CBS Televised Computer-Generated Stories in 1960—and Ten Million Watched! | James Ryan | 11m |
CBS airs three computer‑generated playlets on October 26, 1960, created by SAGA II script generator running on the TXO machine; MIT delivers nine programmatic… | ||
| Programming from an alternate timeline! | Matthew Dockrey | 10m |
Recreates Frege’s 1879 branching notation as a working language called Gottlob implemented in JavaScript with a custom editor, turning IMPLIES (true in three… | ||
| Writing {{‘poems that change’, ‘chance poems’, ‘dynamic poetry’}}! | Andrew Yoon | 08m |
Claims a tiny language called Blur Markup Language (BML) lets writers encode weighted choices, inline JS eval, and seeded randomness so text is lazily… | ||
| We used a MIDI CONTROLLER to tune our GAMEFEEL! | Em Lazer-Walker | 11m |
Wired cheap MIDI sliders and knobs directly to game variables so physics constants like jump force, gravity, acceleration and turn radius are adjustable live… | ||
| Screwing up is easier than ever before! | Joshua Wise | 13m |
Claim: modern hardware hacking is cheap and fast — PCBs from Shenzhen arrive in a week, 10 boards for $20 and parts for about $30. Workflow uses KiCad and Rust… | ||
| nothing matches | ||