!!Con 2021
2021-05-15..2021-05-22
-- online --
!!Con ·
[!!Con 2016, !!Con 2017, !!Con 2018, !!Con 2019, !!Con 2020, !!Con 2021, !!Con 2024]
as the organisers put it
!!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”) 2021 was a week of ten-minute talks (with lots of breaks, of course!) to celebrate the joyous, exciting, and surprising moments in computing.
who it's for
interactive artists, game developers, hardware hackers, tooling and language developers, educators and workshop organisers, data-forensics engineers
topics
voice-driven code editing (Cursorless); bitmap circuit design language (Reso); Teensy-based audio drum interface; GIF real-time multiplayer streams; mojibake detection and repair (ftfy); Nintendo cartridge reverse engineering; Unicode-aware esoteric programming tricks; Game of Life unlimited-register machine; crocheted and textile 3D graphics; year-by-year text games history
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Keynote: CodingFutureCoders | Angie Jones | 28m |
Argues that 1980s marketing caused a dip in women studying CS and that early exposure fixes it, cites Twitter ages and NPR's decline, and highlights… | ||
| Learning to code with Doom! (Now I’m even more confused!) | Phil Salvador | 10m |
A single joke feature — playing one sound — ripples into a tangle of legacy engines and hacks: the constant screaming mode requires working around the morph… | ||
| From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon: 50 Years of Text Games! | Aaron A. Reed | 10m |
Covers a year‑by‑year blog project that picks one text game per year since Oregon Trail 1971 and claims weekly blog covering 50 games; digs into concrete… | ||
| Cursorless: keyboards and mice are sooo last year!! | Pokey Rule | 09m |
Cursorless is a voice-coding layer built on Talon and VSCode that maps tokens to spoken “hats” so commands like swap funky fine whale jump or act on code… | ||
| Making a pixel-y circuit design language and then building circuits in it!! | Lynn Pepin | 11m |
A bitmap-based circuit language called Reso encodes wires and gates as pixels so graphics editors become the IDE; it implements AND/OR/XOR/NOT using… | ||
| wintln!(): teaching an ELF to uwu!! | Jade Fink | 11m |
The prototype inserts itself into the process with a single function call by overwriting the GOT relocation so all write and println output passes through a… | ||
| Bang Bang!! Hacking Switch Controllers to Play Rhythm Games Using... | Nathan Kiesman | 10m |
Builds a homemade taiko drum interface that turns microphone audio into Switch button presses and it works. Uses a Teensy microcontroller with the Teensy audio… | ||
| Crocheted! Computer! Graphics! | Patrick Stefaniak | 10m |
Claims that textile craft translates to 3D graphics through concrete artifacts: a one‑meter crocheted cube that visitors can pick up, a grid of 64 3D‑printed… | ||
| Beware the Dreaded Dead End!! | Richard Schneeman | 11m |
An over-the-top AI pathfinding algorithm takes broken Ruby source, uses the Ripper lexer to tokenise and a goal-seeking explorer that comments out… | ||
| Night of the living GIF: Making interactive multiplayer experiences.. | Andrew Sillers | 11m |
Shows how an IMG tag and HTTP can become a client for stateful multiplayer games by treating a GIF as a GIF as real-time stream and using links/302 redirects… | ||
| Building Weird Things With With The National Hockey League Using Ruby! | Wade Minter | 10m |
Uses Ruby to glue the NHL stats web API to a car via a Tesla API Ruby gem, with three classes, a cron job that polls every five minutes and logic that wakes… | ||
| Mojibake! What the h—ck happened to these strings? | Robyn Speer | 12m |
A Python module called ftfy detects and undoes real-world mojibake — including piled-up cases that require decoding three layers to recover the original text —… | ||
| Save Icons! In Real Life?! (My Love of the Floppy Disk!) | Wilkie | 11m |
Explains how floppies store bits by magnetic polarity changes and how a small encoding tweak—frequency modulation encoding versus modified FM—turns into a… | ||
| Tropes! Cliches! Made-Up Slang! It’s the Data-Sitters Club! | Quinn Dombrowski | 09m |
A computational corpus of Baby‑Sitters Club books gets tokenized, aligned, and compared across ~20 languages to make concrete claims: diff-match-patch reveals… | ||
| GoLlURM! The Game of Life (limited) Unlimited-Register Machine! | Nicholas Carlini | 10m |
Claims a working GoLlURM CPU implemented entirely in Conway’s Game of Life using gliders and three instructions (INC, DEC, JUMP_IF_ZERO), builds 16 four‑bit… | ||
| Let me at my data! Pulling pictures out of an undocumented file format | Alex Pounds | 10m |
Reverse engineers an undocumented Fog of World file format and proves it contains 515-byte chunks (512 bytes of a 64×64 monochrome subtile plus three mystery… | ||
| NetMonster: A trip through early 2000s internet and the monsters hidden inside websites! | Rocky Kev | 10m |
NetMonster exists circa 1999–2001 as a collectible web game where one URL equals one monster and badges hidden on fan pages generate specific creatures the… | ||
| Numeric Data Types in the Wild; or: Let’s Look at Last Night’s Dinner Receipt! | Michael Woods | 10m |
A shipped POS printout shows specific failures: a brisket line prints an absurdly precise float — effectively 1200× precision beyond any measurable reality —… | ||
| Nifty Weaving Tools: A Different Kind of Color Picker! | Rebecca Ravenoak | 11m |
A web app that predicts woven color outcomes using the yarn maker’s product images and a 76‑color palette replaces trial swatches and the dreaded 2.2 trillion… | ||
| It’s my party and I’ll build my own virtual social platform if I want to! | Sara Farquharson | 11m |
Project builds a web game UI with Phaser, wires media with Jitsi and WebRTC, and layers audio spatialization to let small groups form naturally. Peer-to-peer… | ||
| Do your eyes hurt? All you need is cardboard and motors!!... | Dasha Llina | 10m |
A DIY project builds cardboard and motors contraptions with lots of superglue, two Arduinos and oversized motors that sometimes rip off flimsy frames… | ||
| Changing a Single Byte Saves Me Seconds Every Day! | Sven Dahlstrand | 11m |
Reverse-engineering a Game Boy Tetris cartridge, this person dumps the ROM with yellow bags and a flashcart, inspects bytes with a hex editor and debugs in… | ||
| It’s like you’re actually there! Mouse synchronization in an... | Paweł Marczewski | 10m |
A playable online Mahjong tabletop is built that shows each player’s actual cursor and piece motion; cursor position comes from a raycast into the 3D world… | ||
| tzdata: Back to the Future! | John Feminella | 10m |
A single line in tzdata ties modern clocks to a historical legal change and every system that schedules or logs depends on it being right. The dataset contains… | ||
| Oh, no! The Lowest-level* Programming Language is Unicode-aware... | JeanHeyd Meneide | 11m |
Claim: Unicode can be added to C, not just promised. Work uses a homegrown library that implements conversion functions and a standards prototype, plus emails… | ||
| Enter the Minus World! Nintendo Cartridges Share Secrets! | Paul Pollack | 10m |
Demonstrates a reproducible hot cartridge swap that Japanese gamers originally used to access up to 256 possible worlds in Super Mario Bros by exploiting the… | ||
| Option hack that 30 year old oscilloscope! | Tom Verbeure | 11m |
A $160 eBay Tektronix scope gets concrete upgrades: firmware dumped over GPIB, RS232 console opened, strings and Ghidra reverse engineering used to find… | ||
| compilers HATE him: use this ONE WEIRD TRICK to hide a message...! | William Woodruff | 11m |
Claims a practical steganography method that flips instruction encodings to hide bits by exploiting ModR/M and opcode direction bit collisions, implemented as… | ||
| Dithers of the Error-Diffusion Kind! | Daniel Temkin | 09m |
A scoring algorithm blurs dithered and original images and compares them with structural similarity index measure to quantify quality across a Creative Commons… | ||
| It’s a picture! It’s a program!! It’s Piet!!! | Anjana Vakil | 15m |
Image files execute as code: contiguous color regions become integers, a direction pointer walks edges, and color transitions map to stack operations, so Piet… | ||
| The Brave Little Database! | Alicja Raszkowska | 11m |
A small production database runs into a RAM exhaustion crash, reboots into read‑only mode, and accumulates a huge backlog of delayed jobs and indexes that slow… | ||
| Making Music! In Emacs?! | Zachary Kanfer | 10m |
Builds zmusic inside Emacs and describes concrete choices: uses Emacs text properties and font rendering, implements the WAVE file format by writing samples to… | ||
| Geometric derivations of RGB colorspace! The strange eyeball science... | Laura Kurup | 14m |
Builds RGB LED clocks, writes linear fades using 8‑bit 0–255 bytes, and sees unexpected pulsing because human luminance is non‑linear. Reports one out of eight… | ||
| How layers upon layers of hacky abstractions turned Doom II into the best kart racer!! | Kimberly Wilber | 10m |
Recounts the 25-year creative history and the concrete hacks that turn the 1994 Doom engine into SRB2Kart: file-format workarounds, map-format tricks, and… | ||
| Ride on Model Railway Signalling using Kubernetes! | Jonathan Kingsley | 12m |
Claim: container orchestration prevents collisions on ride‑on layouts by running each sensor and actuator as its own microservice. Hardware uses Raspberry Pis… | ||
| making our own napster so we can party like it’s 1999! | Martin Gaston | 12m |
Recreates a tiny Napster: reverse-engineers opennap protocol, implements length/type/data packets and hex headers, uses Python sockets over TCP, encodes data… | ||
| Closing Keynote: The Joy and Excitement of Forbidden Computer | Kate Temkin | 32m |
A hardware/software project reproduces QEMU/Kimu’s TCG by emitting pre-generated gadget chains (every ARM64 snippet for Kimu IR) and stitching them with a… | ||
| How !!Con came to be! | Julia Evans | 10m |
Origin story traces to 2013 when colleagues invent a fake conference to get one attendee’s travel covered, then actually build it: a programming‑focused CFP… | ||
| nothing matches | ||