!!Con 2024
2024-08-24..2024-08-25
Santa Cruz, United States
!!Con ·
[!!Con 2016, !!Con 2017, !!Con 2018, !!Con 2019, !!Con 2020, !!Con 2021, !!Con 2024]
who it's for
retrocomputing enthusiasts, makers and hackers, creative coders, hardware engineers, interaction designers, typeface designers, data visualization designers
topics
recreating Sketchpad GUI; running a tiny neural network by hand; Braitenberg vehicle robotics; reversing Bluetooth protocols; designing your own microchip; keyboard building and ergonomics; textile-based data visualization; full-text street search; electromagnetic spectrum exploration; component-based Chinese typeface design; algorithmic garden layout generation; Voyager 1 recovery and preservation
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Let’s make local and accountable tech! | Dawn Walker | 25m |
A decade of experiments produces concrete artifacts: a Raspberry Pi + cjdns mesh nodes kit to share internet, a decentralized storage + verification prototype… | ||
| Programming with only exceptions! | Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya | 10m |
Builds a toy language called Hurl that uses only exceptions for control flow and claims it can express any computation; implements two forms of exceptions — a… | ||
| Let’s run a tiny chess neural network by hand! | Amédée d’Aboville | 13m |
Claim: a tiny chess neural net that fits on two pieces of paper using a sparse board encoding, incremental updates and clamp activation and integer arithmetic… | ||
| The astrolabe! Digital technology recreating ancient analog computers! | Jes Wolfe | 10m |
Recreates a working astrolabe using modern digital fabrication rather than handcrafting, producing engraved plates and a metal alidade that measure sun… | ||
| A brief history of keyboards! | Jesse Chen | 11m |
Finds a QWERTY keyboard 150 years ago and traces exact evidence through patent filings by Lam schols and subsequent prototypes, shows Remington taking the… | ||
| Recreating Sketchpad, the first GUI! | Adam Solove | 11m |
A browser recreation of Sketchpad actually reimplements the original claims: a working constraint solver that enforces perpendiculars and centers, an… | ||
| Images from a 1970s typewriter!!! | Phil Warren | 10m |
A 1971 Selectric typeball gets 3d-printed custom glyphs that render mosaics produced by a Python pipeline (Pillow plus an image-collage tool with CLI), mapping… | ||
| bang! bang! he murdered math! {the musical!} | Taylor Troesh | 13m |
A musical retelling that states concrete results and consequences: Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems — any consistent formal system that expresses arithmetic… | ||
| Huggable data! Making the ephemeral last with textile dataviz! | Aldís Elfarsdóttir | 09m |
Claims that textile encodings outlast digital bits and that tangible artifacts can preserve readable data for millennia. Shows PhD dress produced by machine… | ||
| Keyboarding ain't easy?? What not to do when building a keyboard!! | Liz Frost | 11m |
Build attempt uses DSA Dark Magical Girl keycaps on a custom PCB that never quite works: wrong KiCad drill and trace settings force a full reroute… | ||
| The perfect blend!! Reversing a Bluetooth protocol for better smoothies! | Ryan Mast | 10m |
Reverse engineers a bluetooth blender protocol and shows concrete results not promises: captures HCI via macOS PacketLogger instead of hardware sniffer, maps… | ||
| How to design your own microchip!!! | Omar Rizwan | 10m |
Designs RTL in SystemVerilog, runs an open-source toolchain (make_harden) to synthesize and place-and-route, and targets the SkyWater 180 nm process (compare… | ||
| Let’s find random things on the street with full-text search! | Yufeng Zhao | 10m |
A searchable index called “all texts in Brooklyn” turns Google Street View into a full‑text DB and actually returns street signs and stickers: 300,000 Street… | ||
| It wasn’t me, it was the cosmic rays! Blaming physics for evil actions! | Matías Lang | 11m |
Claim: a single event upset — a cosmic-ray–induced bit flip — can change an x86 conditional opcode (demoed as x74→x72 flip) in an OpenSSH binary to bypass… | ||
| It’s alive…. IT’S ALIVE!!! Braitenberg vehicles! | Devon Tao | 11m |
Claims that humanlike behavior needs only a couple of sensors and motors not trillions of parameters are demonstrated with a custom Braitenberg Vehicles… | ||
| Lord Zeus, please create a function called printBeerInsideLoop! | Daniel Temkin | 11m |
Olympus is a working esolang implemented in JavaScript with a PEG grammar so a line like printBeerInsideLoop actually exists as an invocation and compiles to… | ||
| 88 files a second - running Flappy Bird inside macOS Finder! | Nolen Royalty | 10m |
Claims running Flappy Bird inside macOS Finder at 4 frames a second and 88 files a second by abusing the Finder “last opened” timestamp. Implementation uses… | ||
| This is the poem that doesn’t end!! or, the poetics of RNG! | Alicia Guo | 10m |
Builds an endless browser poem with a context free grammar implemented via tools like Tracery and Rita and a generator that refreshes new lines on demand and… | ||
| Algorithmically generated flower beds!! | Rebecca Ravenoak | 12m |
Algorithmic system maps a Crackle / Jämtlandsdräll weave into 4x4 SVG tiles and a JavaScript renderer that takes two block sequences (A B C D) and outputs… | ||
| Exploring the invisible: adventures in the electromagnetic spectrum!! | blinry | 12m |
A $30 USB SDR dongle plus open-source decoders yields concrete outcomes: 50 experiments in a week, including decoded NOAA weather-satellite images (first… | ||
| Backtraces in the mirror: mad science by secrets of elves & dwarves!! | Julian Squires | 10m |
Claims a practical way to reconstruct cold stack frames without stopping the program by unwinding from the bottom using ELF header entry point and DWARF… | ||
| Making Chinese typefaces! With components!!??!! | Ivan Zhao | 13m |
Claims that component-based interpolation cuts creation time for an 8,000 character font into something practical, and demonstrates a working pipeline: define… | ||
| Calculating the ideal “Sex and the City” polycule! | Juan Pablo Sarmiento | 11m |
Claims a computable polycule compatibility score and ships a dashboard and GitHub with the code. Uses 14 relationship traits from mindbodygreen, rates eight… | ||
| SATisfying answers to difficult questions! | Vaibhav Sagar | 10m |
Overview of concrete methods and limits: explains how problems become CNF and shows a Sudoku encoding with nine Booleans per cell, implements DPLL with unit… | ||
| How to stop worrying & collect early banner ads! | Richard Lewei Huang, Yufeng Zhao | 11m |
Built an interactive archive called Banner Depot 2000 that scrapes the Wayback Machine using ~77,000 URLs from printed internet directories and extracts images… | ||
| Riveting insights! Bridge.Watch and America’s infrastructure | Maryanne Wachter | 12m |
An open dataset from the FHWA (about 600,000 bridges) becomes an interactive pipeline: CSVs cleaned with Visidata and pandas, served through PostGIS, vector… | ||
| Domain names! Where do they come from??? | Wesley Aptekar-Cassels | 11m |
Registers cost $180,000 to apply for and ICANN charges about $0.18 per registration while registrar accreditation runs about $4,000 a year, and the surprising… | ||
| Mutating text toward better nonsense?! | Max Kreminski | 11m |
Three small systems demonstrate concrete results: a Scrabble mod called Blabrecs uses a trigram and CNN classifier to accept nonsense that scores more probable… | ||
| Saving Voyager 1! | Bruce Waggoner | 35m |
Voyager 1 loses all downlink telemetry in late 2023 while 15 billion miles away and a tiny Flight Data System failure stops frame markers; the team diagnoses… | ||
| It’s skeuomorphin’ time!! The enduring physicality of braille! | Santiago Gepigon III | 12m |
Claims that tactile legacy tech revives physical computing via concrete examples spanning three centuries: the 19th slate and stylus method for embossing… | ||
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