!!Con West 2020
who it's for
makers and hardware hackers, creative coders and artists, indie game developers, educators and teachers in computing, data visualization and sonification practitioners, security and reverse engineers, systems and network operators
topics
DNS TXT record uses; pen plotter game development; reverse engineering game formats; data sonification techniques; infrared boolean photography; memory allocator concepts; zero-cost compilers and executables; program synthesis and metaprogramming; neural network inspection tools; 3D reconstruction photogrammetry; digital preservation and link rot; cheap self-hosted podcasting
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Opening remarks | lindsay cooper, Sohum Banerjea | 18m |
Announces practical logistics: locations of all-gender restrooms, left‑handed desks, lost‑and‑found and a request to wave instead of handshakes; posts the code… | ||
| big number small computer | Isis Lovecruft | 24m |
Code implements a post-quantum supersingular isogeny key exchange on a Commodore 64 6510 8-bit CPU. It builds 448-bit integers as 56 8-bit words, implements… | ||
| You can weave software into hardware! And then fly to the moon!! | Katie Broida | 10m |
Core rope memory is a hand‑woven read‑only store made of hair‑thin copper wire threaded through or around iron cores so a through‑thread = 1 and around = 0… | ||
| You can put WHAT in DNS TXT records?!?!! | Breanne Boland | 10m |
TXT records accept arbitrary printable ASCII (original 128) and are limited mainly by length (about 255 characters per string), so people pack data into them… | ||
| Wolf, Goat, and Cabbage In Two Styles!! | Jason Orendorff | 15m |
Implements the wolf‑goat‑cabbage puzzle in Inform 7 and Alloy, showing Inform’s rule engine and natural‑language syntax versus Alloy’s relational model and… | ||
| The Ancient Greeks and Their Restless Cattle: 2300 years of Bigints! | Aaron Wood | 11m |
Solves Archimedes’ Cattle Under the Sun by reducing it to Pell equations and using continued fractions to get the fundamental unit then raising a quadratic… | ||
| How To Host A Podcast For 25 Cents A Month! | Michelle Brenner | 13m |
Claim: host a podcast for about $0.25/month using Amazon S3 and minimal AWS services and Python scripts. Demonstrates creating S3 buckets (separate public… | ||
| Compilers for nothing, executables for free! | Vaibhav Sagar | 09m |
Claim: partial evaluation can take an interpreter plus a fixed program and produce a standalone executable, and further specializing the specializer yields a… | ||
| Writing Programs! That Write Other Programs!! | Nick Fitzgerald | 11m |
Claims an automatic peephole super-optimizer that synthesizes correct replacements, not just examples. Uses implemented CEGIS in Rust with Z3 to turn synthesis… | ||
| Plotty Bird: Making Modern Games on Retro Pen Plotters! | Wesley Aptekar-Cassels | 10m |
Builds playable Flappy Bird on a pen plotter and a mouse-driven maze by driving a mid-80s HP plotter with HPGL, mouse input, and a trick that reads the… | ||
| Reverse engineering game formats for fun and profit! (or just fun) | Spencer Alves | 11m |
Concrete, practical reverse engineering: a hex editor plus a decode view reveals integers, endianness, signedness, and floating points (look for 3f 80 00 00 as… | ||
| ba-ding! | Lito Nicolai | 11m |
Explains why the Nintendo logo scrolls and goes ba-ding! — the boot ROM compares an on‑cartridge bitmap as a trademark check and loops forever if pixels… | ||
| Sonification: You Can See Your Complex Data with Sound!! | don-E Merson | 14m |
Claims that sonification reveals extra data dimensions by combining discrete pitch bands, short melodies, timbre changes and stereo placement with visual… | ||
| Beyond the Black Rainbow: Using Booleans to Photograph IR Rainbows! | Phil Warren | 11m |
Claim: three-channel infrared color is possible by combining multiple IR-pass exposures and Boolean subtraction. Setup uses a camera with hot mirror removed… | ||
| Curses!! | Jeremy Apthorp | 12m |
Starts at telegraph hardware and traces the lineage to video terminals, showing concrete artifacts and numbers: a 1956 Whirlwind hookup of teletypewriters… | ||
| Opening Remarks, day 2 | 06m | |
Announcements list practical details: sponsors acknowledged, a matching donations up to $500 for the UCSC strike fund, and reporting channels for conduct… | ||
| def tech_liberation(): teaching agency in a programmed world! | Erin Rose Glass | 37m |
Claims that universities treat computing as neutral utility and that student data worth $890B–$1.2T drives surveillance get quantified: more than 50 grad… | ||
| The hacks behind my 3D reconstructed wedding cake topper! | Kathleen Tuite | 10m |
Project uses Kinect Fusion depth capture, inspects Shapeways network traffic and decoded Shapeways viewer with JavaScript to exported PLY geometry, then turns… | ||
| Delete all code! 100% testing coverage, the lazy way! | Matías Lang | 12m |
Claims a hack that will delete untested branches to give a codebase 100% coverage; builds a Python tool called magikov (GPL) that performs source-to-source… | ||
| Tex-Mex and malloc(3C): Restaurant Hosts and Memory Allocators! | Jordan Hendricks | 11m |
Restaurant seating maps onto malloc: 35 tables handle 20–40 waiting parties (~120 people) so hosts push tables together, first fit seating boosts throughput… | ||
| Of Muppets, Metaballs, and Ballroom Dance! | Dr. Kate Compton | 29m |
Covers concrete prototypes and what actually failed or shipped: particle-and-spring bodies, a Spore-like secondary-motion system, and a Google-backed webcam… | ||
| linkRot!! Dancing the patterns of digital decay | Sarah Nguyen | 12m |
A durational choreography that claims link rot and obsolescence can be embodied and audited, using audio of all talks recorded the day before and a live… | ||
| How I solved my NYC parking problem with Python! | Jessica Garson | 10m |
A small service polls the @NYCASP feed via the Twitter Developer Labs recent search endpoint, looks for the words suspended and tomorrow in the same tweet, and… | ||
| Packages, but in 3D! | Tiffany Tseng | 11m |
A web app called SVG Tracer converts photos of printed packaging diagrams into machine-ready SVGs that separate cut and score paths, using an image-to-vector… | ||
| Cisco Purses Cubed! | Tom Verbeure | 10m |
Twelve discounted pixel purses become a single working LED cube by reclaiming 12 purses for their hub75 panels and 48 AA cells and by repurposing obsolescent… | ||
| It's alive, but not for long!! | Maria Mishurenko | 11m |
Bizarre Barber is a VR haircutting game built with a procedural pipeline using Houdini VEX and Python to auto-export characters to the engine; the initial plan… | ||
| Get Hooked On Neural Net Inspection! That was a pun! | Naomi Saphra | 07m |
Shows exactly what hooks reveal and how to use them with PyTorch including PyTorch forward and backward hooks, how hook callbacks receive raw tensors and how… | ||
| Drag Makeovers, via AI! | Lee Butterman | 15m |
StyleGAN encodes faces in a 9000-dimensional latent space trained on ~70k Flickr faces and provides pre-trained models plus a live webcam demo at… | ||
| Closing remarks | 14m | |
A closing that promises 12 concrete steps for carrying the !!Con feeling into daily work and a cultural claim that the conference is like a shabbat spice… | ||
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