mattw.fn_blog()

Jason Gondziola stopped by hacknight for some interviews. He is making a short film on North American Community Wireless Networks for Citizen Shift. Just a stop in the journey, he has already been to BCWireless, Wireless Toronto, Il Sans Fil, and NYCWireless.

Other than giving the general SeattleWireless story to Jason, we talked a bit about mesh networking, most notably the Meraki Mini (spawned from RoofNet), the recent MacBook exploit, and the upcoming Field Day.

This week at HackNight, we flew planes for an appropriate amount of time, watching Ken nearly lose his plane as it flew over the nearby church and landed in a far-away tree. We drifted back and forth through the technical as well as task and goal oriented discussions, but the one highlight (at least in my mind) was the discussion with Casey about the upcoming Field Day. Field Day cannot just be a technology demo given by a few of us to other people. It should be participatory and fun. It also needs some solid goals, deadlines and milestones, just like any other project. If you want to help out / participate / have fun, come to HackNight and tell us what you’re going to do to achieve that and what we need to do to help.

This week’s HackNight was dominated by little Styrofoam planes. We did get a sneak peek at an as-yet unreleased Samsung wifi phone. Small, stylish, seamless switching of GSM and WiFi networks *during* a call.   Eric is building out OpenWRT/OLSR packages for his Airlink router, and there were a pile of soldering irons out at one point. But mostly it was all about the planes.

This week’s HackNight was held in Cal Anderson Park.  We were hanging out next to some guys flying Aero Ace planes and they gave us the chance to do some piloting.  The planes are surprisingly manueverable and fun for $30 toys.  There are only 4 channels available, so it looks like we’ll either have to coordinate buying or figure out a way to move the frequency if we want to get a good dogfight going.

Arp storms getting you down? Discuss.

Someone needs to give me a black macbook. Seriously.

Gumstix with Bluetooth and audio? Not uselix at all.

Oh yeah, here’s my Zipit HOWTO from Wireless Hacks v2

Last night’s hacknight started out on Teletubby Hill then moved over to Vivace for coffee, cakes and beers. Beware the 6.9% alcohol by volume IPA. My task for the evening was deleting a weeks worth of spam and going through Hawaii pictures.

I took no pictures today, but it was a pretty interesting night. The Park/Vivace thing is working out pretty good, but once we have a few lattes and park ourselves in the Roasting Room, time pretty much whips by.

As usual, topics were all over the map, but we did chat a bit about how to build wireless voip mesh communication devices (think parasitic walkie talkie mesh boxes), the difference between mesh protocols for permanent and temporary infrastructure, and some TODO items for Pyramid Linux.

On the ‘pending nodes’ list, Bryan has moved into his new place over in the Central District. Rob has been talking with Brady and a few other folk over there as well. If all goes well, the CD could have a nice mesh soon.
On a completely different note, Adam Scott is eating nothing but Monkey Chow.

The rain earlier in the day kept us from meeting on top of teletubby hill, but we did find a nice dry concrete bench in the middle of the park to sit down and geek out. A battery/inverter setup was brought for portable power, but it didn’t really work out. Converting DC to AC back to DC eats a lot of juice and is best to be avoided. Portable lithium on the other hand, is pretty cool. I imagine by the end of summer we’ll all be showing up with solar rigs and windmills.
Casey, who has been missing in action for quite a while, showed up with his 3d camera and took a few pictures around the park. I got to play light meter with my digital, so it should be interesting to see how his shots turn out.

Wireless wise, Joe broke out the UMTS and added to the list of open APs. Bryan got openbsd installed on his laptop, some cable crimped and did a bit of new geek in town networking. We realized Jesika’s place could probably cover the park easily, and started murmuring about what it would take to put a park node up. Not bad for a day in the park I thought would be called on account of rain.

Tonight we met on Teletubby Hill at Cal Anderson Park, enjoying the sunshine and ripping through some Axis Digital Media Managers that Andy spotted on the way out of Vita.

We didn’t have power (I fear next week’s fixes), but we did have plenty of hardware in a pile, and once chris showed up, chips, dip and drinks. Not great for charging up gear, but great for energizing geekery.   We all had a great time out on the grass, and as long as the weather holds up, we’ll be meeting in the park.   If it’s rainy/cold/unbearable out, we fall back to Vita.

Technorati Tags: hacknight, seattle, seattlewireless