Freeside Atlanta

Through some crazy scheduling mishaps, two of the south/southeast hacker conventions are set to happen on the same day. The weekend of March 19 th will begin CarolinaCon and Outerz0ne, both returning for their 6 th year. In recent years the conventions have had talks ranging from embedded malicious javascript, Security Assessment Methodology , learning NMap, Format String Vulnerabilities and even how to travel on the airlines with a firearm. Local Hacker Cons For those that have never been to a local hacker convention, it’s completely different than something like DefCon. There are usually only around 80-150 attendees instead of thousands, this allows for anyone to have a 1 on 1 with the speaker if it’s a subject that you’re passionate about and would like further info. This also allows for all the attendees to get to know each other, even though many of us are introverted, after seeing the same people at 2 or 3 cons you end up talking and it’s always easier to talk to strangers

A bunch of us are in the middle of a short fad of fascination with magnets. I recently purchased about a thousand gold-plated spherical 6mm N35 neodymium-iron-boron magnets from Edwin Science . These are strong enough that swallowing two of them would probably require surgery . But I am not dumb enough to eat them, being far more interested in building things out of them, and thus I give you some photos of the nifty things I did when I got them, and some tips on how to assemble them. I regret not having the artistic skills or patience to illustrate all of the information I want to share here, but hopefully those interested can follow along. The first building block is a loop of magnets, with the poles aligned circumferentially (that is, a string of aligned magnets joined end to end). In the photos below, anywhere you see two parallel rows of magnets arranged in a square configuration, that indicates the adjacent rows are aligned in opposite directions, and almost always part of

We recently received our second order of Surprise Boxes and Display Assortments from Electronic Goldmine , and again we made a group activity out of unboxing and sorting the parts. Afterward I combined all the sorted containers from previous unboxings, both Freeside's and my own , and started categorizing things. The take this time was similar to last time. We got a lot of VFDs from the display assortments, which we can't use right now due to lack of a good cheap easy-to-reproduce 30-40V AC power supply, but those will be much fun later. We went with the "Super" (medium size) surprise boxes this time, to get more densely packed smaller components and less larger sparse items like the security hardware and R/C cars for last time. The choice parts this time included some high voltage relays, two-prong AC outlets, a bunch more 96x64 LCDs, a few dozen dual RJ45 jacks, some 10-segment LED bar graphs, and a lot of nice trim and dual-log pots. The bulk of the order w

I know I'm late getting around to posting these pics from the Hack-a-Thon that freeside participated in on Nov. 21, 2009, but got some pics from the projects I worked on. Here are some pics from the social side of the Hack-A-Thon: This is a quick project I did to make a hook system for my dogs food/water bowl so she didn't tip it over while in her crate. And this is some pics from my model rocket engine project. More details can be found at: www.shadow404.com/125