By @edent · hackathon hackday solar · 400 words · read ~132 times.
Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient. There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams […]
Continue reading →By @edent · hackathon hackday nhs nhshd · 550 words · read ~198 times.
It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · alexa developer hackday nhshd python · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~483 times.
Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete. So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a […]
Continue reading →By @edent · conference food hackday inclusive NaBloPoMo vegan vegetarian · 3 comments · 350 words · read ~275 times.
I go to lots of conferences, unconferences, hackdays, and tech events. As a vegetarian, I'm used to being relegated to second-class when it comes to event catering. If I'm lucky, I get some cheese sandwiches mingled with a plate of meaty snacks. That's why I was overjoyed at ODF Plugfest Rome when the organisers made […]
Continue reading →By @edent · hackday talks unconference · 800 words
A quick round up of the fascinating talks at the Hackaday London Unconference. This was a slight twist on the usual unconference format. There was only one room - so it was a single track event. There were three invited speakers who had presentations of 15 minutes - everyone else pitched for 7 minute slots. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · games hackathon hackday oxford · 1,250 words · read ~204 times.
I'm a little obsessed with collaborative games. I'm bored with fighting against my friends, trying to bankrupt them, or simply beating them into submission. I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset […]
Continue reading →By @edent · hackathon hackday oxford shakespeare · 1,250 words · read ~169 times.
On Saturday, I attended the Shakespearean HackFest organised by HiCor / TORCH at Oxford University. I'd like to discuss the hack our team created and how the event differed (in a positive way) from other hack days I've been to. The Event On arrival at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, I was automatically assigned to a […]
Continue reading →By @edent · google hackathon hackday · 2 comments · 850 words · read ~868 times.
So Google Ventures is swinging in to London Town, dragging one hundred meeeeeellion dollars with it. Wow! What a way to reinvigorate the European tech scene. All that cash is sure to filter its way down into the economy. Viva la trickle-down economics! Or, not so much. Earlier last week, I was asked if I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · 3d printing FailSafe2014 hackathon hackday · 1 comment · 500 words · read ~1,189 times.
Rewired State have just announced "End Of The World Hack" We know the earth is about to be bombarded with solar flares and magnetic storms of varying ferocity on July 4th, 5th and 6th 2014, by which time the infrastructure of the energy and communications networks will have been completely decimated across the entire planet. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ble bluetooth energy hackday hacks necropost o2 · 850 words
This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, most of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination. Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices […]
Continue reading →