Pwn!

The blog needed something new XD

HackDay 2007 round-up

It’s been a few days since I returned home from London HackDay 2007, the first Yahoo! and BBC sponsored Hackday in Europe was a hit success, this was surely a weekend I won’t forget for a long time.

I have no words to describe how fantastic all of this was, there were talks about many of Yahoo’s and BBC’s API’s and other subjects, a enormous palace, pizza, lightning, indoor rain, faceball, blimps, annoying Nazbatag’s, Lego NXT robots with stencils, Doctor Who, GPS, mentos and coke experiences, Halo 2 multiplayer combat, playing Rayman on the Wii , lot’s of bluetooth and wi-fi hacks, the Rumble Strips concert, beanbags (I got mine!) and over seventy strange, creative and fantastic projects submitted for appreciation by the HackDay judges.

Want to know more?

• See the photos in the Flickr Gallery;
• Watch the short version of the Hack Day London Video (or the 15 minute long uncut one);
• Read the article from Wired Magazine;
• See or experience the winning hacks from HackDay at Yahoo! Developer website or in the wiki;

Anyway, I hope this serves as an example and more events like this show up in Europe, I guess when people feel they’ll learn a lot from the experience, they’ll participate and endure heaven and earth for things to be successful (even indoor raining).

So Kudos to the all the backstage crew at Yahoo and BBC for putting together this amazing event and all the great people who participated.

Interesting Patents

I’ve been truly busy in the last few days and haven’t given much attention to the blog but I’ll put some effort in the next days.

Anyway, I recently discovered Google Patents and decided to list the top 5 most interesting patents I’ve found.

1. Electrified table - cloth Richard E. Mahan

An electrified table cloth to prevent crawling insects or fry your unsuspecting family in anual meetings, who knows.

2. Method of stopping a stolen car without a high-speed chase, utilizing a bar code - Young Ill Choi

This is hilarious and aparently involves one of the following:

1. turn off the engine (uh?)
2. puncture the rear tires with bullets (with a pistol installed inside of both of the rear wheel covers)
3. puncture the rear tires by mechanical means (with two anchor knives which are installed inside of both of the rear wheel covers).

3. Monkey shaped camera bag - Michelle R. Kranz

I think this should be part of the next Bond movie, somewhere, I don’t care. We need a scene with a monkey shaped camera bag, pronto!

4. Finger Puppet - Hobart Ford

“The ornamental design for a finger puppet (…)”, dude, those are glasses… for a finger! How fantastic is that? Well not much, really.

5. Device for the treatment of hiccups - Philip Charles Ehlinger, Jr.

It seems the best way to treat hiccups is to shock someone until it passes, combine this with the table cloth for better results.

So, found any interesting patent worth sharing?