NYC Resistor

However, this is the wrong thread

This thread is about a branding exercise on CERN. Which is a pity, because trendy retro hipster feel-good sugar-coat marketing propaganda will do more harm to CERN and its cause than good on the long run. Ask Herwig Schopper if in doubt.

Just to illustrate my point, here is a quote:

­­After digging and digging, we came to the conclusion that the font rendered on screen wasn’t going to be a font-file, it was probably C code in the drivers for the screen. This was disheartening since there was no easy template to build from or convert.

The guy and his audience has apparently very little notion on how a terminal works (let alone how it is built), never mind about the computer itself. For educational purposes, here is a better way to go about a similar digging:

http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/

Which would actually lead to the old character map in the ROM that would be seen glowing on a CRT.

Case in point about XOFF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587088

And again, right on topic, however only accessible for those who do not suffer from functional analphabetism:

Strangely, not only has it forgotten how to fly, it also seems to have forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Legend has it that a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

ps: the post is old, because the issue is old and recurring. It…

I'm a big fan of hacker labs/collectives like Saul's Squid Labs. Here are some others I know of:

Squid Labs (Bay Area): http://www.squid-labs.com/

Applied Minds (LA): http://www.appliedminds.com/

Syyn Labs (LA): http://syynlabs.com/

NYC Resistor (NYC): http://nycresistor.com

Any others?

Wouldn't medium-sized and large companies benefit a lot from having small but independent (free to hack on whatever they feel like) "skunk works" labs like these? I'm not sure if the research labs at Microsoft, IBM are equivalent.

The Synn Labs folk are cool hackers. They often have their interactive tech projects on display at Mindshare. If you're in LA, Mindshare (http://mindshare.la) is a monthly event that I highly recommend.

The ones collected in my rss reader after years, as hackers in the general sense, not just security:

http://blawg.72dpiarmy.com/

http://arduino.cc/blog/

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arduino/

http://events.ccc.de/

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/chaos_tv.html

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/chaosradio_international.html

http://charlie137-2.blogspot.com/

http://www.flylogic.net/blog/

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/

http://har2009.org/

http://neil.fraser.name/

http://www.nycresistor.com/

http://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/

http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/

http://thepiratesdilemma.com/

http://the-shoebox.org/

Good luck, looking to see your memetracker ;)

But you can't tap a NFC tag from a distance. You can interact with QR codes from a range only limited by the size of the image, but NFC requires you to bring your reader within a few centimeters of the tag. And you can't print an NFC tag from a LaserJet, broadcast one on TV, or make one into a waffle [1].

Not that I have anything against NFC -- it's a rather interesting technology, with many useful applications that QR codes don't have. But QR codes have several properties that NFC doesn't, and by definition can never have.

[1] http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/11/24/our-demoslam-entry-tasty-qr-codes/

"... I'd like to meet up with a group of people that are technology-oriented ... recent transplant to New York ..."

Might be worth checking out http://www.nycresistor.com it provides a private workspace (something like $30/month) and project groups, accessing smart locals on Saturdays & Sundays. The events are here http://www.eventbrite.com/org/52408308?s=1 and you can read an NYT article ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/nyregion/thecity/28tink.html?_r=1 There is also HN thread somewhere (I killed 'SearchYC.com' looking for it).