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Chaos Communication Camp 2015

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Update 2015-08-24: my Org-mode lightening talk

I was at the Chaos Communication Camp 2015 in Mildenberg near Berlin.

This is how I experienced this event:

Hardware

Besides the usual software projects/hacks, there were many hardware hacks on the camp. First of all, each participant got a software defined radio badge called rad1o with a wonderful hacker message on its back-side. There will be many projects with rad1o in the future. On the camp, a guy managed to build a radio (including an antenna) playing mp3 files to his walkie talkie over hundreds of meters within a few hours. Hacks like this one where someone is making some fun with a door bell will be swamping the world from now on. Be warned ;-)

Cool things like the Mate-Car or an offroad skateboard with motor were at the camp. The amalettomat of the metalab making thousands of crêpes (Palatschiken) was a favorite to many children and grown-ups.

Fun

A lot of things were done just for fun.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had her Neuland-moment which resulted in tweaked direction signs showing the way to the camp.

The power generators from Bredenoord quickly became defaced to a more suitable name. Somebody even created a Twitter account for the generators!

On the on-camp party train, there was the inevitable ball-pit on-train together with a decent cocktail bar and more.

Many people were enjoying the beautiful swimming lake with its ferry. With temperatures way beyond thirty degrees Celsius, this was quite necessary.

The historic - and very beautiful - area of the brick manufacture was pimped by many light installations. The artists who did this spent much effort even on small details:

After the big thunderstorm with heavy rain, people found a huge spotlight turned on with its power cables and a power distribution connector in a puddle! The cables were already smoking. Nobody dared touching it until a guy came along and re-filled the dry ice. This turned out to be a fun hack: the water-proof LED spotlight was operated by batteries, the power cables were not connected to anything at all, and the smoke was done via dry ice. What a great gag!

And those were just a few examples of nice hacks waiting for you around the next corner.

People

"Be excellent to each other" was the motto for the attendees. And the attendees followed and embraced it.

Alex wrote following message on Twitter (in German) which pretty much sums up the great spirit of the camp:

#cccamp15 is "when you forgot your notebook at night in front of your tent and someone plugged it in to a power adapter so that it doesn't run out of power!" #Freakshow

There were all kinds of people. I'd say that even Conchita Wurst would not have attracted any special attention. Men wearing mini-skirts, bras, and high heels, all kinds of hair-colors even sometimes multiple colors on one head, strange alien outfits, the usual tin-hats, and so forth.

And all of them were excellent to each other.

To my astonishment, there were many women at the camp. I don't have any numbers but I'd guess that a fifth to a third were female. Since our camp was near the children playgrounds I might be biased but there were lots of families with children as well. Kids with t-shirts with "future hacker" were visible all over. Promising future for the community.

Most of the attendees were from Germany of course. However, there were many others as well. I personally saw many folks from Spain or even the USA.

I met many interesting people on the camp. I had wonderful conversiations about all kinds of topics, tasted lovely Whiskey at the Whiskeyleaks-event, drank the Mate as everybody else, enjoyed the overwhelming excellence of the camp and its people!

Thanks for the unique experience!

My Lightening Talk about Org-mode

In the video of the Lightening Talks of day 2 starting at one hour and fourteen minutes, there is my quick teaser talk about Emacs Org-mode.

Enjoy it, especially when you're using vim.

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