Settling down

We arrived at the camp site on early Tuesday afternoon. After taking a look around and not getting a second "REMOVE YOUR CAR NOW!" slip of paper (because we still had the first ones ...), we actually did find a spot for our village right after the entrance. It provided a satisfactory place for ten guys to stay six days.

Getting (more or less) everything built up, in place and working took until the late evenening. Our luxurious setup includes a big tent (with carpet!) and an awning of about the same size for hanging out, some tables, lots of chairs, even a sofa, 32 A heavy current connection, Cisco Router and VPN, a fridge, cooking with electricity and two types of gas, various light equipment (including flexible light tubes that made our tent look like some kind of fairground booth), a satellite dish, a full-size spade (which should be come very handy later on), lots of power and network cabling (including fiber), servers, some VoIP telephones (and our standard cordless DECT phones, of course), multiple ventilators, and even more stuff I forgot about.

Environment

The weather was excellent, with temperatures just below "too hot" -- with Saturday being the exception when it was pouring with rain, flooding many tents. Thanks to the spade mentioned above and a trench digged the day before, it didn't turn into a disaster. Others seem to have had less luck.

The light installations everywere were made up of vertical fluorescent tubes along the ways, blinking lamps and very bright, rotating spots on the shelters, mirror balls (one between some smaller birch trees, a priceless look!), lasers (they recreated GRL's Laser Tag), a huge VU meter, lights inside the museum's airplanes standing all around, and any other kind of light emitting device and created a surpassing atmosphere.

Toilets and showers were available, but the latter met some sewerage limitations so we showered outside the camp. Toilets were usually in acceptable conditions, though.

FooBlah

The lectures were quite good, but not that interesting overall. Actually, I just visited the "Foo" and "Bar" shelters (or, more specific: only "Foo") just for the opening event and "Powerpoint Karaoke" (which was definitely lots of fun). Since we had a big amplified loudspeaker and a spare TFT, we attached the latter overarm to a tent bar and were able to watch the lectures in our tent henceforth. Very nice. Will download and watch some of the rest at home.

Quite a lot of guys brought their fantastic quadrocopters/microcopters/flying drones and there were quite some talks about drones and related technology.

Activities

Mostly having fun and enjoing the atmosphere. Doing some coding and other usual stuff in between.

Regarding electronics, I (with the great help and mentoring of razzor, thanks for that) spent hours to attach some TTL to an old 8-port network hub, so I could read its connectivity status via a parallel port and some Python code into my laptop. Although there are some control or input issues (maybe some wiring went wrong), it basically works.

Before the camp, I heard of BookCrossing and brought some books to register, label and release. I (incidentally) attended the workshop which was quite interesting. I released my books at the hackcenter and they were gone by the next time I came there.

Lockpicking was fun, I should've stayed there a little longer.

Nice gadgets I were able to further examine include the OpenMoko phone ([1], [2]) and two revisions of the OLPC.

Oh, and we made the crazy decision to take part in the Hacking Capture The Flag starting on Saturday (with some hours delay due to the heavy rain) contest. Surprisingly, we made the second place. And since we didn't earn any attack points (exploits were ready, but the other teams didn't have the required services running ...) we got called white hats ;)

Final words

There is tons of stuff I left out so far, sorry for that. Lots of interesting people with interesting projects of which I probably might have missed the biggest part, anyway.

The camp was a great experience I clearly don't want to have missed. Kudos to everyone involved in making this event happen, including the organizers, angels, lecturers and all attendees!

Take a look at the pictures I took. The gallery was created by gallerize, which was itself actually started on the camp just for presenting these photos. Additional pictures are listed on the camp wiki's photos page.