hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1227.txt

Episode: 1227
Title: HPR1227: Not-A-Con interview
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1227/hpr1227.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:58:25

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This is Mordancy with the Hacker Public Radio episode.
The following is an earn-in-free with the founder of NAACON, which I recorded last summer.
I thought the recording was lost, but recently found it on an old SD card.
So enjoy!
Hello, this is Mordancy with Hacker Public Radio, and I'm interviewing Froggy from the
NerdKnook who is the CEO for NAACON.
I like to call myself a founder.
Founder?
Okay.
So, for everybody who's not attended, what is NAACON?
Well, NAACON is essentially what hacking conventions are all about.
We try to distill hacking down into its base form.
In terms of how to do things with technology and other things that it wasn't originally
intended to do.
And NAACON, we focus on three different kinds of, our motto consists of basically three
different words, community, creativity, and technology.
We like to find communities of people that like to create and apply technologies in all
of its various forms.
So we try to bring people together who are interested in doing stuff, not necessarily
talking about stuff or seeing something being done.
We're all about doers.
So participate in.
Absolutely.
Being part of the community, which is exactly what Hacker Public Radio is all about.
Well, and it's actually why we call people who come to our event participants and not
attendees.
We realize that there's a really big difference between simply being somewhere and being
a part of something.
So we are very clear to make that distinction.
So this year was NAACON 9, and it was my first time for attending.
And one of the things I noticed that I've been seeing the other events is that all the
badges are circuit boards.
So can you tell us how you chose that as a?
Sure.
Well, I have to admit, we weren't the ones that kind of invented that.
There are a lot of other clans, including Defcon that did it first.
But I really liked the idea because it exemplified to me what we're all about.
We're all about people doing things and creating things and building things.
Our take was a little different than some of the other kinds.
And a lot of the badges like Defcon had the core of their badge pre-built.
A core concept of ours was to have as much of a dispossable built by the user so that
they can go through the process.
I said, well, here's how to make a good Saturday joint.
And here's how to work with somebody else who has a little more expert to get that mentoring
down.
So we've tried a different versions.
We've had an Arduino badge, and we've had a pick-based badge.
And every year, we try to do something a little different.
But we chose the hardware badge because it let us get a lot of flexibility in terms of
trying to spot our message and what we're all about.
It also looked pretty damn cool, so you can't argue that.
I really love putting mine together, and I'm trying to figure out more things to play
around with it at.
And that's why we do it, absolutely.
So can you think of any of the coolest things that you can remember seeing people do with
their badges?
Well, a couple years back with the Arduino badge, we had people do some really awesome things.
One person turned theirs into a fully autonomous robot, which I thought was awesome.
They went down to Ray O'Sheck, bought some gears, and some wheels, and some motors, and
built a robot.
Another friend of mine, Luis, put two badges together with their breadboards and managed
to do a sound synthesizer he put on, the sound chip from a sycogenesis, and managed to do
fully synthesized voices through that.
One of the coolest things was that he didn't actually leave enough room on the birdboard
to do all he wanted to do.
So he used the Arduino to actually do the waveforms for him.
So he used the pulse width modulation inside the Arduino to generate a lot of the sound
functionality that he was going to do on chip somewhere else.
So I thought that was really cool.
Very interesting.
But we always like to put plenty of room on the breadboard for blinky lights and other
stuff, because you can't go wrong with blinky lights.
So out of the nine years of Nauticon, what's been your favorite badge?
Our favorite, well we've only done the hardware badges two years.
Both badges were great in their own respects.
I really don't know if I can pick one over the other, because they both had disadvantages
and advantages.
I'm really excited about the Nauticon 10 patch, which hasn't been released yet and is still
in development.
And I'll decide who is one of our presenters last year agreed to do our badge for next
year, which will be 32-bit probably designed on an MSP, and will offer us a lot of power
and a lot of flexibility.
We're going to post the design in the specs early so people can have their own shields
and code and development already before they get to the con, because one of the other things
we realize is that we don't want people to dedicate their entire week in a sitting down
and programming their badges, since there's so many other awesome things that we want
to do as well.
Hopefully, we can get people to bring code bases ready for their badges so they can hit
the ground running and start to enhance their code with other people's code.
So one of the things I noticed beyond the normal talks at an event was the contest on the
last night of the show.
Yes, our Pixel Jam demo party now.
Can you tell me a little bit about the contest and the different I'll be happy to?
Demo parties don't really originate in the United States, actually.
They originated in Europe back in the late 70s and 80s, mainly as ways for demo coders
and demo groups who wrote the graphical cracks in the beginning of aptitude games and
all that other kind of stuff.
Instead of just cracking a game for the sake of cracking it, they realized, well, we can
actually start a community around people who just developed these awesome little bits of
code and generate graphics in audio as a way to one up, you know, as a way of one up
to the show.
I became aware of the demo scene in the late 80s, early 90s and it really kind of
congealed for me when I saw a second reality by the future crew, which was developed for
assembly in 1993 in Finland.
Since then, I've always kind of, I've really kind of, I'm trying to think of the work.
Well, I've appreciated everybody who's been in the demo scene.
I've really kind of looked up to them and admired them.
And since I really haven't done much demo coding, I thought, well, the best thing I could
do was just support demo parties.
We will do that initially through the home of Jason Scott and Radman from Asset and they
ran a black party, a party, a black party in Nanakon, starting in 2007.
A few years back, they decided to kind of do their own thing.
So we decided to keep the traditional life with our own event called Pixel Jam, it was
in the same spirit.
And what essentially is consists of our competitions at various things, anything from photography
to batch-acking to demos, which are essentially 3D graphics usually, 3D basically rendered
real-time demonstrations of what they can get the computer to do, whether it's to be
the fastest-running polygons, or to see how much programming they can throw into 64
kilobytes or 4 kilobytes, or even 1 kilobytes of space.
So we tried to encourage this kind of creativity because that's essentially what we were all
about initially.
I was very impressed watching that all of this.
There was a lot of great entries and we opened it up to people that weren't at the event,
which is a little bit unusual, but we like to encourage our European friends to help
kind of educate us and how to build our own demo scene here in the US.
Currently, there's only a few demo parties going on besides ourselves and at-party, which
takes place in Boston.
It's kind of a late-night form, but it really is what hacking is all about.
I like to think of it as that what hacker culture is in the United States is what
our demo culture is in Europe.
It's the same feeling, the same sense of community, they're just kind of doing it a different
way that we're doing hacking here in the US, but it's all the same concept and spirituality.
That makes a lot of sense.
So the talks, do you make those available to the public?
Are they recorded?
Yes.
We're very proud to have all of our talks online.
I think we have all of the audio recordings going back to Nauticon 1.
We have video starting at Nauticon 3.
All of that's available at Nauticonmedia.com.
We still haven't put up a mirror to our roast recent talks, but our good friend, Iron Geek,
has them available at his website, irongeek.com, I think, and we'll be marrying there shortly
as well or quarantining or whatever.
But all of those are freely available under Creative Commons license.
You can take them, share them with your friends, show them wherever you want.
We actively encourage this, as a matter of fact.
So for everybody who's ready and waiting for the next Nauticon, when is Nauticon 10?
If my memory serves me right, it will be April 18th to the 21st.
In April, 2013, it will be again at the Hilton Garden Inn, including Ohio, right downtown.
It will be, as you mentioned, it will be our 10th year.
All of the information will soon be available on our website, nauticon.org.
We're still in the process of revamping and launching before Defcon.
So more information will be available there.
We always throw stuff on our Twitter feed at Nauticon, and you can also follow me at Fraggie
Nauticon.
And I try to post some stuff on Nauticon every now and then in updates.
A quick note to Lord Dragon, blue to do not schedule Indiana Linux Fest on the same weekend.
I would appreciate it.
I know there's only so many weekends in the year.
I try not to cannibalize other kinds of the area.
I appreciate one of the people trying to give us that sink, et cetera.
And one of the hacker public radios that I plan on recording is what's in my bag, a list
of the little gadgets and stuff that I carry around with me.
And it just so happens that a lot of these gadgets that I have, I have purchased from
you.
Thank you.
Could you tell everybody a little bit about your company, too?
Sure.
Nerds and look, actually a few years back, it was originally called just the Nauticon store.
I became unemployed, and I decided the best thing to do was to spend a lot of money and
try to run my own business and run my own store, selling stuff that I thought was awesome.
I figured if I thought it was awesome, other people would too.
I've done fairly well, but unfortunately not well enough to call it a career.
So I've recently found another full-time job, but I'm still keeping the store alive and
going.
We sell lasers and emulator, hand-held emulators, K&D, plush, all kinds of random stuff, gadgets,
tools, soldering irons, as well as our Nauticon badges and parts kits, so that people can
get started in that as well.
And another one of the things that I bought was a beginner's electronics kit from Vellium.
Vell-men.
Vell-men, I think.
Vell-men, it has two little projects in it, and I'll be recording a separate hacker
public radio and how I got into electronics and the kits that I purchased from you.
And it's important with electronics if you don't know what you're doing to start small
because you're going to make a mouse and make some really bad cold solder joints.
I actually recently put together my Nauticon 8 badge finally, and I realized how rusty
I was at soldering and everything was a cold solder joint, so I had to go back and do
it again.
Once I got into the hang of it, I was really proud of how it looked, and it looked pretty
decent, so I'm looking forward to purging that finally and doing it.
One of the difficult things about an organizer is you really don't have time to play with
your own stuff with the con.
You're so busy helping people out and answering questions and talking with people, so you
don't get a whole lot of time to enjoy the other parts of the con.
So doing things like this and working and talking with a participant in Nauticon, it's
a great opportunity for me to actually see what else is going on that I missed, since there's
always so much going on.
And so we're here at a Baycon, I don't think I mentioned that at the beginning, which
is the Columbus Baycon Convention.
So what do you think of it?
Well this is our second year here, we're having a great time, obviously we're kind of stuck
here in the vendor's room for three days, 10 hours a day.
But the people are great, and a lot of people swung by and talked about Nauticon and other
con's in the area.
It's just a good celebration of geek them in Baycon, two things that go swimmingly well
together.
And it's helpful that some of the Baycon fairies have come around and made sure that we've
got samples of the treats before they disappeared into the con's room.
Well, I want to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to interview you, and hopefully
this will be up on Hacker Public Radio soon, and I look forward to Nauticon next year.
Sounds real good, and perhaps we can have Hacker Public Radio come and participate with
our own radio project, Nauticon Radio.
We do live streaming during that whole event too, so it might be a good way to get Hacker
Public Radio folks involved as well.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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