In August we were back in full force and with human-approved random presenter order! Oh, it was a fine time indeed. Thanks to everyone, and especially all the hackpad contributors to these notes!
Reed showed a cool JS trick to auto-scroll kittens in socks.
Speaker 1 - Tim Hui
Tim has some papers, but he brought us the apparatus itself for Microcurrent Injury Detection aka injury detection by zapping audience members. If you are injured the current drops near the injury and the audio from the tester decreases. It’s really quite painless - and tests were IRB cleared! So now you can detect injury without doing a complicated MRI. Nice!
Speaker 2 - Reed Spool
It’s happened to all of us: you break your phone and want to send text messages via SMTP from the command line instead, for free, via network SMS gateway addresses. But how do you know which carrier address to use? Reed solved this problem by writing ruby_email_txt (uses the gmail gem). (Also featured: a novel secure hashing algorithms for passwords.)
Speaker 3 - Michael Schade
Michael showed his literate color picker tool, along the way enlightening us as to the intricacies of web colors with his presentation. We were all quite impress.js‘ed! It’s a way to get CSS names and color codes from images, and you can see some examples!
Some examples worked better than others.
Speaker 4 - Julia Longtin
Julia showed her process for Microwave Aluminium Printing. You take a 3D-printed plastic (PLA) mold and turn it into an aluminum part with a microwave (@_@). So far only three killed microwaves, for five cast aluminum parts. This was seriously mind-blowing! Seems like there’s a lot of cool stuff going on out at HacDC! (Wait what? HacDC on Wikipedia)
Speaker 5 - Levent Gurses
Levent showed BayBucks. Built on jquery, angular, and firebase as part of a hackathon, it’s now “a mobile platform designed to help the Chesapeake Bay through collective action. It relies on incentives (Baybucks) that reward everyday citizens who take action for a healthier Chesapeake Bay. It uses market forces, combined with social awareness and gamification, to achieve environmental change.” So you do something good and get baybucks, and then you can redeem your baybucks for stuff!
Addendum! The day after presenting at Hack and Tell DC, BayBucks was declared the winner of the DataBay “Reclaim the Bay” Innovation Challenge. COINCIDENCE??? (Congratulations, Levent!)
Thanks again to all the presenters, to WeWork, and to everyone who came out and made Hack and Tell great! Continue being awesome!