Back to Sydney. Good to travel and see my delightful coworkers, but good to be home too.

DEFCON Badge Challenge

As has been tradition for the past 4 years, I attended DEFCON thanks to (and in honour of) my employers Bugcrowd.

The first year I went I joined a team that was trying to solve the annual badge challenge - the prize for which is a black badge, granting the holder perpetual free entry to DEFCON.

As usual, it was a doozy, and this write-up demonstrates part of how difficult it is. Actually being at the event, wanting to see everything, and simultaneously trying to work out what is and what is not a clue makes this puzzle a real head-scratcher.

A-Frame

I continue to experiment (lightly) with VR projects. I have no particular love of javascript, but I do love the web; getting up and running with my Vive and A-Frame only took about 20 minutes (you’ll need an experimental build of Chrome).

2 hours after that I’d found aframe-vive-cursor-component and have two fully-functioning Vive controllers in VR. I’m attempting to use that plus aframe-draw-shader to create a whiteboard that a user can draw on, with the goal of making that multi-user and putting it up on Github.

Possible earth-like in orbit of Proxima Centauri

Not entirely confirmed yet, but hugely exciting. Finding a planet in the goldilocks zone of such a (relatively) nearby star opens some interesting scientific missions.

Sadly it would still take us a long time to get there, so short of a complete revolution in physics, massive breakthroughs in fusion technology, or engineering on an unprecedented scale that gives us laser sails, visiting another star system is still just a dream.