This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Stuart Langridge. Original Post: Two cool things that happened at OpenTech Feed Title: as days pass by Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Stuart Langridge Latest Posts From as days pass by

The first cool thing that happened at OpenTech was that Danny O‘Brien set up a pledge to donate a fiver a month to a new UK EFF which I signed up for. I signed up by phone, very smoothly; Francis Irving explained that you can associate your phone signup with an existing PledgeBank “account“, which I did. And I’m the first person on the list on the website, although I was actually the second to sign up because the first hasn’t put his name on it :) If you’re in favour of digital freedoms in the UK then you should think about signing up too; the pledge requires a thousand people, which would give this putative UK organisation five grand a month.
The second cool thing was some “physical media hacking”: Ewan Spence asked for people with iPod Shuffles to come down to the front. He had five volunteers; he took their Shuffles and put them in a box, and then, while saying “and now we hack this media!“, shook the box and then gave each of the five back a random Shuffle. Ha! Good things about this: as Ewan said, this is what media hacking is all about; you try a new thing, and if you don’t like it you go back to what you had before. And it was hilarious. The people who were shuffled didn’t think so, mind; one bloke had a face as black as thunder. He may have had some private information other than mp3s on it, mind; nonetheless, it was an excellent bit of crowd-pleasing by Ewan.