Hackitat - A film about political hacking, world wide

Around the world there is a network of hackerspaces that explore, hack and create new ways of expressing themselves with technology. Hackerspaces that by some are seen as a threat to our digital society.

What is it that drives these people? What are their purpose and their reasons for what they do? How do they live their lives? These are some of the questions we will seek to answer with this movie as we meet hackers and visit their hackerspaces.

Help us out on Indiegogo to make this film:

http://www.indiegogo.com/hackitat-a-film-about-political-hacking-world-wide

Hackaday

There is no single and definitive definition of what hacking is. We all have different versions of similar ideas in our head, but depending on your background and area of enthusiasm, hacking means something different. While dictionary.com has many definitions of the word itself, none seem to cover what we see on a daily basis.

We set out to define “hacking” ourselves. We tossed around words like “modify”, “kludge”, “explore”, and “create”. Each time we committed an increasingly vague definition onto the page, we decided it was too narrow and tossed it in the proverbial trash. The variations were just too many.

What we do know is that “hacking” seems to breed advancement and innovation. Much like mutations in an evolutionary chain, each hack pushes the topic in a slightly new direction, inspiring others and thereby perpretuating the evolutary event. In a very short time we’ve witnessed hacking bring forth the evolution of wagons to cars, kites to airplanes, and the creation of the computer.

We at Hackaday would like to declaire August 11th to be “International Hack Day”. A day to celebrate hacking in all of its diverse forms. From soldering to sewing, coding to carbonating, knitting to knurling, we want you to keep on hacking. Take August 11th as a day to show pride in your hacking. Waive your hacker flag high and educate those around you.

A PA DO LOUP - Self sustanable Hack&DIY festival

Self sustanable Hack&DIY festival from 12 to 22th August 2012 in Pado, 06470 Beuil, Alpes Maritimes. France. 1600mt high.

Come and leave the epicenters, quit your urban groves to join us in Pado, at 1600 m, during the storms season, at the territory of wolfs. For recovering from daily binding schedules, we want to avoid this summer having journeys divided into 7 sessions taking each 1 hour during the 7 days of the week, to privilege a matter that is highly rarefied: time. To help the gradual withdrawal, A Pado Loup Festival make a call to people wanting to propose and be part of a collective time around many projects ; to finish some others, engage new ones, and take the time to continue or rethink all those left fallow during the year. So no list of conferences in the program, but periods of workshops, meetings and discussions. The festival is expected to gradually find its natural shape and create a sort of constellation of flexible and interconnected workshops, which we have no idea the final organisational structure.

http://apadoloup.wordpress.com/

Ladyada of Adafruit Industries

Ladyada of Adafruit Industries is a finalist for “Entrepreneur Of 2012″. I feel like the maker movement has grown up together, and now many of us have become businesses. Best of all, I think the open-source hardware companies out there have done a great job at keeping their open-source and maker values – while still being solid businesses.

Liberty Tool Company

Liberty Tool Company in Liberty, Maine sells salvaged tools. This lovely three minute videofeaturing Liberty owner and tool buyer H.G. “Skip” Brack provides a glimpse into a solid small-town business that provides a useful service to its patrons.

There’s a huge problem with structural unemployment where many people don’t have the skills and there’s really no role for them except as consumers. But underneath that, for the sustainable economies of the future, we really have a vibrant group of artists and craftspeople who will play a major role in the future, in terms of sustainable economies, because they are able to use tools.

Synesthesia

syn·es·the·sia syn·aes·the·sia (sĭn’ĭs-thē’zhə)
n.
A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.
The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.

Modkit Micro

Modkit Micro is a graphical programming environment for microcontrollers that supports a growing number of popular microcontroller platforms including Arduino and Wiring boards. It makes it easy for almost anyone (perhaps especially those with no programming background) to get started using microcontrollers, just by dragging and dropping blocks on their screen to write the firmware.

That part is already pretty neat, but what's really great about Modkit is that it isn't trying to be a substitute for "real" programming in source code. When you're ready to go deeper, Modkit allows you to go "under the hood" to directly view and edit the code that it generated for you. If you'd like early access to try out Modkit, we'd encourage you to support their project— they're opening up the next round of access to supporters this month. 

Link: Modkit Micro on Kickstarter