Out and about: Hack Day London
Mike Jewell 18 Jun 2007

Armed with laptops and the beginnings of an idea, a crack team of Mind Candies headed up to Alexandra Palace on Saturday to join the other 400-odd people attending Hack Day London, the first of its kind to reach our shores. After a morning of tech talks from the BBC and Yahoo! (the Flickr presentation on Machine Tags and the Yahoo! intro to Fire Eagle being especially good), the hacking commenced. Or it would have if the building hadn't been hit by lightning - the organizers got that sorted out impressively quickly though (and Nexuiz helped pass the time).

Many interesting hacks were sighted during the day: spark-controlled musical instruments, fruit and vegetable recognition, 3D augmentation of images, and even redesigning the free Yahoo! wireless detectors that we got into something a lot smaller. There was also a 'physical' hack involving pong, boots, and whips - we didn't venture too close to that one.

The result of our day of coding (and a short spree on Sunday) was a bijou game named Boxr - a bit like Domination, but with phone boxes. Over the next few days we're going to be getting the Skype bot onto a more permanent home and providing the means to add phone boxes, so keep an eye out for boxring matches near you!

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