Pai

I’ve wanted to build a badge for the Unsupervised Learning crew at DEF CON for a couple of years now. The original thought was just that we needed a better way to find each other. We scatter as soon as we arrive, phones are not a hundred percent reliable in that building, and finding people by radio sounded like more fun than texting them anyway. What I wanted was something hanging off a lanyard, next to the con badge already there, that tells me roughly how far away the rest of the crew is without needing an app or a network. ...

I very much love the massive mind melt of new information that I get when I attend great tech conferences. But I’ve never been super good at keeping notes thorough enough to remember everything I want to, or follow up on all the new tech and links I had aspirations to while sitting in the rooms. The talks I really liked? I remember them well enough to tell someone about them over coffee, but the specific details, the links the speaker mentioned, the names of tools that came up in Q&A, those are usually gone by the time I get home. I end up with a few half-sentences scratched into my phone’s Notes app and a vague impression of “yeah, good stuff.” ...