Stories about failure

This fourth installment of the occasional Think Tank hack morning starts off with a tale of failure.

Izzi and I decided that our project was going to be hacking a Kindle Touch to display an image generated on a custom web server, inspired by reading about other people converting the kindle to display the weather. It might be because I spend so much of my days on backend code and security, playing with things that people can see is a lot of fun. We didn't end up completing the project in the 3 hours, largely because I didn't prepare enough. We spent most of the time working on jailbreaking the Kindle, and never got as far as getting SSH running on the Kindle in order to start manipulating the display. Using the Kubrick Live CD was easy enough, although time consuming - first downloading the images, then finding USB sticks, then finding a laptop that would boot the linux version used in Kubrick, then dealing with USB bus issues that required starting over a couple of times. I think we'll try again next time, and the lesson I took from this was to do a bit more prep and research so all the necessary materials are available when we start.

John Colton continued with his project from last time using the Echonest Remix API. He added a Redis queue to offload the audio processing jobs outside of the page request, and demoed playing a remix! I loved that he used the Amen Break during the demo. Now that everything is working, it will be interesting to see what he does with the UI.