36c3 Day 1

So day 1, I arrived around 11 AM and got myself in a queue which was surprisingly well organised and fast-moving. There is even a page to show waiting times for the last few years.

Once passing the entry area I was a little overwhelmed, lights, people, noise everywhere and the space seems simply large…

At some assembly, I met a good friend and long-time CCC / C-Base hang around who introduced me to some people and within a blink, 3 hours of conversation were gone.

Along the way, I learnt stuff about Freifunk, open firmware, and many more, but the most important thing – very good conversations and friendly people.

An aspect that is not covered much in blog posts or wikis is food. I was not sure how to prepare for the long days in regards to food and drinks. Turns out there are a lot of bars serving Mate (of course), beer, cola and other stuff and there are a lot of food places, so no a problem there (not vouching for the quality…)

Hacker Jeopardy was something I was curious but watched back in the hotel.

36C3 Day 2

Pretty early, for congress standards I guess, hit the CCL around 11 AM and most floors and assemblies were empty, which had its own vibe.

Some people I wanted to meet during the congress I tried to meet today and was quite successful with.

By accident, I ran into a pitch of „| age“ a tool „a simple file encryption tool & format“, which looked quite cool and will try to play with it at a later point.

36c3 part 1

For many years I wanted to go to a CCC and this year because of different reasons I was finally able to go, this blog post is going to cover my planning and following posts will hopefully follow.

Preparing

There is a log of coverage already how to prepare for a congress. Obviously, you need a ticket. I got my ticket thanks to a co-worker who is a pretty active member of a local chaos group, so was fairly easy (thx stean)

So after getting a ticket, a place to stay needs to be found. In most cases, I run with AirBnB, this time I was unable to find a cosy place nearby so I ended up doing a hotel reservation and I hope this was a good choice.

And last but not least, transportation. The way to go here for me is using german railway services, Deutsche Bahn. There is even a special page from Deutsche Bahn to get a special ticket for a lower price.

Stuff

Of course, going to a conference you need your basic stuff as for every conference/travel, so I will not go into that too much. Especially for the congress, I tagged most of my gear that I plan to bring to the venue with my twitter handle and my domain so that it is easy to find the owner.

In addition to my normal list I packed the following items:

  • permanent markers (white/black) – maybe I can help with those
  • Magic ties (Amazon link) – I love those things
  • Stickers (mostly for FIRST)
  • batteries (AA+AAA) because why not.

A water bottle, because @c3himmel asked for it:

Tech

The tech also needs some extra time, in particular, updating every service/application running is critical. As I do not trust the wifi (as with any other wifi) VPN and a backup VPN was tested/updated.

To be able to work on stuff I also freed up some space on the devices, just in case.

Power up batteries, external power supplies and co. I do not want to run out of power.

Further reading