Notes: Apologies for the delay on posting this summary. The talk was delivered to a very busy room. Lots of amazing questions. The presenter notes were extensive, but entirely unused when delivered. One person asked a question, I said I’d follow up with them later, but didn’t find them before the end of the conference. One person asked about the benefits of EKS over ECS in AWS… as I’ve not used ECS, I couldn’t answer, but it sounds like they largely do the same thing.
Slides: Available to view (Firefox/Chrome recommended – press “S” to see the required speaker notes)
Video: There was a stream recorded on the day, however, due to the technical issues detailed below, I uploaded a better, pre-recorded version, after the event.
Slot: Room 1, 14:30-15:00
Notes: Wow, this probably had the worst technical issues of any of my talks so far.
In the morning before the talk, I checked my talk, and realised the speaker notes were still the long-form version I’d written for the recording… so I jumped into the editor and started putting the bullet-points in. I checked the output, and the formatting had all changed! Oh no, what had I done? Well, actually, a recent update to the presenter plugin I use for WordPress had moved the location of all the theme CSS files… fortunately, I’d had this happen to me before, so I knew what to look for – but for 10 minutes, I thought editing the speaker notes had properly caused me issues! Thank goodness for SSH!!
In the actual venue, in the morning, I was told that they’d moved the room allocations for everything in Slot 1, because they needed to run to pre-recorded videos for speakers who couldn’t attend in there. No worries! I said! We get to the afternoon, and they let me know that I’m in Room 1, as they’d finished screening the videos… The adjustments to the schedule is probably the one (small) issue I have had with BSides Liverpool – but having been involved with OggCamp, I know how hard this piece is!
I head to Room 1 and set up, but it’s the first time I tried to deliver a talk using my new laptop, which doesn’t have any external video ports, so a few weeks ago, I bought an USB HDMI interface… tested it at home, and thought all was “good”. The screen they were using for Room 1 didn’t recognise the interface I was using! Oh no!! So I borrowed a laptop from one of the crew, but it didn’t have bluetooth, so I couldn’t use the “clicker” for moving my slides on, and then we’re just about to go live, and the crew tell me that the camera to use to record my talking head, is not rendering any video, and “can I use the webcam on the laptop”.. Hmmm Of course, I say yes, but it means that I need to have the Windows Camera app on screen the whole time.
Anyway, talk starts up, and part way through the presentation, I don’t notice, but the WiFi drops out, so when I get to the pre-recorded demo of running Ansible…. NOPE. Bah, OK, so I continue on, and the final images (a QR code for the project I’m plugging, and my social media avatar) are missing. Oh well. Also, part way through, I realised that the screen resolution where the slides are being rendered are basically showing up dreadfully, because the text size is so very small on the screen, and the people at the back of the room really can’t see the content!
Had some fab questions from the audience, talking about things I’ve not really thought about (and really made me interested in how to do things with Windows and Ansible).
And then, just as I wrap up, I noticed that when I’d clicked on to show the demo, it had hidden the webcam. Ah, oh well. Fortunately, as I mentioned, I’d pre-recorded my talk, the only thing I’ve “lost” is the questions, but as I wasn’t really sure on many of the answers I provided, I’m not desperately sad about it.
Fundamentally, all of the technical issues really stemmed from the fact my laptop wasn’t capable of rendering on the screen. If I’d solved that in advance, the rest of the issues could have been resolved when I wasn’t stressing about getting my presentation to work on an unfamiliar machine.
I’m very grateful to BSides Liverpool for giving me the opportunity to deliver my presentation, and the rest of the event (I’ll post about that later) was fab!
Firstly, an apology! It’s more than a week after OggCamp. I’m quite aware that this is very very late for me!
About OggCamp for those who weren’t there!
OggCamp is an annual semi-scheduled Unconference. An Unconference (sometimes known as a “BarCamp”) is where when you arrive on the first day, the schedule (also known as the “Grid”) is blank, with a stack of post-it notes next to the grid. You’re encouraged to put talks on the grid, and keep checking the grid to see what’s up next.
OggCamp is a conference which encourages people to talk about Free Culture (Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware, Creative Commons Content) and other permissively licensed works. It’s also a “Geeky” conference, so games will often appear, they encourage hardware makers to attend, and this year the event also contained “FlawCon”, a security conference, so the event also had a higher-than-usual proportion of Infosec people there!
OggCamp was started by podcasters in 2009, and so there’s usually at least one or two podcasts being recorded. This year, there was a panel session, Linux Outlaws “rode for one last time”, Hacker Public Radio (HPR) were out and about to talk to people at the event, and the podcast I co-host, The Admin Admin Podcast, found a quiet spot to record a show too. Sadly, with the exception of my own podcast recording, I didn’t make it to any of the other recordings I mentioned, as I was attending talks by other people at those times.
Differences, for me, from previous years
Since OggCamp ’10, I was either not at the event (on the years each of my children were born), was running the Talk Scheduling Software; CampFireManager, crewing, or organising the event. This was the first year I managed to get to see talks all day since the very first OggCamp, so that was a big change for me.
This year, Lorna organised the grid, from right in front of it. Except for the welcome and closing talks, I don’t think she left the grid for the entire day both days. In previous years, when we weren’t using CampFireManager, the grid was left unattended, with an occasional drive-by crew member transferring the grid to Joind.In. Talking of which, here’s the Joind.In view of Saturday…
Saturday
A screen shot of the grid from Saturday. Talks marked with a * are talks I attended.
I went to the “Opening Talk” first. This is your usual “Here’s how to get on the Wi-fi, here’s how to participate, here’s the sort of things we want from you” talk, and was run by Dan and Lorna.
OpenBenches is a project that records what is on the plaques on benches that people arrange for their relatives, sometimes when they die. I’ve been aware of this project for some time, but never contributed. Until now I thought you had to manually type in what was on each plaque (and I think, at the beginning you had to), but NO, they’re now doing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to copy the text out of the photos.
The talk discussed the statistics of the project, the technology stack and why the project was started. It was just lovely and really well delivered.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
Next I went to see Jeroen talking about Self Publishing.
Jeroen first attended OggCamp last year, giving a talk about Mainframes. This year he was back, talking about running a project with a very small community. Before he got to that though, he wanted to talk about self publishing. He endorsed Lulu for paper printing, AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor to produce the content (PanDoc to convert between formats, if you started with something that isn’t AsciiDoc(tor)) and then Inkscape to create the cover. I asked him if he would suggest anything for eBooks, but he doesn’t create eBooks so couldn’t make any suggestions.
We got a demo of publishing a finished book on Lulu, with a running translation from Jeroen’s native language :) It was a great talk, and very well delivered in 25 minutes!
After that, I gave a late-pitched talk on Time Based Security (TBS). I made a few mistakes here – not least of which was failing to charge my laptop having used it while I was travelling in – so my laptop wouldn’t actually boot… I couldn’t even put up a single slide with my details! Trying to explain the maths around TBS without something to show it is hard, and involves walking around and waving your hands about. I had about 20 people in the room and I felt woefully underprepared.
Because I ended up running much shorter than I expected, I also started to bring in other material from the Analogue Network Security book (pictured above, with post-it-note reference markers for my review) that I’m currently writing a review on. This was my next mistake. So, I mentioned about feedback loops (which about 1/3 of the book is about) and that in the later sections of the book it’s mentioned that this can improve workflow where you need sign-off to complete changes. I mixed up a few terms and it sounded like I was endorsing having changes made without approvals. I tried to pull it back, but not having brought the book with me or having enough experience in vocalising the material… yehr, it was never going to go well. Oh well, I’m hoping to get the review nailed down and then start writing proper presentations on the matter, so I can try and deliver it better next year!
Then… Lunch. Phil, my father-in-law, plus Kian and Cat went to a Chinese Bakery for lunch.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
Neil’s talk was my next talk to see; an ad-hoc review of web pages about Repair Day
After I gave my talk, I headed to see Neil give an ad-hoc talk about Repair Day. Neil had a collection of pages he wanted to show off. Neil works with The Restart Project to help people fix their own broken things, not just computers (which is Neil’s area of interest) but also white goods, radios, home electronics, clothes and furniture.
In the audience was Stuart Ward (featured later) who also mentioned about running Repair Cafes. After the talk was complete, Stuart posted a collection of links to the Joind.In page for people to find out more for themselves later.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
This was my stand-out talk for Day 1. Anna had come to OggCamp last year, and thought there wasn’t sufficient content for people new to Linux, so she proposed, wrote and delivered a blinder!
I went to Anna’s talk next. I went in, amongst other reasons, because thought I would be going in to support someone “new to Ubuntu”, and came out stunned at how well the talk was delivered!
Someone wise* wrote on twitter a few months ago something like “The point when someone new joins your team is when you get to challenge implied knowledge. If they ask ‘Why’ and you have to say ‘I don’t know’ it means you need to justify why you do something, and perhaps stop doing it.”
* Someone in this case means I can’t find the tweet!
In this case, I wanted to know what being “New” to Ubuntu (my preferred desktop Linux distribution right now) meant to people. Anna’s talk was fantastic, and got right to the heart of what someone new to Linux would feel like. She mentions downloading “things” from the Internet, setting them to be executable by everyone, and then running them. She also mentions running everything under “sudo” or as root, and then went into where she found she should put things. This was sprinkled with a lot of appropriate emojis. It was a really great talk.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
As an event organiser, I’m always interested in what other groups are doing!
After Anna’s talk, I went to a round-table session about meetup and event organisers. This was inspired by something new that Lorna had organised this year for the unconference schedule. Next to the board, showing what talks were going to be given, was another board asking for talks to be given. Someone had asked for a talk about organising meet-ups, and so several of the attendees who are organisers of local groups came together to give their views on how to start a group, how to motivate attendees to come to your groups, and how to keep the momentum going.
I’m sorry to say that this was one of the weaker sessions I went to over the weekend. Because no-one had really planned anything in this slot, and none of the people running the session were really comfortable in what they were delivering, it was hard to get any points out of the speakers, and there was very little interaction with the audience. This could have been run as a Q&A session from experienced group organisers, or even a round-table… but never mind!
Towards the end of the session, I stood up and asked about whether any groups like TechNW.UK existed in their regions, and asked people who organised groups like this to put pull requests to get their groups added to that website. I hope to see something come out of that!
After I left this session, I went to look at the exhibition hall and the Kids Track room.
In the exhibition hall was the Merch Stand, the grid, two stands that were apparently about musical things – one of which basically had a guitar and amp constantly being used by a very good musician. After that was Matrix.org, The FSFE, Hacker Public Radio. Along the other wall was a lock picking stand from FlawCon, Manchester Grey Hats and InfoSec Hoppers, a telepresence bot and more!
In the kids room were computers, micro:bits and willing instructors! It looked like a lot of fun for kids, but there wasn’t much room! I had a bit of a chat with a few friends I met along the way, before I went to see my co-host, Al, talking about Wireguard.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
Al hadn’t expected to be giving this talk today!
Al has been talking about Wireguard a few times over the past year-or-so, and wanted to give a talk about it. He’d planned to propose it for Sunday, but was encouraged by Lorna to talk about it on Saturday. As a result, he hadn’t had a chance to run though the demo he’d planned to give, and it tripped him up at the end of his demo, when the notes he was following mixed up private and public keys at each end… Aside from that, it was a great talk, and made me want to look at Wireguard again!
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 19, 2019
My final talk for the day was one I didn’t expect to be in!
Kian is a friend of mine from days of old, and when he walked into the room I’d just been in for Al’s talk… I decided to sit in whatever he was talking about. Kian spoke to a small audience about hardware builds he’d done over the years, and the mishaps that had occurred on them. A very entertaining talk, albeit one that I couldn’t really empathise with, as I’ve not done any hardware builds since I did my Radio Amateur Exam. Hearing the story of the halloween pumpkin with eyes that were supposed to look at you was very funny though, and the videos really completed the story!
After the talks were done, I went to get dinner with my co-hosts from the Admin Admin podcast, and a few of the other attendees. After we were done, I went back to the venue, but couldn’t settle as I’d had a headache coming on.
While I was gearing up to leave, I ended up having a good chat with Ben Grubert, who changed my view somewhat on how to deliver a talk. He said that people, particularly those who are very process focused, struggle to explain something that links back to the goal, for example, explaining how to win at a board game. It made me completely re-think how my talk I wanted to give on Sunday would go, and I left soon after that conversation so I could re-write my talk. I’ve since gone on to share that advice with several other people!
Sunday
A screen shot of the Sunday Schedule. Again, starred talks are the ones I attended.
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 20, 2019
My hands-down favourite talk from the entire weekend!
At Barcamp Manchester 9, which I attended a few weeks before OggCamp, I missed a talk by Rachel. I saw a picture of one of her slides, and I think I might even have caught the last slide of it… Either way, I was desperately sad that I’d missed the talk, and so encouraged her to attend OggCamp to deliver it. Once I saw she was on the grid, I knew exactly where I was going!
Rachel’s talk did not fail to deliver. I’ve heard from lots and lots of people that they were moved by this talk. Rachel was talking about her life, mostly undiagnosed with Autism, ADHD and depression. She enriched the talk with fun comments, including asking someone to play the part of Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, and then asking him, without having seen the book, why he didn’t know his lines. It sounds quite brutal, but actually, it sets the scene quite well on her life. There’s a fantastic photo of the spectrum of issues related to autism that just keeps having more and more artefacts being added to it.
I’ve heard that she wants to take this talk to more people, businesses and conferences, so I won’t spoil any more of the surprises, but it’s a really powerful talk and I’d strongly encourage anyone to bring Rachel into their environment to hear her talk.
While sitting in Kian’s talk the day before, I missed a session on Ansible Security. I’d made the point, in the morning, of finding Michael from the Matrix Project who gave the talk, and they said that they’d planned to host a “Birds of A Feather” (BOF) session on the Sunday following the feedback from the talk.
I managed to make it to this session, but unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos.
Having been to the meet-up session the day before, I was partially dreading this session, as Ansible is something I’m still very keen on. I needn’t have worried, as Michael managed to control several very chatty people (myself very much included). He managed to engage people but then stop them from going on too much. I wish there was somewhere the people who attended this talk to join to catch up and share knowledge, but… oh well.
Next I went to a talk on the Java Open Street Map editor, JOSM. It was very much a show-and-tell “This is how I use the tool”, but I struggled to follow it, and, sadly left early.
LATE EDIT 2019-11-04: Stuart contacted my on Twitter to apologise for making his talk hard to follow. I wanted to add some extra notes. The problem I had was not with Stuart’s talk per-sey, but more that I couldn’t focus on the subject, and wasn’t sure if I wasn’t in the right head-space for the talk or perhaps I was just hungry. I wanted to become more involved in Open Street Map, and thought I could get a better idea on how to contribute from this talk, but as I said, I wasn’t tracking the content. I walked out more to clear my head than because I didn’t enjoy the talk.
I realised I was getting hungry, so went to Subway for my lunch, and came back refreshed in time to give my second talk.
A screen shot from the talk “Here’s how you win: Secure Scuttlebutt”
This talk was on Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), a decentralised social media platform. There were about 20 people in the audience, and I had some very sensible questions about the project. At the end of the talk, I’d encouraged three people to give it a try, two of whom fell at the first hurdle, and the third persisted in the bar at the end of the day, and has since connected with me on there. Woohoo!
The talk was a stark contrast to the talk I felt I’d not done justice to the day before, and I felt like I’d really nailed this talk. I’m still exceptionally grateful to Ben who’d pointed me in the right direction for the talk layout the night before.
At the end of my talk, I wandered around a bit – I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to see next, so instead I caught up with friends who also weren’t in talks. I bumped into Rachel, and recorded a quick promo for her speaking career and then saw some friends start a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game up in the exhibition area!
This looks like a great talk at #OggCamp for people who are interested in IoT. @ralight talking about "Introduction to Streamsheets, the real time IoT spreadsheet". The first talk this weekend that made me go "Oh, that's clever"!https://t.co/wzXsHhhDVZpic.twitter.com/KKVJYBdQZu
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 20, 2019
The first talk at OggCamp about a technology I’d not seen the likes of before.
I made my way to Roger’s talk about Stream Sheets, an Internet Of Things (IoT) connected tool like Google Sheets. It can read content from MQTT, REST APIs and other similar data sources, tweak and convert them, and then publish them back again. All very interesting, although I’m unlikely to use it somewhere any time soon! I was glad though to popularise it with colleagues when I got back to work on Monday!
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 20, 2019
My last talk attended of the day – Jamie Tanner
Jamie had talked at OggCamp ’18, and I was very glad to see him back at OggCamp this year – particularly on the main stage!
His talk was about self hosting and the Indie Web movement. He talked about why he self hosts, and what sort of content he “owns” when he can (spoiler: all of it!) He not only stores bookmarks in a public blog, but his Google Fit step counter results, his RSVPs to events and … yes, even blog posts. He talked about why he felt that you too should be part of the Indie Web.
After Jamie’s talk, was the annual rafflecast. A laptop was given away, but not to me (boo!) And then I went to record the Admin Admin Podcast.
From left to right, Jerry, Gary, Al, and then Me (with my red hat from Red Hat). Out of shot is Mr Joe Ressington, who let us use his recording gear. Because he’s lovely.
On the way to Joe’s hotel (where we did this recording), I got us a bit lost, and ended up walking us clear across to the Northern Quarter of Manchester. We then had to walk back to just near Piccadilly station, where his hotel was! Oops. The show has since been released, if you want to hear us talking about OggCamp, and guest host Gary.
We went to the Lass O’Gowry pub for a drink before I had to catch my rail replacement bus home, and catch up on some sleep!
On the last replacement bus home from #oggcamp/#flawcon. I had an amazing time and hope all the other attendees did too! ❤️ Together we made a conference! 👊
— Jon Spriggs – toot.io/@JonTheNiceGuy (@jontheniceguy) October 20, 2019
And that was OggCamp ’19. The featured image is of the OggCamp Grid on Saturday.
OggCamp are looking for someone to take over the organising in 2020 (supported by past organisers, like me!) so if you’re interested, please getintouch!
Notes: FDE is the abbreviation of “Fujitsu Distinguished Engineer”, an internal program at Fujitsu. Each year they hold a conference for all the FDEs to attend. This is my second year as an FDE, and the first where I’m presenting.
This slide deck was massively re-worked, following some excellent feedback at BCMcr9. I then, unusually for me, gave the deck two separate run through sessions with colleagues, and tweaked it following each run.
This deck includes Creative Commons licensed images (which is fairly common for my slide decks), but also, in a new and unusual step for me, includes meme gifs from Giphy. I’m not really sure about whether this is step forward or back for me, as I do prefer permissive licenses. That said, the memes seem to be more engaging – particularly as they’re animated. I’ve never had someone comment on the images in my slide deck until I did the first run through with the memes in with a colleague, and then again when I ran it a second time they particularly brought up the animated images… so the memes are staying for now.
I’m also slightly disappointed with myself that I couldn’t stick to the “One Bold Word” style of presentations (the format preferred by Jono Bacon), and found myself littering more and more content into the screen. I was, however, proud of myself for including the “Tweetable content” slide, as recommended, I think, by Lorna Mitchell (@LornaJane). I also included a “Your next steps” slide, as recommended by Andy Bounds (although I suspect he’d be disappointed with the “Questions?” slide at the end!)
This deck required quite a bit of research on my part. I’d never written CloudFormations (CF) before, and I’d only really copied-and-pasted Terraform (I refer to it as TF which probably isn’t right) before. I wrote a full stack of machines in CF, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for the native technologies, as well as the same stacks in both TF and Ansible for both Azure and AWS. I also looked into how to deploy the CF and ARM templates with both Terraform and Ansible, and finally how to use TF from Ansible. I already knew how to run Ansible from within userdata/customdata arguments in AWS and Azure, but I included it and tested it as part of the deck too.
I had some amazing feedback from the audience and some great questions asked of me. I loved the response from the audience to some of my GIFs (although one comment that was made was that I need to stop the animations after the first run!)
Following the session, as I’d hoped, it brought a few of the fellow attendees to the forefront to ask if we can talk further about the subject and I would encourage you, if you are someone who uses these tools to give me a shout – I want to do more and find out about your projects, processes and tools!
My intention is to start using this slide deck at meet-ups in the Greater Manchester area, hopefully without having to re-write it that much!
BarCamp Manchester 9 (#BcMcr9) is a BarCamp style Unconference. It was held in the offices of Auto Trader in the centre of Manchester. It was a two day event, however, I was unable to attend the Saturday. Sundays are usually quieter days, and apparently the numbers were approximately half of the peak of Saturday on the Sunday.
Lunch was provided by Auto Trader. The day was split into 7 slots, or sessions, running for 25 minutes each, with 5 minutes between slots to change rooms. There were three theatre layout rooms, each with a projector, and one room with soft chairs around the edges.
There and Back Again/How The Internet Works
Format: Presentation with slides. 30ish attendees.
Slot: Slot 1 Sunday 11:00-11:25
Notes: This slide deck was reused from when I delivered it in 2012. Some stuff had changed (the prevalence of WiFi being one, CAT5e being referenced raised some giggles), but most had not.
There were some comments raised during the talk about the slides, but nothing significant (mostly by network engineers, commenting on things like routing a local network. Ugh.)
Following the talk, someone came up to suggest some changes (primarily that the slides need to link back to the graphics created). Someone else noted that there were too many acronyms that should probably have been explained. As such, this deck is likely to change and be published here at some point soon.
Format: Presentation with slides. 8 attendees, reduced to 4 half way through.
Slot: Slots 5 and 6 Sunday 14:00-14:55
Notes: This was a trial run of my talk for the Fujitsu FDE Conference I’m attending in a couple of weeks. The audience were notified as such. I took two slots on the “grid”, and half way through my session, half the audience walked out.
Following the talk, someone came and suggested some changes, which I’ll be implementing.
The slides for this talk are still being developed and will be shared after the FDE conference on this site.
Decentralised Social Media? – Secure Scuttlebutt
Format: Conversation with a desktop client application (Patchwork) loaded on the projector, and the Google Play entry for Manyverse on a browser tab. 3 attendees.
Slot: Slot 7 (last slot of the day) Sunday 15:00-15:25
Notes: This was an unplanned session, and probably should have been run earlier in the day. The audience members were very interactive, and asked lots of sensible questions.
Did you come to my talk at #BcMcr9 about #SecureScuttleButt? If you run a SSB client (patchwork, patchbay, patchfox or manyverse) and want to follow me, I’m @p3gu8eLHxXC0cuvZ0yXSC05ZROB4X7dpxGCEydIHZ0o=.ed25519 and @3SEA7qNZQPiYFCzY6K57f0LTc9l+Bk6cewQc6lbs/Ek=.ed25519
Notes: My first main stage show. Two questions proposed by the podcasters and a discussion with the audience. Slightly waffly on my part, mostly because I was tired. I also was taking the “mic around to the audience”. Skilfully mastered by Joe Ressington.
Well worth a listen – I’d like to know your views on anything raised in the podcast in the comments!
Notes: Very quick summary of what you can do with Amateur Radio. Trying to encourage people to take up Amateur Radio from an Open Source mind set. Followed up with two attendees, one who was licensed, another who might get a license. Felt good :)
