The sign is subtle.

The entrance is hidden.

But they do have quite the array of printers.

As well as a vending machine full of all sorts of neat things. I bought a stepper motor for $5.

There is an attractive display of 3D printer output.

As well as an attractive display of assorted attractive things.

As well as a... display of assorted guys.

The comparison to Jigsaw is interesting. It's much more of a hangout than Jigsaw, being a lot easier to get to, and in a residential neighborhood, but they're much more electronics oriented, without all the heavy equipment that got me to ante up for a keyed Jigsaw membership.

Later:

The first talk was by Dominic Muren, and was essentially an overview of personal manufacturing technology. Nothing I hadn't heard before, but with more minor technical inaccuracies that I wasn't nearly nebbish enough to stand up and object to.

The second talk was by Jigsaw's Willow Brugh, and again, was stuff I had already heard.

The third talk was by Matt Westervelt, who owns Metrix Wireless, (who I've bought networking gear from) runs seattlewireless.net, and whose newest venture is Metrix Create:Space, which is half coffee shop and half hacker space. His talk was mostly about bootstraping a Mendel Reprap from a Cupcake Repstrap from a cheap Chinese CNC laser cutter.

Not something I had heard of before. Quite interesting. I've been following the Reprap project for three years now, waiting for it to get good enough, and right now it's looking like it'd be a viable hackerspace build.

The third and a half talk was by Mark Ganter, and was mostly about counterfeiting feedstock for commerical 3D printers.

All in all, a good night. Now, if only Joey answered his damn phone, and I could have returned his graphic novel while I was at the University. Jeez, Joey. Jeez.

For a representative sample, read the executive summaries on SCP-200, SCP-296 and SCP-231. The site itself is alarmingly compelling. (I was linked to it from TV tropes, of course.) I burned four hours yesterday going through the first 209 SCP's, and, as is my wont, came to the conclusion that I rather wanted to write one myself. That requires an account, of course.

The site looks a lot like Wikipedia, and is in fact hosted on one of the wikihosts, but account creation is... different. Let me recount my adventures in trying to join.

1. First, find the "join" form. From any one page, there are three links, all of which say variations on "How to join" and all of which point at different pages.
2. Click on "Create account", which is at the top of the page, and thus most prominent, and seems like the highest level link. "You probably have to create a wikidot account before you can join the site, or they point to the same thing," I reason. This does nothing, confusingly.
3. Click on "Join this site" in the frame at the top of the page. This also does nothing.
4. Growing suspicious, I unfullscreen Firefox, and mouseover the Create Account link, which reveals a javascript anchor. Like 10 million other people, I use a netbook for light internet browsing. Since the screen is small, I run Firefox in full screen mode to hide useless interface chrome, and I run NoScript to keep useless scripting cruft from clogging up its underpowered processor.
5. I allow wikidot.com, and wait for all the SCP tabs to reload. This takes a while.
6. At long last, I'm allowed into the account creation form. I fill out all the fields, decipher the CAPTCHA, and hit submit.
7. Oh, I have to verify my e-mail address. Of course. I navigate over to gmail, and click on the new e-mail, then click on the link inside that e-mail.
8. Success! My account is created. I read this page.

First of all: Read the How to Write an SCP page (this one) and the Big List of Overdone SCP Cliches. Now, in order to prove that you've read these two pages, post a reply on this article's discussion page with your name. That'll let us know who's taken the time out to learn the culture of the site and who hasn't. If you don't reply to that thread, you are very liable to just have any articles you write deleted, especially if they suck.

9. Oh no! I don't want that to happen, so I better add my name to the discussion page.
10. I can't find the edit button. I check to make sure the domain's added to NoScript. It still is.
11. I poke around in the source, but nothing jumps out at me.
12. I click on How to edit pages, which refers to an edit button at the bottom of the page. I see no edit button.
13. Maybe the forum can help? I navigate over there. Ah ha! There is an introductions subforum. This is what the author of How To Write A SCP had to be revering to by "thread".
14. I attempt to start one, only to be confronted by a permissions error. Apparently I have to be a member of the site?
15. Of course! The "join this site" link. I guess it isn't the same as creating an account. I click on it.
16. This opens a popup dialogue, which asks for an entry password, or allows you to request an invite. I don't have an entry password, so I ask for an invite.
17. Well, that was annoying, but I seem to have made it as far as I can go. I close the popup, and close the tab that hosted it.
18. Under that tab is an unread one I had opened while flailing around, looking for the edit button. How to join.

As the Admin currently in charge of approving applications, I cannot stress this enough: You MUST complete all five steps in order to join the wiki. I am getting REALLY tired of people skipping either step 4 or 5.

19. Skipping what steps? I read further.

Step-3 -Read the Guide to Newbies, How to Write an SCP, Site Rules, Chat Guide, and The Big List of Overdone SCP Cliches. No, seriously, read them. Don't skim them, don't assume you know what they'll say, read them fully. Especially the bit in the Newbie Guide about Applications.

Step-4 - Go fill out the application form here. If you have problems with the questions, please see the Newbie Guide. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

Step-5 - Come back here and use the form below to actually apply to join this site. Put in whatever you feel will help you be approved, and then click apply. IF YOU DO NOT COMPLETE THIS STEP, YOU CANNOT BE APPROVED FOR MEMBERSHIP.

20. I click on the application form. It's a moderately long Google document, consisting of trivia about the site, which you have to fill out and submit before you can apply to join.
21. Minutes later, I get a new e-mail. My application was denied! Shocking.

Let's count the fuckups, here. There are no less than three different signup forms. Neither of the ones at the top of the page mention the application, and the third signup form is buried in the sidebar.

There are also three newbie guides. Two of them mention the application, only one explicitly mentions the order in which you have to create accounts, and the third, the one of most interest to people who want to contribute, assumes you're fully approved, and makes no mention of the application process.

Perhaps appropriate for a site about inexplicably hostile objects, the application process is a bitter, hateful machine, which will obliterate you at the slightest error. Attempting to comprehend its purpose will drive good men to utter insanity.

The "How to join" guide, the thing you should click first, is not bolded or highlighted in anyway. In fact, it's hidden halfway through a list of trivia that new users have no reason to care about. Between "Recent changes" and "Site manager" is not an obvious location.

There should be one "create account" link, not four. It should have the account creation and application form on it, and certainly not on a completely different domain.

This is not hard, guys! Every other site on the internet has a single account creation form. If you want to raise the bar, then you make the account creation more difficult, not bizarrely unintuitive. Come on!

(related)

It was about as awkward as you'd expect a superfan meetup would be, but alcohol lubricated things somewhat. Awkwardness wasn't lessened by me showing up, admitting that no, I didn't have a forum account, well, I haven't actually played the game that much, or at all, really.

Dwarf Fortress is the very picture of a game I would like to play.

Procedural world generation and mythos creation? Excruciatingly in-depth item crafting? Mining, but real mining, with actual ore, and ore processing, and smelting? Magma forges? Yes, please!

But when I actually try to play, I am presented with the paralysis of choice. Indeed, I am not choosing one thing, but eliminating thirty others. If I make it past this, I smash into the sheer wall of the Dwarf Fortress Learning Curve, and promptly resolve to figure it out later, when I have time.

Later, When I Have Time, is a mythical point far, far in the future, where I have both free time and liquid assets in infinite abundance. It is safe to assume that this mythical reckoning will never come to pass in any of our lifetimes.

But the embarrassment at attending a meetup for a game I have never played for more than five minutes got me past the world generation phase, and to a point where I was actually digging into a mountain and planning rooms, at which point everyone starved to death, because seeds are filed under food, but aren't actually food. Bug report! A proper whine post will wait until the next patch, since I am sensitive to complaining about things that are already fixed. Tarn, his spies being legion, has discovered my plan, and has thus vowed never to release the patch. Fie!

There is no room for your logic in my gadget-lust. It was 44% off! A bargain!

Wait a minute.

What?

That link.

What link? I don't see any link.

That Amazon affiliate link with the 1x1 pixel tracking image. You've sold out, haven't you?

Aw, you caught me.

Technically, I sold out a couple years ago, when I actually signed up for Affiliates. The plan was to write a Mohs Hardness scale for metal, with bands ranked by brutality, with 30 second mp3 samples of songs and Amazon affiliate links to the albums, just in case my masterful writing filled the reader with the urge to buy, buy, buy. This plan was dealt a fatal blow by NFSnet's per-gigabyte pricing plan, and so I abandoned it, though now that I've got plenty of bandwidth, I might have to bring it back from the dead.

Recently there was an utterly terrifying article on HN that started with a single, bolded, sentence.

"I have earned $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program since I began using it as a way to make money online late in 2003."

Horrifying.

In case you don't want to inflict the post on yourself, the gist is that by inserting affiliate links into blog posts, he made a great big pile of money. That's cool, I'm down with piles of money. But as he says, in order to make piles of money as opposed to puddles of money, you have to structure articles around affiliate links, seeking money, all of your thought bent towards it.

Which makes the resultant article an advertisement, and worse, an advertisement with absolutely no disclaimer. The only way to tell if the author's objectivity has been compromised, and is now writing for profit, is by carefully examining the links.

Poisonous.

So, naturally, I had to get in on that shit! Feel free to click on, and then purchase from, any complicated Amazon links you see.

As for the calculator itself, it's interesting, quite interesting. Retail, it costs the same as the Pre, but the two are completely different beasts. The 50g is binary compatible with the 49g, which was an incremental improvement on the HP-48, which came out in 1990. The thing is a dinosaur, and it shows. The screen resolution is lousy, the pixels are huge, it's monochromatic and non-backlit, the UI has 19 years of cruft, it runs on double A's, it's 8mhz 8-bit processor compares poorly to the Pre's 600mhz 32-bit one, etc, etc. By any rational basis of comparison, the Pre is a far, far superior pocket computer.

But the 50g's a better calculator, mostly because it's got a far better keypad, though it's utterly incompetent at text input.

Now that I'm a couple years out of school, I've got a bit more perspective on what an odd beast the "graphing calculator" is; primarily existing because it is unacceptable to bring a laptop with a computer algebra system of one kind or another, any of which would be far more powerful and flexible, at the cost of letting the tested student cheat with trivial ease. Of course, the continuing features war between TI and HP have made the graphing calculators just as easy to cheat with.

1021 hours: After Not Enough Sleep I am back on site. Some jerk left a Razor t-shirt on my keyboard.

1240 hours: Should probably stop playing TF2 and hit the expo floor during the lunch sag.

1253 hours: I guess nerds don't eat?

1257 hours: I claim my prize from the Intel booth, after being tagged by a prize patrol while playing TF2. It's... a crappy messenger bag! Wow!

1401 hours: Apparently I missed the Avatar booth (generic movie tie in, for a movie I don't have a whole lot of hope in) and the Brutal Legends booth, which still looks metal, even after surviving a cancellation.

1420 hours: The Darksiders mechanical horse has broken down. No! My favorite gimmick!

They've got a sign up declaring an "intermission". Nice try, guys.

1441 hours: A flack at the Peregrine booth (they of the interesting but stupidly expensive 3D controller and the stupidly expensive and also regularly stupid glove controller.) just said "Ladies and gentlemen, does anybody want some swag?" Instant crowd.

1444 hours: He's got them screaming their devotion to Peregrine, in return for t-shirts. Dance, puppets, dance!

1538 hours: Played Split Second at the Disney booth. Generic, but very pretty racing game where you can trigger sundry cataclysms to alter the course and/or immolate opponents. (Disney games make me verbose) I then had a wonderful conversation with the booth flack.

Me: Very cinematic. (This is an insult)

Flack: Yeah, it's great, isn't it?

Me: I'm concerned about replayablity. It's a racing game, so in order to not suck, you're going to have to run the course a dozen times, but each event will be the same, every time.

Flack: Well, it's a racing game.

Me: Yes, but it will never be as cool or as awesome as the first time. People are going to buy it after reading a review or playing it for three minutes at Gamestop, but every time to run a course, the same tower will explode and fall down, the same plane will crash, the novelty will wear away, and you'll have a mediocre racing game from Disney. There's no depth, no replayablity.

Flack: What? You didn't say half of that.

Me: It's my blog, and I'll fabricate conversations from whole cloth if I want to.

Flack: Heil Hitler!

1625 hours: Returned Roy's call in the Star Wars fan cantina. Hi Roy.

1640 hours: Playing Monty Python Fluxx with two guys whose names I wasn't professional enough to write down.

Python Fluxx has rule cards that allow you to play more cards if you talk in an outrageous accent, or draw more cards if you sing a few lines from a Python song. Naturally, there is an action card called "This is getting far too silly" that resets the rules.

1815 hours: Eating outrageously expensive WSCC chili dog and somewhat expensive coffee. I missed the TF2 tournament, which sucks, though my experience with competetive TF2 has been nothing but bad.

2120 hours: Waiting in line for the Saturday Night Concerts. Brought earmuffs this time.

2129 hours: This place is absolutely fucking full of people.

This photo completely fails to convey the scene. There's at least two thousand people in here.

2136 hours: Someone actually recognized my Dwarf Fortress shirt. We have an awkward conversation, because we're at a nerd convention.

2159 hours: Burn that noise, man. If you don't wear hearing protection, it's far too loud and the acoustics are terrible. If you do, its tolerable, but the acoustics are even worse.

0110 hours: After playing TF2 for three hours, I caught the last bus out of Seattle. Exciting!

Additional pictures:

Unlike my PAX 08 experience, which was pretty much dominated by waiting in lines, I didn't wait in a single major line this year. As a result, I didn't play any of the big unreleased games, but as I have whined previously, there are no worthwhile unreleased games. Speaking of which,

Shame how little respect Bungie has for their major fanbase, ah haw haw haw haw haw.

Disappointing epilogue:

Even though PAX has three days, I'm not going to blog about the third day, since I didn't do anything of interest. Five hours of me absolutely kicking ass at CS:S and L4D2, and getting crushed at FE:L.

Verdict for PAX 09: A+, would do again, with a much lighter computer, and teathering on my Pre enabled, as to not be at the mercy of PAX's internet connection. Also, bringing my own food might be a good idea.

This is unsurprising. People Are Idiots, after all. But.

What are ticket prices going to be like next year? PAX 09 takes up the entire WSCC, so there's no way to expand. And, of course, there's no upper bound on expo ticket prices. Doubling it would be easy enough. $60 is the price of just one console game, after all. A even hundred dollars is still fairly reasonable, if you're a leech bound to gouge the last dollar out of every gamer.

Something I just found out is that PAX opened up BYOC registration to forum members a full week before they sent the e-mails to people who asked to be notified when they opened, which is some real bullshit. Angry face.

Live updates follow.

1055 hours: Computer set up at BYOC, (Tycho I-4) swag assessed.

(terrible photography courtesy of my cell-phone.)

There's a promo copy of the D&D MMO, (it's a trap!) a t-shirt for the Ventrilo knockoff, a six-card Magic booster pack, the PAX guide, and a real actual CPU magazine, the only worthwhile piece of loot. Heading out to the expo floor.

1131 hours: At the new new video games journalism panel. Gus says his name far too quickly. Having a hell of a time connecting to PAXnet. So far Chris' speech has been about how his field sucks, and how everyone hates it.

1150 hours: Gus says that networking is important. Okay, Gus! Will do. PAXnet keeps fucking dropping out.

1153 hours: Karen Chu points out that games journalism has become more personality based, and less about institutions. Less "G4 said this about this game" and more "Kieron said this about this game." And then she admits she's reading directly from a script, whoops.

1244 hours: Starcraft 2 looks exactly like it did last year, but with more maps, and Diablo 3 looks like the previews. That is, both games look be exactly like their 2D predecessors, but in 3D, and prettier. L4D2 looks like L4D, but new weapons and characters, and considering the bitching and moaning online, I expected to see a protest line, but apparently $30 is too much for people who wanted L4D2 for free.

Something interesting that I haven't seen anyone mention: melee weapons replace the pistols in L4D2. I didn't see anyone with a melee weapon get incapacitated, so I don't know what happens then.

I have yet to see anything new and weird, well, like L4D1 last year. The theme of PAX 09 seems to be "uninspired sequels".

The PAX HVAC crew, hearing that it is September in Seattle, and thus 65 and cloudy, made the executive decision to crank the cooling in the exhibit hall waaay up, and freeze to death certain underdressed bloggers. The Pyro cosplayers are happy, though.

1430 hours: I'm misusing a handheld lounge to blog, using their terribly overloaded wifi.

Something new and weird: Borderlands it turning out to be a lot more RPG than FPS, with all sorts of inventory management and item collecting. Quite interesting.

Darksiders had a mechanical bull, which was actually a horse. The game itself was pretty generic, but the horse was an excellent gimmick.

The BYOC enforcers made a big deal of the Intel prize patrol badges, but I have yet to see hide nor hair of one in four hours, which presumably means I've just been suckered into advertising them for free all day, which is great.

1517 hours: The "Legal Issues In Contemporary Gaming" panel is one part exteremely nerdy to one part fairly depressing. Apparently patent trolling is on the rise, something that is apparently fairly new to the gaming industry.

1521 hours: There have been a dozen states that have passed laws attempting to regulate free speech relating to games (viz. violent ones) and every one have been struck down by state supreme courts as violating the first amendment. The point made by the (unknown) panelist (the stage isn't elevated, and I'm pretty far back) is that this is fairly reasonable if you're one of the first states to pass these laws, but if you're the fourteenth, the question becomes one of a waste of taxpayer money; since the state is obliged to both defend against the lawsuits, and then to pay the legal costs of the platiff when they inevitably lose.

1528 hours: Someone just refered to Jack Thomsons as "He who shall not be named".

1602 hours: At the BYOC hall again. Apparently there's a Fallen Empires: Legions tourney about to start.

1720 hours: Got my ass kicked, which is going to be a post all by itself. Going to go get something to eat outside the expo hall in vain attempt to save money.

1750 hours: Ended up eating at a Subway at the IBM building, even though there's a Subway at the WSCC. Whatever, I do what I want!

2221 hours: Oh shit, I forgot about the Friday Night Concerts.

2226 hours: Oh shit, I forgot about how stupidly loud the Friday Night Concerts are.

2241 hours: Failed to get a game of Genesis Bomberman going in the retro console gaming area. How about a nice game of TF2?

2301 hours: BYOC paper airplane contest. The prize: A quad core processor. Oh PAX. Taking some time off from TF2 with a bit of CS:S deathrun with kyonko.

0039 hours: Kicked ass at koth_viaduct, time to take the late bus home. If I don't get shanked by a hobo, I'll put this up with the Day 2 post.

(Latest in a series, now, a blog post based on a thread reply.)

The correct answer is, of course, that it is not at all safe for sensitive work. It's their computer, so you must assume that the OS is compromised. High security modes ("Private browsing mode") means nothing at all if the program itself is rooted. You'll have to boot into another operating system entirely to avoid whatever they've put on the computer.

This may not even be enough. At DEFCON 2009, K. Chen demonstrated (but read the paper first) execution of arbitrary hostile code on the microcontroller of an Apple aluminum keyboard by exploiting a poorly designed firmware update.

This particular attack has quite a few limitations: it only works on one keyboard, and can't contain an useful keylogger since there's only eight kilobytes of flash; but that's more than enough space for a little program, that, say, opens up a terminal window at midnight and downloads a spyware package.

Hardware keyloggers are ancient, though to my knowledge nobody has thought of using one to bootstrap a spyware infection, even on to a freshly reformatted computer.

For this particular threat scenario, this is very, very unlikely, unless the school outsources tech support to the NSA; but the point is made: it is their computer, so it's compromised. You cannot completely trust it.

However. While you cannot fully trust it, there are less rigorous standards of trust that can be applied.

Like all ubiquitous surveillance programs, capability does not denote intent. They might have installed any number of devious rootkits, hardware snoopers, or trusted computing platform trojans; but have they? And if they have, are they even being monitored? And if they are monitored, and on a regular basis, do they care about users engaging in mundane illegalities, or do they only bring the hammer down on people using school hardware to write bomb threats?

Some of this can be implied through side-channel signals (they cannot be conducting any kind of surveillance program if they have a three man IT department) or through more obvious routes. Public schools may be required to disclose this, depending on jurisdiction, and how much of an asshole the lawyer asking is.

UPDATE:
Howdy kiddies. If you got here by googling "hack shoreline schools laptop" or something else along those lines: I don't know how, though it should be fairly trivial. I haven't even touched one since 2007, when I graduated.

That being said, the point of this post was that you can't trust a hacked laptop to stay hacked, and if they suspect anything at all, they can just demand a physical inspection, at which point you'll be suspended. Get a job, buy a netbook, look at porn on that. Sermon ends.