14. July 2010 by admin.

So, the past month or two has been crazy. Just wanted to hop on over here while I still had a minute or two of free time while drinking some coffee to let you know what is going on.We’ll start off with the projects. The daily projects have still been going on (some of them are even starting earlier than others so that they’ll be ready by the completion date that I set for them). Due to some technical difficulties (my desktop and laptop both needed to be reformatted) as well as time constraints from work, I have been unable to find the time to sit down and edit/upload all the pictures of the projects. I have been working on getting them done and the blog posts for each week should be up before (if not shortly after) DEFCON.

Speaking of DEFCON, I leave for DEFCON 18 in about fifteen days. For those of you who haven’t heard, my talk on “VirGraf101: Introduction to Virtual Graffiti” got accepted this year and I’ll be speaking on Friday at 1600. I’ll post a second blog with my best-guess itinerary for the show this year. Chances are that I won’t follow my own schedule, but I will try my best and you can always follow me on Twitter (@tottenkoph). I will have the slides that I’m using during the presentation up on tottenkoph.com Thursday night/Friday morning so that those of you unable to attend can see them and those who are attending can see them beforehand and prepare to throw your best questions at me (well, your second-best questions. Don’t be an over-achiever).

Another reason why the blog hasn’t been updated recently is that Rain and I just became the owners of neuronumerous.com It is completely empty right now, but we are working on making a place for neurohackers that not only has a collection of neurohacking presentations, but also a list of links and various other bits for the budding neurophyte (think of something similar to BoingBoing or Mind Hacks).

That’s all for now, kids. I need to go get more coffee and stare at the screen for another 6.5 hours.

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6. January 2010 by admin.

I am trying hard to make sure to post at least once a week this year. I thought that the best way to kick off the first post of the new year would be to talk about what got me interested in neurohacking as well as information about what I am currently working on.

The first time that I heard about neurohacking was during DEFCON 15. It was there that a nervous, pink-haired pixie talked about using your heart rate to play video games. I didn’t hear or think about neurohacking again until April of the following year at NOTACON where the pixie and a mad scientist were having a heated conversation about neurohacking. She wanted to use it to fix herself and he wanted to use it so that he can (in one form or another) live forever. At DEFCON 16, the mad scientist sat next to me at the bar and asked why I was interested in neurohacking. I replied with the stereotypical hacker answer: I’m curious.

Something that a lot of people don’t know about me is that I took four years of medical classes in hopes of becoming a forensic pathologist. I gave that idea up for my passion for technology. I (just like the majority of the medical world) thought that medicine and technology were more or less mutually exclusive.

We as hackers make sure that we know all of the ins and outs of a machine and then finagle it so that we can get it to do what we want it to, even if it wasn’t created to do so. Our bodies are nothing more than electrochemical machines and after we learn the ins and outs of it, we can get it to do things that we didn’t think were possible. The days of invention and creation in the medical field are few and far between.  I’m not saying that they’re all sitting on their thumbs, some progress is in fact being made. But it is up to us to try the new and adventurous since the good ol’ boys now seem to be scared to do so.

As part of my new habits for this year, I’m going to start quantifiying my life. I’ll post more about this later, but why this is important (to me) is that I don’t have health insurance and even if I did, I wouldn’t go to the doctors regularly. I don’t trust most of them nowadays. My experience has been that they have you come in, run a few tests, and then prescribe a lovely little pill for one ailment or another. With the quantified self, I hope to be able to establish a baseline for how I usually feel and operate so that I can easily track any deviations from said baseline. I’m also starting work on a new project that won’t be ready until at least 2011 and works with genetics.

Are there any questions from the blogosphere regarding neurohacking? Feel free to post them in the comments section.

Posted in quantified self, update, neurohacking | Print | 1 Comment »