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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14. March 2010 by admin.

Greetings everyone!

I know I haven’t written a blog since #ert began. Nikita and I got back from the trip safe and sound March 1. Shortly after that, however, I got SuperFlu (a not-too-distant cousin of conplague) and that’s why there hasn’t been an update. The videos from the trip can be found on Nikita’s qik account and all of my pictures are up on my Flickr account and I’ll post a link up to Nikita’s as soon as I am able to steal her SD card from her (probably some time tonight or tomorrow).  When I see her, I’ll update this entry with the total number of miles it took us to get from Tampa, FL, (where we reset the odometer on the truck) to Redmond, WA. We were in Florida from the afternoon of 2/15 through the afternoon of 2/17 (although we left my parent’s house in the morning, we ended up messing around quite a bit). Arrived in Louisiana around noon on the 18th and left late on the 20th. Our next stop was just outside of Dallas, TX, to stay with Nikita’s family and we got there around noon on the 21st. After having a great time with her family and grabbing lunch with Digi, we “kidnapped” her brother and left Texas around seven at night (local time) on the 25th. Although we would’ve liked to have spent more time there, we did only a quick stay with Jayson Street and his wife in Oklahoma City. We arrived in Denver, CO, late on the 26th and was able to have a few drinks with the 303 crowd. Left the following morning (noonish) and arrived at Salt Lake City. Stayed there and harassed Hektik until Sunday, when we decided we were all ready to be back home. We arrived in Redmond about 8:30/9:00 AM local time.

I’m sorry if you sat there and read that whole paragraph. The next post I put up will be about things that we learned while we were on the road trip.

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7. February 2010 by admin.

With only a week away, I thought that I’d throw up a post asking for suggestions on roadside attractions, traveling tips for the road, and/or any suggestions or questions anyone might have about #ert.

As you can see on the map of the previous post, we’ll be traveling across the southern states and then heading north toward Seattle. The only minor change being made is that we’re going to make a trip up to Oklahoma City, OK, to visit Jayson Street and then from there go to Roswell, NM. After Roswell, we’re planning on heading north toward Denver, CO. So, if anyone resides (or have seen/been somewhere interesting) in any of the areas mentioned or marked on the map, let us know in the comment section.

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4. February 2010 by admin.

Next Sunday is the big day. I’ll be leaving at 9:55PM on Valentine’s Day (boo) and arriving in Jacksonville, FL, at 10:30 the following morning. There, Nikita will be picking me up and then we’ll be driving to visit my family in St. Pete and from there begin our Epic Road Trip (with the hash tag: #ert) back to Seattle. Here’s a rough drawing (lol MSPaint):

We’ll have Internet through most of the trip and we’ll be keeping you up to date via Twitter (@tottenkoph and @niki7a), posting blogs up here (I’ll try to have pictures up in a timely manner on my flickr), and we’re talking about maybe doing QIK videos from our phones if/when we get extremely bored (will post link here and/or on twitter when that happens).

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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 »

16. December 2009 by admin.

Greetings!

As some of you may have noticed (SecBarbie pointed it out today, for example), all past entries are missing! I deleted them a couple of days ago so that I can start over with this blog (pictures are still floating around, if there was one you’re looking for, contact me and I’ll send the link to you). At first, the blog wasn’t being updated because I didn’t really have an idea what to do with it. Tottie + No guidelines/ideas = bad idea. Then neon came with the idea to update her blog daily. Now, this idea sounds good in theory (to me). I had a general idea what I was going to post about everyday and I’d just do it. In practice, however, this didn’t work because I was expecting myself to generate that much content every day of every week. The reason why I’m telling you this is because I needed a segue to (and excuse for) a new schedule for blog posts next year (which is only technically a few weeks away).

Instead of updating everyday like I promised (and failed) to do, I’ll be making updates at least once a week. That is to say, I promise you at least one post a week but may or may not post more. The schedule for the posts I’ll be making for January 2010 (the absolute minimum ones, anyways) are as follows:

1/3: Neurohacking-Why I’m interested and Why You *Should* Be
1/10: Food-Recipes (step-by-step w/pics) of random goodness from December
1/17: Security-Digital Billboards
1/24: Craft-Random made bits from December

A few more changes will also be made to the main site (tottenkoph.com). As you can tell by clicking the pics link, I’m working on a photo album for Hacker Cons Past. Also starting next year, I’ll be posting a picture of the day. I’ll probably be posting those updates on the main RSS feed for those interested.

Anyways, have a (Happy Hanukkah/Merry Christmas/Merry Solstice/Happy Kwanzaa) and I’ll see you here in the New Year!

<3,

Tottie

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