Zagreb was cool, much livelier than Pula. The group at MaMa was really awesome. They are very much less ideological than the people in Pula, but that allows them to be more inclusive and they have a great community. They have a thing called “Skill Sharing” every Saturday, where people come and hang out and show each other how to do cool stuff. There’s a pretty diverse (in terms of age and gender) group of 20-50 or so people who come frequently. They even have a few people in their 50s and 60s who AREN’T old-school hackers, but rather people who learned computers/free software later in their lives. I think that’s really cool.

Saturday Skill Sharing

Oh, and after the meetings, everyone goes out for pizza together. Everyone at MaMa was really friendly and welcoming. They were even willing to switch a whole table of conversation from Croatian to English just for my  benefit. Probably the funniest comment was Marcell talking about people who know just enough about computers to seem like they really know a lot about computers, they’ll drop a phrase like “I had to recompile the kernel,” or “flash the BIOS,” and if you never actually ask them more questions or have a real discussion with them, you’d assume they were totally 1337. He said it reminded him of a guy who’d been teaching him yoga and meditation: At first, Marcell thought the guy was the smartest person in the world. He hardly ever spoke, and when he did, he’d dispense really wise aphorisms. Then after a while, he realized the guy was actually really dumb, and just spoke in nothing but wise aphorisms.

One guy told me he thought it was harder to become a good hacker these days, because lots of the small, but tricky problems have already been solved. These are the kinds of problems that one person just starting out might work on.

I also went to a couple museums in Zagreb. The technical museum was pretty cool. They had a lot of really good exhibits on different subjects. My favorites were probably the section with very early computers, a whole room full of very intricate and informative models of heat engines (everything from a refrigerator to a Saturn V rocket) by Ivo Kolin, and also a big exhibit on Nikola Tesla, including live demonstrations of some of his inventions.

1.21 gigawatts!

I also saw the naïve art museum, which I really liked. I’d gotten kind of burnt out on art museums in Italy, but this one had some really cool stuff, and it was very different from anything I’d seen elsewhere. I especially liked the pieces by Ivan Rabuzin.

Ivan Rabuzin: On the Hills - Primeval Forest, Image Courtesy Wikimedia Foundation, licensed under GNU Free Documentation License (I saw this in person, but Wikipedia had a better photo)

After Zagreb, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I had a 20 hour layover in Budapest. I went to see the Memento Park, where the Hungarians dumped all the communist statues after the fall of communism there. It was the main thing that I’d missed in Budapest the last time I was there. The park is pretty far outside of the city, and getting there takes about an hour. Once you get there, it’s also kind of expensive by Hungarian standards. The irony of communist iconography being turned into a money-making tourist trap was not lost on me. What better way to remember a morally bankrupt, repressive government than with your very own McLenin’s t-shirt?

McLenin's or East Park t-shirt

So yeah, the Momento Park was a good way to kill time, and it would’ve been pretty cool if it were 70% closer and 50% cheaper.

The rearguard of the revolution?

I went out for drinks with a couple people I met the last time I was in Hungary (the bar had swings instead of seats!) and then went out and slept in the airport (which was much warmer than the one in Milan). My flight left for Warsaw at 7 am. In Poland I emailed some developers and white-hat security hacker types. I’ll probably meet with them when I get back there. Yesterday (!) I caught a train from Warsaw to Vienna, Austria for the Roboexotica festival.

It’s not homesickness, exactly, because I don’t really miss just being home, although there are a few people I’d really like to see. I’m having a great time. I think I’d just like stay someplace for a while. In a day or two I’m going to Frankfurt to spend Christmas with some family there, and after that I’m going back to Berlin for 25C3, which should be amazing. I like Berlin, and I might try to settle there for a few weeks at least. We’ll see.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lazing about and reading. I’m most of the way through Steve Wozniak’s (the co-founder of Apple computers) autobiography, the trendily-titled iWoz. It’s a good read, and Wozniak is truly an impressive hardware hacker and old-school geek of the highest order.

His original idea for the Apple was to create a powerful, but accessible, low-cost computer that hobbyists and ordinary individuals could use—as opposed to the $10,000 machines that preceded it. It’s almost sad, considering the direction that the Steve Jobs-dominated Apple has gone in recent years: producing overpriced computers-as-art-objects.

One of the first projects Jobs and Wozniak worked on together was the Atari game Breakout.  Wozniak stayed up for four days straight killing himself to meet a deadline. Jobs split with Wozniak the $700 wage he’d been paid for the project, but kept secret an extra $5,000 bonus he’d received from Atari for the pair’s efficient use of components. In his book, Wozniak claims not to be bitter about this, but it does  say something about the character of one, Steve Jobs.