Dear all,

as of yesterday afternoon, our fellow hacker, amazingly talented game and graphic designer, and wonderful friend Florian Hufsky aka oneup (aka geeq, aka no_skill) is no longer with us.

Some of you might remember his beautiful game ideas for Super Mario War or Puit Universe, the 72 dpi Army, and Urban Takeover (later ClaimSpotting), but also the work for GRL Vienna and laser tagging, and Planet; or him being spokesperson of the Austrian Pirate Party, founding member of soup.io, just as well as an amazing graphic designer and comics artist,… and I could maybe continue this unordered braindump of a silly attempt to make a list of all the projects he’d been involved in for eternity and a day, but – never will I be able to embrace the sheer endlessness of his very original, both incredibly inspired and inspiring, geek-artistic output.

Metalab has lost one of its most creative hackers, and the world one of its most beautiful minds.

The one quote of his that came to my mind right after we heard the terrible news was, ‘When in doubt, do it (you have no chance to survive, make your time)’ – and that, I believe, is what held true for all his life.

R.I.P. Florian Hufsky | November 13th, 1986 – December 16th, 2009

While tears choke the words, I have to admit to fail at expressing my deepest sorrow.
Much love and sincerest condolences to all friends and relatives.

And we all go together if one falls down, we talk out loud like you’re still around; and we miss you.

/astera

Were the words spoken by over two dozen people who made it to the Feuerwerkskörperkontrollkästchen Party for New Years at c-base. Where a salvo of fireworks just screeched up into the sky celebrating the new year to everyone and welcoming a new year of collaboration in hackerspaces everywhere!

Rewind back to less than 24 hours previously a metal box with buttons lay on a table with no innards. A very sad sight to see when a project has been left on the table. It was originally destined to set off a salvo of fireworks at the c-base reconstruction crew’s location in Berlin, but when push came to shove and a few hackers from two continents came together at two in the morning magic started happening, and who was to mess with destiny?

With soldering guns in hand and three members of different hackerspaces (Astera of Metalab.at, Ash of Hacdc.org, and Jeedi of c-base.org) leading the charge plans started to take shape. A double dead man switch,  with a bank of 16 Ethernet ports broken down to two 8 port jacks with 5 blocked off for disuse and 1 for power allowing for 40 individual rockets to be fired. When wired correctly you could either kill a bank of Ethernet switch right quick or as for the intended purposes set off a salvo of fireworks.

Hackerspaces.org staffers have preliminary agreements to turn the Flashy-Ammunition-Ignition-Lighter-over-Ethernet (FAILoE)  intellectual property over to a certain sillicon valley network hardware provider. All the proceeds will be donated to charities that benefit destitute arms manufacturers.

After the work was done it looked like this:

As of schematics:

And for the action shot:

Welcome to the New Year hackerspaces.org folks!

-E.
of the hackerspaces.org team.

All pictures by Ash Gokhale and Dan Kaminsky.