In the past 2 to 3 years, I've somehow developed the habit of going to hacker camps.

This summer was no exception, as I once again found myself packing a tent and camping gear to head to a small field not far from Ledbury, a small town in Herefordshire, located in the southwest of England.

Electromagnetic Field, commonly abbreviated as EMF, is a hacker camp much like MCH 2022 and CCCamp 2023, which I had attended in the past and written about in older blogposts (respectively this post and this post). The vibes are similar, and a large proportion of the people tend to be as well, but it isn't exactly a Chaos event, at least aiming to be more distinct in it's organization than MCH was.

I would end up spending a bit more than a week there - despite the event only lasting 4 days - because I got myself involved with build-up. But, in the words of River Song, "Spoilers!".

Outline

• Travelling to Ledbury
• Questionable logistical choices
• Build-up and DK provisioning
• Event days
• Event nights
• Badge Lyfe
• Return shenanigans
• Conclusions and bonus shenanigans

Travelling to Ledbury

Going camping overseas - as England technically is, at least from mainland Europe - is always a bit complicated. Of course, I could have taken the train all the way to Brussels-Midi, and then taken the Eurostar to London, and then further taken a train to Ledbury.

At the time, this seemed somewhat impractical and onerous, leading me to choose flying to Birmingham instead, and carpooling down to Ledbury. This would prove to be a logistically unwise decision, as it meant I had to deal with several unexpected logistical and timing issues.

Freshly landed in Birmingham, with approximately 20 kg of camping gear in tow, I linked up with May who'd agreed to drive us down to EMF. After a few hours of driving, including a last minute Decathlon pit stop in the city of "Cyber Spook Central" (aka. GCHQ, in Cheltenham), and some driving on small country roads with questionably safe speed limits, we arrived at Ledbury.

Once we made it up the small road from Ledbury to Eastnor Deer Park - an adventure which included seeing a miniature steam-powered kart - we started to think about how we were going to settle in.

noot noot

Questionable logistical choices

Something that seems evident when one gives it a good think, but sometimes goes over people's heads, is that the amenities typically available at such a hacker camp - such as running water, toilets, showers, electricity and wi-fi - are not fixtures that are available all year round.

Having arrived a full five days before camp started, only the staging area near the HQ tents was inhabitable for people seeking comfort, and this led to attendees participating in build-up to pitch their tents in the vicinity.

My take on this was that it'd be easier to set up our tents on the first day at a chosen location, rather than have to move it later at a time where the camp grounds would be more populated.

I ended up pitching my tent in the future "Freeside Heavy Industries" area (an unofficial sub-district attached to Milliways) with May and Boreq.

This came at the cost of "easily accessible" amenities as a long trek was needed to go to the showers, but with the advantage of having very quiet nights, which is very desirable on days involving labor. It also came with an unexpected advantage as it was located in an area with better drainage and water downward flow, which helped our tents stay mostly dry and mud free during the rains which plagued the build-up days.

Build-up and DK provisioning

My primary area of involvement during build-up was the Network Operations Center (or NOC), the main activity of which consisted of running fiber or copper to or between various porta-potties (which NOC calls Datenklo's or DK's), and later doing targeted runs to deploy 48-port network switches, network access points and DECT antennas.

The network map, a close-enough representation of the NOC reality.

On the plus side, the NOC is - at least logistically - quite well organized, and we had very clear deployment schemas, which - when followed correctly - led to the switches having the ability to be centrally provisioned and configured.

This meant that, even though we ended up not being able to provision some of the camp until d-minus-one due to the rains and several undeployed porta-potties, we were live on d-zero.

♫ Walking a switch downfield ♫

One of the things that helped throughout the build-up was that the orga team had accounted for volunteers' well-being, which extended to having facilities to relax, drink coffee, and eat the meals lovingly prepared by the orga team (and later by the volunteer kitchen once too many volunteers were on-site and the HQ tent could not fit us all anymore).

The rains didn't dampen the mood, but may or may not have dampened our shoes, as I ended up buying a decent set of work shoes to stave off the dirt and humidity.

wet

When the NOC didn't have anything for us to do due to the rains, I found myself helping build up Null Sector (aka the "naughty corner" or the "party zone") alongside people from Freeside Heavy Industries, because an extra pair of arms always helps when it comes to moving around lumber and set decorations.

Event days

During the event, I ended up attending only a few talks, as the overall heat - as the event days inexplicably were missed by the rains - made sitting in a large tent with hundreds of people a matter of motivation and interest.

In lieu, I ended up doing a few volunteer shifts, primarily as volunteer manager, where my job was simply to check people into their shifts if they didn't have a shift supervisor, field calls for relief, and where I could also help direct people into signing up for volunteer shifts.

But for the most part, I ended up hanging out with people I knew from the Glauca Digital / T3 bundle of villages, people I'd bonded with during build-up, or friends I knew from other events, or even friends I made on-site.

"DO NOT THE SHARK"

Event nights

EMF has a somewhat visible separation between its day life and its night life. Where during the day the various stages would hold technical talks, at night they would hold music concerts, parties, expos, and other social events.

I usually ended up being awake until Null Sector closed for the night, dancing and partying with a variety of friends and other people I'd met, before winding down and going to sleep to start over the next day.

🔊 Electric beats to get hyped to

Badge lyfe

This years' badge, called the Tildagon, had a really interesting concept: "what if we made a badge that is futureproof?". You can read up more about it at this link.

It has a number of connector ports which allowed users to interface with specially designed PCB's (called Hexpansions), and given the designs had been released beforehand, a number of groups had already designed Hexpansions for games or other fun features, and uploaded the related apps to the Tildagon "App Store".

One example of this was GCHQ.net (not the cyber spooks, but rather an acronym for the "Great Camp Hexpansion Quest"), which involved finding as many of the 87 (or more) Hexpansions across camp and syncing them with the Tildagon.

Hopefully this badge will see use in 2026 as was intended, as I would really like to see the platform evolve. As it turns out, so would the badge team, as I ended up running into two of them before and during my (very delayed) flight from Birmingham Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol.

Return shenanigans

Carpooling all the way to Birmingham Airport was a bit chaotic, but I ended up making it with time to spare.

When we finally were allowed to check in and go through security, I noticed my flight was severely delayed by at least one hour. This would have been fine, had I not needed to transfer in Amsterdam Schiphol to return to Zurich within that hour.

I ended up missing that connection, and given I had to be in Geneva early the next day for an appointment, managed to negotiate a flight direct to Geneva early in the morning, after which I would take the train back up to Zurich.

I won't mention the relative chaos that this meant with regards to handling twenty-plus kilograms of gear, but I'm sure you can imagine it.

Conclusions and bonus shenanigans

To close things up a bit, I can definitely say that going to EMF is one of my highlights of 2024, and I'm happy I got to meet a lot of new and interesting people.

Oh, and as a bonus for sticking with me throughout the article: Did you know that my random posting during the event got one of my posts featured on HackerNews? (see here). The reason for this was a radioactive source ended up being found at the swap drop, and the very particular nature of how it got retrieved and rendered safe made for a very funny toot:

Unexpected banger of a toot