campGND 2024
Published:
campGND took place this year from the 9th to the 11th August at its usual location. I wasn’t able to make it to EMF in June so I was happy to have the opportunity for some camping.
This year there was a conscious effort to change things up compared to previous years. The biggest difference was that we would not be attempting to run a generator for power, but also we would be watching the noise levels and not having a central sound system for music.
Power
As I have sleep apnoea, power is a requirement for sleeping. I used the Anker 535 PowerHouse again (nominally 512 Wh) along with the Anker 625 Solar Panel (nominally 100W) to provide power. Running my ResMed AirMini overnight used 10% of the battery capacity according to the display of the PowerHouse. I used the DC/DC converter rather than the regular transformer plugged into the 240V inverter as that seems to be a lot more energy efficient.
In the morning on Saturday I got the solar panel set up and quite quickly the battery was full again, so rather than let the solar power go to waste I offered to charge up phones and laptops until the sun went away. When I made an effort to get the panel aligned with the sun it would see about 60-70W generated, but this would fall to 10-15W if I didn’t keep up with rotating the panel as the sun moved across the sky.
Music
Before heading to the camp I used my YouTube Premium subscription to download a few mixes to my phone in the YouTube Music app. I was surprised to find that mobile service was quite usable in the field this year but in previous years it has been terrible, so best to be prepared.
Ana lent me her Anker SoundCore 2 which seemed to be a good fit for background music at the camp. Not too quiet but also not too loud.
During the camp I played:
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Toki Pona Presentation
This year we had presentations on the theme of: “The project I haven’t finished”. I have plenty of projects that I haven’t really started but it was a requirement that I had at least started the project, so rather than a computing or electronics project I decided to speak about my efforts learning Toki Pona.
Presenting my efforts to learn Toki Pona to the campGND attendees inside the Scottish Consulate marquee.
Due to lack of power and being outside, a projector wasn’t going to work for slides. To work around this I took the flip chart from the office conference room and it seemed to work well (once I moved it inside the marquee, it wasn’t happy in the wind outside).
I gave a quick introduction to the language, including a few words of vocabulary and basic grammar. I also talked about the tools I have been using to learn with:
- jan Misali’s video course
- jan Kekan San’s video course
- Toki Pona: The Language of Good by Sonja Lang
- Toki Pona Dictionary
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Toki Pona Edition)
I also forgot to mention it in my presentation, but Thing Explainer has been helpful in breaking concepts down so that I can think about translating them into Toki Pona. Often translation requires describing the components of concepts, or the features of concepts, so that you can build up a context in which you have a shared understanding. Due to the limited vocabulary of Toki Pona there almost always is not a 1:1 translation available.
Sitting around the campfire at the end of the day