36c3 part 1

For many years I wanted to go to a CCC and this year because of different reasons I was finally able to go, this blog post is going to cover my planning and following posts will hopefully follow.

Preparing

There is a log of coverage already how to prepare for a congress. Obviously, you need a ticket. I got my ticket thanks to a co-worker who is a pretty active member of a local chaos group, so was fairly easy (thx stean)

So after getting a ticket, a place to stay needs to be found. In most cases, I run with AirBnB, this time I was unable to find a cosy place nearby so I ended up doing a hotel reservation and I hope this was a good choice.

And last but not least, transportation. The way to go here for me is using german railway services, Deutsche Bahn. There is even a special page from Deutsche Bahn to get a special ticket for a lower price.

Stuff

Of course, going to a conference you need your basic stuff as for every conference/travel, so I will not go into that too much. Especially for the congress, I tagged most of my gear that I plan to bring to the venue with my twitter handle and my domain so that it is easy to find the owner.

In addition to my normal list I packed the following items:

  • permanent markers (white/black) – maybe I can help with those
  • Magic ties (Amazon link) – I love those things
  • Stickers (mostly for FIRST)
  • batteries (AA+AAA) because why not.

A water bottle, because @c3himmel asked for it:

Tech

The tech also needs some extra time, in particular, updating every service/application running is critical. As I do not trust the wifi (as with any other wifi) VPN and a backup VPN was tested/updated.

To be able to work on stuff I also freed up some space on the devices, just in case.

Power up batteries, external power supplies and co. I do not want to run out of power.

Further reading