This time last week I was enjoying myself in a field in Herefordshire with over 3,000 other ‘hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers’ (to quote the blurb), at the 2024 edition of the Electromagnetic Field festival. EMF is something I've wanted to attend for a long time – having read about its early iterations in Milton Keynes, 2016 was the first year I definitely remember feeling like I was missing out on something cool by not being there. I basically chickened out of trying to attend in 2018 and 2022, but this past year has been an absolute stinker for me both personally and professionally and so I figured EMF 2024 might be just the event to give me something to look forward to and act as a pick-me-up.
Spoiler alert: this plan worked splendidly. It was not only my first EMF, but my first festival of any stripe, and I couldn't have asked for a better experience.
Having been keeping an eye on updates from the site build (where the theme appeared to be incessant rain and mud up to your eyeballs), I arrived several hours later than planned in glorious evening sunshine on the Thursday. This did mean it was trickier than I'd have liked to find a nice clear spot for my tent, but I made a beeline for the ECHQ village since I'd been hanging around the CuTEL Discord prior to the event; it was in the furthest corner of the site from the main gate, and the area was already quite busy but there was some space to be found a little way up the hill. I got the tent up by 8, and then began the long trudge of unloading the rest of the car; by 10 I'd moved everything except the largest box full of comms/tech gear, which I decided could wait for morning since I didn't particularly fancy running my network and telephone cables in the dark!
… four telephones is a perfectly reasonable number of telephones to have in one's tent, right? And that's not even counting my mobile! (We currently do not talk about the DECT handset, though. It knows what it did.)
Technological delays notwithstanding, at this point I retired to the bar and immediately bumped into Lex, so a pleasant evening was had chatting about (amongst other things) their ZX Spectrum laptop and my Viewdata service which we'd hoped would work together nicely.
And so, to the first of the projects I'd set myself: a Viewdata service related to the festival. This initially came about as I was debating whether to attend, and whether I would have anything interesting to talk to people about if I did; it occurred to me that I have a nicely-portable Viewdata terminal that I'd originally bought to use with System/1, repaired back in early 2020, and then done nothing with beyond testing that it worked with Jelora's Minitel service. So why not take it along and point it at a simple service I could use to review the talk schedule from my tent in the morning, just as a ha-ha-that's-fun sort of hack?
Of course this plan snowballed somewhat, as such plans are wont to do, and I'd ended up talking to various other folk who were interested in telecoms stuff – at least two of them had had ‘build a Viewdata service for EMF’ on their to-do list for ages but not got around to it, and I had some time on my hands, so I figured I might as well do a proper job of it! The resulting system is based around John Newcombe's Telstar software, with a couple of local patches to tweak some minor aspects of the user experience (I must get around to sending those to John in case he's interested), and a whole bunch of rather hastily-written Perl to pull in the schedule details, bar/shop/telephone/weather information, and offer a guestbook facility.
(Memo to self: next time, don't forget to rebuild the Docker container with the guestbook scripts embedded within it; I think this is the only page on the entire service that still has the ‘2022’ left over in the header from the prototype, and of course it's the only one I took a photograph of at the event!)
Sadly some changes to the bar API this year meant the tap lists ended up out of sync with what was actually on offer, which is something to address for next time, but overall the service was a roaring success and I had a fair bit of very positive feedback on it. As I remarked to a friend in the bar on the Sunday evening, I've been feeling pretty burned-out recently, with a lot of the things I've been doing for work ending up not getting used in the end; being able to put together a project like this in my spare time and have it be well-received by the community was just the tonic I needed. Now I just need to funnel that energy and sense of accomplishment into going on the job hunt…
If anybody missed it at the event but would like to check it out anyway, the service is still available through the web interface for the time being.
I had two other projects in mind for the weekend; one of them was a reminder-call service that grew out of the Viewdata one, and would allow attendees to call a number and request a call back at either a certain time or 15 minutes before a scheduled event. I did have the service working at home and was very pleased with it, but left it too late to properly co-ordinate with the phones team in order to get the required access to place calls into the camp phone network. Instead I worked with CuTEL, who run the copper phone network for the site, to try to get it working through their infrastructure; unfortunately we hit an unexpected snag, by which time it was already late on the Saturday so there was little point pursuing it further. However, I fully intend to bring it to the 2026 event and have it working properly so the effort won't be completely wasted! In the meantime, I can only offer a video demonstration which I filmed vertically for no compellingly good reason.
The third and final project was to shoot and develop some B&W film on site – the temperature regulation required for colour processes being a bit tricky to achieve in a field, although I suppose I could have used a water bath and a sous vide heater. This went quite well, although I'd found so much to do during the event that it ended up being 11 p.m. on the Sunday before I got around to developing the first roll of film (Ilford Delta 400):
The second roll of B&W (Ilford HP5+) ended up having to wait until I got home, and the Cinestill 800T is still in the T90 until I shoot a scrap roll to make sure my stock of C41 chemistry is still good. That one was mostly shot in Null Sector on the Saturday night so it could be a bit messy!
It turns out walking around the site with a film camera is a good way to meet other film enthusiasts – several said hello and asked what stock I was shooting on. Similarly, Jenny List's talk on converting Super-8 cine cameras to digital attracted a cluster of vintage camera people to the Q&A session afterwards; the prospect of putting together some sort of film camera workshop for 2026 was mooted, which is definitely something I need to think about getting involved with.
Apart from my own nonsense, I think I spent a lot of the time just soaking up the atmosphere – particularly on the Saturday, when it seems I completely abandoned the majority of what I'd planned to do in favour of ambling around the place looking in on the various villages. A common theme I've seen when people are talking about EMF is that no matter how much of it you see, there's always a sense that there's so much more you didn't; this certainly holds true for me, as it wasn't until I was catching up with the Fediverse after the event that I remembered half the things I'd meant to check out. But that appears to be the delight of it; newcomers to the event were even advised in the opening ceremony that spending all our time in the talks would be a mistake because so much of EMF happens not in the bits that are organised, but the bits that attendees put together for themselves.
Particular highlights from the talks I did see, though, were Tim Hunkin's Short History of Electric Shocks, Matthew Garrett recapping the XZ backdoor saga (although I think I make a guest appearance in the recording as ‘idiot who applauds twice at one point before realising nobody else is’), and Phil Pemberton's talk on running a cable TV station. The latter included a mention of a class of device I didn't realise existed, and which will solve the main problem I thought was stopping me from doing something similar at home; not to mention the fact that I've known Phil online for probably 25 years at this point and we finally got around to having a pint afterwards.
So many other talks sounded fascinating, and although it was a shame to miss them at the time the vast majority of them were recorded and should hopefully be available to watch at my leisure. I'm not going to rush to do that, though; it'll be more fun to spread them out, to retain some of that feeling of having had an absolutely brilliant weekend for as long as possible.
It would have been nice to have spent more time playing the various games and suchlike dotted around the site; I noticed a lot of children enjoying the Polybius CTF game, for instance, and the Capture The Phone game running on the various public telephones on the main thoroughfares seemed to be a hit. The GCHQ game also looked like a good way to explore the site but it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise why I couldn't get it to work – I was plugging the hexpansions into my badge upside down!
In closing, a few things I ought to jot down so that I don't forget them in 2026:
First and foremost, I definitely need to take some work gloves next time. The camping gear was easy enough to carry from the car to where I pitched up; the various boxes of kit that I brought with me were absolute murder on my fingers. A foldable trolley thing might work too but I doubt I could fit one in the car without borrowing a nice sensible hatchback or something!
Secondly, allowing a lot more time for packing said boxes before leaving home would have been wise. I ended up completely blowing my schedule, which did mean I felt free to take an extra hour or so to do some bits I'd previously decided I didn't have time for, but it would have been nicer to arrive on site in early afternoon and had time to get the tent cabled up. That would have in turn allowed me to get the Viewdata service up and running on Thursday, as planned, rather than Friday afternoon.
Thirdly, and maybe most importantly: relax, and perhaps take the “what if everything goes wrong?” worrying down a notch. (The comments I'd seen about 2022's food vendors being horribly expensive and not very appealing? Absolutely not a concern this year, so the emergency dinner stash didn't get touched! Besides, Ledbury's only five minutes up the road, and it has shops…)
Finally, one thing I didn't get around to doing and which I really should have: signing up for a volunteer shift or two. I'm not sure what was going on with my browser but I couldn't log in to access the relevant details on the website for much of the weekend, even though I'd looked through them before I left. Definitely need to make sure I get ahead of that next time.
EMF 2024: I had an absolute blast, and am looking forward to 2026 already. Huge thanks to everybody I met there for making me feel welcome, and especially to the absolute army of volunteers who made it all happen. Next time I plan to count myself amongst that number!