By the hour
OK Go to play Maker Faire Sunday
In case you missed the announcement tucked at the end of Dale's Maker Faire preview post yesterday, I'm here to tell you the OK Go will be performing an acoustic set on the Solar Stage at Maker Faire Bay Area on Sunday at 5pm. They're thinking of it as a teaser to their headlining show at the Filmore later next week in SF. If you liked OK Go's Rube Goldberg machine video for "This Too Shall Pass," then don't miss Adam Sadowsky's talk about the machine, called "Music, Machines, & Life" on Saturday at 5:30pm on Center Stage.
More:- OK Go Rube Goldberg video: meet the makers!
- OK Go Rube Goldberg machine interactive floor plan
- Behind the scenes of OK Go's Rube Goldberg video at Ignite Los Angeles
- The OKGO WTF effect
- OK Go LED jackets
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Curfew in Bangkok after surrender
Bangkok and about a third of the rest of Thailand spend a first night under curfew after protest leaders surrender.
Categories: By the hour
Bazaar Bizarre at Maker Faire: Particle Zoo
Rachel Hobson @ CRAFT's been catching up with some of the vendors who will be at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, selling their handmade goodies at Bazaar Bizarre. Don't miss Particle Zoo, where you'll find all your favorite subatomic particles as cute plush toys. Check out the full interview over on CRAFT.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
London 2012 unveils Games mascots
London 2012 organisers unveil cartoon animations named Wenlock and Mandeville as mascots for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Categories: By the hour
Maker Faire Arduino project: MintyBot prototype
This is the prototype of MintyBot, an Arduino robotics platform I've been working on. I'll be doing show-and-tell with it (and other projects) in the Maker Shed Arduino area at Maker Faire this Saturday, May 22 and Sunday, May 23. Please come by and check it out!
In the Maker Shed:
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Train guards in pay loss ballot
Train guards are to vote on strikes over pay on the East Coast Mainline as automated ticket machines hit commission.
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The Road to Maker Faire: Greetings Earthlings!
The Raygun Gothic Rocketship and her crew arrived in San Mateo, Earth today, on the 17th day of the 5th month in the year 2010. After an uneventful 12-hour trans-galactic journey across the western reaches of the Sobay Nebula, our sturdy and resilient little ship finally settled down on the grassy planetary landscape that will soon be densely populated by the rare and interesting Humanus Makeriferous Species. We look forward to studying their kind...
The RGR Crew will be docked for approximately seven Earth days in order to take on supplies, refresh our reading material, and to grant shore leave to the crew. Ship tours will commence on the day of the Saturn and will continue until the moon rises on the day of the Sun.
To all you Space Cadets out there! The RGR Crew is recruiting! Stop by our space port and pick up a Raygun Gothic Rocketeer recruitment packet today!
The Road to Maker Faire:
TinyMeat preps for Maker Faire
Categories: By the hour, Creative
How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?
Small businesses workin' it... via UPS blog -
According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses in the U.S. employ over 50 percent of the private sector and shell out 44 percent of the private sector pay. Small-business owners are the backbone of our economy (PDF here).At Maker Faire I'll be doing a talk (and likely a lot of informal chatters) about running your own kit business. It's mostly sharing information, what has worked and what hasn't... Sunday, 5/23 3:00pm, Open Source Hardware Businesses, MAKE magazine booth, Make: Projects Stage. Over the last 3-4 years I've seen attendees turn in to featured makers and featured makers turn in to thriving businesses. Make (Maker Shed) as well as many others have also taken off in the last few years, it's a wonderful time to make things and make good businesses - see you at Maker Faire!
Categories: By the hour, Creative
From hackerspace to outer space: A Maker Faire preview
For the fifth year in the Bay Area, Maker Faire welcomes thousands of makers of all ages who show us the amazing things they create. Here's a preview of some of what you can expect to see and do at Maker Faire Bay Area 2010, May 22 and 23 at the San Mateo Expo Center.
Spacebridge Panel DiscussionExpo Hall"Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace, has a space program now," wrote Ed Hunsinger on Laughing Squid. They launched a balloon that rose to nearly 70,000 feet, taking pictures of the Earth below.
Mitch Altman of Noisebridge will also lead a Hackerspace Panel discussion on Sunday at 1:00 pm on the Innovations Stage in Expo Hall. The panel will feature representatives from HeatSync Labs in Arizona, Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, as well two Detroit-area hackerspaces.
Three college students built a balloon and sent it to near-space, an altitude of roughly 90,000 feet, and carried a 4-pound payload of sensors and cameras. It cost them about $800 to build.
Parachute Mobile Mark Meltzer & Michael PechnerOutside at the Bay Area Amateur Radio Exhibit
Talk Sat. 5:00 pm at Center Stage.
Parachute Mobile is taking ham radio to new heights. Mark Meltzer combines skydiving, which he's done since 1968, with ham radio. Recently, he jumped from 18,000 feet carrying equipment not only to conduct voice communications during the jumps, but also to relay GPS data and physiological sensor readings to the ground and to the internet via VHF telemetry. The data produced the Google map seen above.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Maker Faire: Syzygryd
Maker Faire is the ideal place for creative collaboration. A huge advantage of sharing what you make in a public space is the potential for finding like-minded folks who can collaborate and contribute to your project. You can feel it in the air at the Faire and it's super exciting. This year's Maker Faire Bay Area, taking place on May 22nd and 23rd at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, will feature folks working together on a project called Syzygryd. The project, still in the works, is a collaboration between four crews: Interpretative Arson, False Profit Labs, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Illutron. The entire team working on Syzygryd is around 30-40 people. One member, Emma Dannin, took a moment to tell us more about the project and what part of it the crew is bringing to the Faire.
1. Tell us about the project you're bringing to Maker Faire.
The piece is a part of the sculpture Syzygryd. There's more info on syzygryd.com, but basically, the piece is a giant 2.5-ton musical instrument that allows 3 people (regardless of musical ability) to collaborate and make harmonic-sounding music together. We'll just be bringing the music pieces to Maker Faire. That includes touchscreens running our custom sequencer/controller software and computers/speakers to play back the music people make. The sets are composed in Ableton Live and we'd like more folks to get involved and submit sets. We're hoping to use Maker Faire as a chance to get the word out about our project, as well as recruit new participants, or musicians looking to contribute sounds.
Syzygryd's Kickstarter video gives a great window into the project.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Cooking with Camping stoves
For many of us, it's hard to imagine camping without a campfire. But unless you need it for heat, you might not need to go to the trouble of building one anymore. This is because camping stoves have gotten to a point that they are so small, safe, and easy to use that you just might choose their small, useful cooking power over that of a campfire. Not to mention the fact that in many campsites and national forest campgrounds, campfires are considered safety hazards and are prohibited. So camping stoves are a great substitution for your cooking needs in those cases.
Camping stoves, or portable stoves, are designed to be compact and lightweight in order to make them convenient and easy to carry. There are four basic categories of camping stoves, depending on the type of fuel that the stove uses. The most basic stoves are single burner stoves that don't have any controls on them. They use a solid or liquid fuel that is put in the burner before it is lit. Other stoves have single burners as well but instead use a liquid fuel that is compressed into a tank, the top of which is the burner mechanism. Still other stoves use gas. They have one or more burners and also have controls to regulate the amount of gas being burned and the height of the flame, just like a gas stove in your kitchen. The last kind of stoves use spirits that drip down into the priming pan due to gravity. They actually have mostly been replaced by gas stoves because they are easier to transport, but these stoves also have a very low risk of causing a fire.
One of the problems with camping stoves is that their flames are vulnerable to the elements – particularly wind. Even if the wind doesn't completely extinguish a burner's flame, it could cause it to decrease in size or to become uneven in it's placement against the cooking vessel, either of which would reduce the effectiveness of the stove. So when looking at camping stoves, you'll want to consider whether or not a model has a built in wind shield. You may have to purchase a slightly larger (or less collapsible) model in order to get this feature, but it will help reduce frustration when you're actually cooking with it. Many campers will try to create their own wind shield, a practice that can be very dangerous. If the wind changes directions or strength, the material being used might get blown against the burner flame and ignite. However, aluminium foil is a relatively safe material that can be used to shield if needed.
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Categories: By the hour
How To Turn A Simple Picnic Into A Fun And Exciting Day
Are you interested in having a picnic with your family in the near future? As fun and exciting as picnics can be, many children, especially teenagers, tend to associate them with boredom. To ensure that everyone, including your children, have a good time at your next picnic, there are a number of steps that you may want to take. A few of those steps are outlined below for your convenience.
One of the best ways to go about turning a simple picnic into a fun and exciting day involves carefully choosing your picnic location. What you need to remember is that there are a number of different locations that make for the perfect picnic destinations. These locations may include your own backyard, as well as a public park. As nice and easy as it is to have a picnic in your own backyard, a change of scenery may do you and your family some good.
Another one of the many ways that you can help turn your next family picnic into a fun and exciting day is by carefully choosing the foods in which you plan on eating, as well as the snacks and drinks. Nothing can ruin a good picnic more than complaints about the food. For that reason, you may want to have your family, namely your children, give you some input as to which foods they would like to have available at your next family picnic. This is particularly ideal if you have young children, as there is often some pride that is associated with helping to plan a family event, like a picnic.
Another way that you can go about turning a simple picnic into a fun and exciting day is by remembering that picnics involve more than just eating great food. You may also want to plan a number of different fun family activities for everyone to participate in. For instance, if you are interested in having a picnic in your own backyard, you may want to think about setting up a volleyball net or playing other fun outdoor sports. If you are planning on having your picnic at a public park, you may want to choose one that allows you to go swimming or fishing or one that has a playground for young children.
In addition to having a small family picnic, with one that mostly just involves your immediate family, you may also want to consider having other guests attend as well. You can consider inviting some of your neighbors or have your children invite some of their friends. This tends to make picnics much more enjoyable, especially for children. With that in mind, if you would like to keep your family picnic a private one, where you are able to spend quality time with your family, the decision to do so is yours to make.
The above mentioned steps are just a few of the many steps that you can take to make your next family picnic a fun filled day, as well as a memorable and exciting one. As a reminder, it may work out to your advantage if you allow your family, namely your children, to assist you with the planning of your next scheduled family picnic. This assistance could include helping you choose your picnic location, choosing some of the food, snacks, and drinks that you will have, as well as helping you prepare those foods.
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