Maker Faire

So Facebook chat is really dumb, and doesn’t save chat history. If it does, getting to it is non-intuitive, and it’s just giving me another reason to dislike (hahaha) Facebook. As if I needed another reason.

ANYWAYS

Maker Faire was pretty damn awesome.

I could leave it at that, but my god that would be a disservice to everyone that wasn’t there and reads my blog, which translates into maybe 10 people, if you’re optimistic about the size of my readership. To sum up the experience, I don’t think I’ve been somewhere with so many cool geeks showing off cool things all in one place. And now, I’m just going to list what I saw:

• Makerbot crews
• Reprappers from around the area, and even some from Montana or Idaho
• New reprap boards
• A veritable lack of NYC reprappers
• Man, I bet some hip-hop artist is going to pick up the tag ‘reprapper’
• Just watch
• I did NOT get to see arc attack. Quite disappointing, something crazy stuff about ‘room capacity’ and ‘public safety’
• The local hackerspace booths: NYC Resistor (I have to say Metrix’s hobo token is much more badass), Alpha One Labs
• Lock picking booth run by TOOOL. Didn’t manage to crack their locks, but I only spent 3 minutes at their booth
• Epilog laser (should we make our space green, or get a laser cutter?! Oh, the agony!), Autodesk, some commercial 3D printers
• shop bot
• Make Magazine (duh)
• Couple of dudes presenting their thesis work, like interactive music, drawing with computer interaction
• Element 14
• mbed – realized I’d forgotten people are trying to make money with this stuff when I asked ‘are you open sourcing the server code?’ and they laughed.
• huge straw structure
• games, of course. physical games, of course
• rubix cube solving robot
• live music remixer using only sound recorder and windows media player
• arm overlay that lets the computer know how the arm is positioned
• fabric hacking! Especially liked the ball o’ yarn pressure sensor, and the tape bend sensor
• utility kilts
• The human sized mouse trap
• mathematica playing cards. Seriously. They’ll likely be the geekiest cards I’ll ever have
• lots of LEDs
• guy that played guitar while wearing a monitor on his head
• luminescent fluid in tubes
• HUGE LED arrays, with separately attached LEDs.
• monome-like devices
• cart-based youtube video uploader
• the reverse geocache guy
• over priced fair food, of course
• microsoft attempting to shoulder into the hobbyist electronics market
• book scanners: at least two guys were doing it
• guy in a 3-4m tall germ suit
• jet-powered fair ride
• biobus!
• sparkfun!
• open STM (scanning tunneling microscope)!
• lots of people trying to sell shirts and stuff
• 3D light show with yarn and a projector
• hydroponics
• talk by a dude that wants to use the building-top water containers as a city-wide cosmic ray detector
• learned exactly how pressure waves kill people in explosions
• listened to Wolfram talk, which was somewhat disappointing because all he did was do random stuff with Mathematica and push his cellular automata based view of the world
• talk by the creator of scratch
• talk by the creator of lilypad
• talks by lots of people that wrote books
• derived statistic: child would have to work full time on getting kidnapped for some 750,000 years for it to certainly be kidnapped. I have some qualms about this derived stat, but it’s interesting none-the-less
• I thought the talk titled ‘Sustainable hacker spaces’ was going to about making hackerspaces green. Nope! It was about how to keep the hacker space alive, a much more pressing concern
• conductive play dough
• guys that want to stick gardens on the top of buses. They’re not entirely crazy, either!
• floor that generates power from footsteps
• carrot flutes
• wearable, welded together steampunk-ish suits (think big daddy, or fallout 3 cover guy, but much more chaotic)
• science history museum
• computer recyclers
• some kids trying to rickroll the subway car (okay, so this was on the way back home, and they weren’t at maker faire, but still!)

I know I’m leaving stuff out, but I think that’s a good start on enumerating what I’ve seen.

Seeing all those finished projects is a really good motivator: at least, it feels like one. We’ll see if I get things done sooner than later.

My octopart (day 1) and xkcd (code compiling) shirts got positive attention. Woot. Geek status boost!

Okay, I really have to get back to… um, doing homework. And listening to trippy japanese pop. Yeah.

Oh! And Dresden Codak AND Methods of Rationality both updated within a day of each other! Yudkowsky and Diaz must be conspiring together, or something (sadly, this doesn’t even seem to be that far-fetched).