Maker Faire 2012 - Part 1.

When I first got to Maker Faire on Sunday, I immediately started to melt down. The first two buildings I went into - I wasn't sure if I was at Maker Faire, or a County Fair. And I'd already waded through a sea of Prius's with Obama stickers telling me to Coexist.

There were booths teaching kids how to make fire survivor style.



There were booths teaching you how to raise chickens. Despite numerous city codes telling you that this isn't allowed.



They had tiny houses. Which I don't understand the appeal of. It's like no one has ever seen the inside of a camper. I guess those are city dwellers for ya. Maybe the shed exterior confused them into thinking it was something else. It's just a camper that looks like a shed!



They were popping popcorn with the sun. Which takes a lot longer than you would expect.



Oh, and then they had the lock picking booth.

Now, what I know about lock picking is really stale at this point - but I used to have a very good locksmith friend until he found a girlfriend.. And there were tons of rules about this kind of behaviour.

Not to mention, if there is anything young boys come standard with - it's knowing how to set fire and break into things. And besides, who picks locks anymore? You just run down to the hardware store and buy a lock cutter. Problem solved.

Shuttles made Maker Faire immensely more enjoyable.

We sort of accidentally ran across the shuttles. We'd planned to try out a new breakfast place in San Jose called....wait for it... The Breakfast Place. They promised pancakes with peanut butter on them! Sometimes I bring peanut butter singles if I think I'm going to have pancakes, because most restaurants don't stock peanut butter.

On the way out we took 280 instead on 101, and on the freeway they had signs for the shuttles way off site at the College of San Mateo. It's a few miles from where the event was. I am so in love with Maker Faire for doing this. Just like old times I got to ride in the back of the bus.



On the way back the bus was packed because we basically stayed until closing. The guys in the seats in back of me kept talking about a body fluid kit. And once I had them point it out - It was all I could think about and the conversation became inappropriate.

Me - How often does that happen, I ask?! Which part is leaking? I know what types of things leak on BART, what kind of situation do we have here? They were from Sacramento, so we compared burger restaurants and stuff. I mean, aside from all that body leakage part.

Maker Faire 2013 - Part 2. The best part.

I can't believe I have been blogging about 3D printers since 2005/6. It's taken that long for them to become common and cheap enough for a large segment of the population to be able to afford them..

I haven't bought a 3D printer yet. Because the technology is still in it's infancy, and new machines are coming on line all the time. I've been sitting back trying to figure out who was going to float to the top. The machine above from Formlabs was at the top of my list. It uses lasers instead of the extraction method. This is suppose to make the resolution better. Although through a crowded booth, the items it printed didn't seem appreciably different from a lot of the other stuff I've seen before.



This type of machine was a surprise. I'd never seen it before. It's from SeeMeCNC. While I find it really fascinating - it has a LOT of moving parts. It is a creative idea to solve height limitation though.





A few companies were trying out this design model. This one was from OpenBeam USA.



This one was interesting because it had tiny fans at the area where the heated plastic comes out. You can see two of them from this shot. They are those square objects resting on the pad.

There were so many 3D printers at Maker Faire I didn't even try for stuff I'd already seen. They were everywhere. Cubify as far as I could tell didn't have much of a presence. I did see a few of their machines. But their machines are pretty mainstream now I guess.

The Makerbot Replicator was an interesting stand out. Mr S. and I were talking about all of the machines later and he pointed out that Makerbot didn't even have a booth (again as far as we could tell - it's a very crowded place), but their machines were everywhere. Even companies selling other machines might have a Replicator in the background. I don't know what that means. Maybe they have hit the sweet spot.

This is also a good article to read. 3D printing has come a long way. It still has quite a way to go before we depend on them for real things.

Maker Faire '07 - Part 6.

Finally... the Robots!

If you look back through my blog, you'll see I've been covering robotic events for years. Truth be told, my dream job would be a robo-event reviewer.

Some years, I have been fairly irritated by the events. Which is why I never even bothered to post most of my pictures from this year's CES, including pictures of iRobot CEO Helen Greiner at their CES booth. And - I'll try not to be bitter the marketing guy stood me up.

My problem normally revolves around companies making products without the tiniest thought of why people might buy the item. They only know robotics are going to be popular, so they just try to put out something with the word "Robot" in it. From year to year these products fade away.


Luckily an iRobot Create team was there. Good job, iRobot. And, unlike CES, most of their toys were actually working.

There was the Hacking Roomba guy. Tod Kurt.



Roomba Spirograph.



However - there was a standout for me this year. A product from Revell.



It had a very good grasping arm.



It also had a video camera. In this case the combination worked very well.







I didn't take any pictures of the Robogames. I couldn't get close enough to the arena to get a good shot. They have an event in San Fransisco next month anyway.

But - I'm hoping they were able to recruit enough participants from Maker Faire to make it a more interesting event. Especially since the Battlebot craze is becoming less popular. Things are trending more towards FIRST Robotics competitions.



Microsoft was also there.



Below is a robot bartender, programmed using the MS robotics sw.



And of course what would a robotics show be without some celebrity cameos?

Maker Faire '08 part 8.

Last post.



The lost in Space robot is at most of the shows.



Do they really think people are going to drive these tiny cars?



R2D2 also is at most of the shows.



Now we're talking. 3D laser printer. When I first heard about these - I thought it was complete bullshit. But I've been tracking them over the years. Here, here and here. They've come down in price, and they are making more items. At this rate - in 5 years, most everyone will have them in their homes.





Maker Faire had some serious merchandising this year.





Kids playing with a create kit. I didn't see iRobot there at all.

Maker Faire '08 Part 1.

The Maker Faire was today. It was a much bigger event than last year. By the end of the day I actually got tired of taking photo's. Which is saying a lot. I got through all of CES without being tired of taking pictures. There was so much going on - I had a bit of sensory overload.



Gizmodo link here.



Lilly pad umbrella.

When the future rips me off.

You guys know I pay to get into 98% of the events I go to. So I can feel free to give my unvarnished opinion without feeling like I have to play nice for my masters. Even the ones I don't pay to get into, sometimes don't fare very well. But, I always feel guilty because they let me in for free.

The Nextgen Science Faire I went to this weekend has to be hands down one of the worst events I have ever attended. And I've been to some colossal failures. This event however was the first one that has so completely oversold itself, I was shocked.

First, it was 25 bucks to get in. As much as it cost to get into Maker Faire which is a giant festival. You can see from the pictures above this venue was maybe the size of a large conference room. That wasn't the most irritating part though.

Smack dab in the middle of this room of maybe 100 people was a guy doing a presentation on microphone. People trying to hear what each booth representative was trying say had to lean in like you were having a private conversation. As you can see in this video.



It was more than that though. Half the things they said would be there - weren't. Which was surprising because they were touting the Nissan Leaf, and you can get those cars to show basically anywhere. Not that I care about seeing it anyway. No heads up display booths like they claimed. No vertical farming. No Google Xprize.

If you've been reading this blog long enough, you probably guess I was in it for the HUDs.

This is their website. So I was quite shocked when there were only about 10 booths. What did it matter though? You couldn't hear them very well anyway. The booths they did have were more on the "high school project" side of things. Which brings me back to the entry fee. 25 bucks. 50 bucks for a couple.





I mean - seriously? An LED light pad placed under a t-shirt?! Oh, you can control it with your phone though to make unique messages.





One thing I thought might be interesting was this apparel which held your devices from Alphyn Industries. But they put me off so hard with their douchey group-think literature. These shirts will protect you from harmful electromagnetic frequency radiation you know!



I've also been watching the sorts of technology that Neurosky was presenting. Where you control objects with your mind. But it was so hard to get to the front of the booths. The way the booths were set up - 10 people could close you completely out.

It's story time.

A long time ago I wrote a post titled, I want to stop hating people -they just wont let me. I still get people every month hitting my site under variations of that search criteria. I imagine they want me to bestow upon them some wisdom to make them better people. I usually laugh inside and think - no silly people! What you need to do is squash those feelings down so they can come out at an inopportune time later on in life.

I'm pretty sure I had one of those moments.

Remember a week or so ago I had Mr S. go over and ask the neighbors if they could trim their monolith of a treeshrub.I call them privets. It was going really well. I was so happy they chose to trim this thing I re gifted them a bottle of wine. I went over to personally thank them.

Well, the day came, and the trimmers were only given instructions to trim a very small part of the thing to get it off my house. I flew over to their house trying to find some way to get them to trim all of the stuff over my fence line. In a fit of panic I offered to help pay. I mean, the trimmers were there. Before the recession I could hire guys to trim my side, but now no trimmer wants to take the chance of getting sued. The trees are not on my property. Period. They refuse to trim for me.

You see, this fall I'd about lost my mind in regards to this neighbors trees. Something about the weather pattern made it shit on my yard for months. And I'm not a lazy person. However raking these leaves every three days was starting to aggravate my back. Even though I almost never talk about it - I have a pretty bad back problem. I had breast reduction surgery about five years ago. That's how bad my back problem is. Women don't have half of their breasts taken for cosmetic reasons. I'm a hugely active person, but certain things really eff me up even still.

Now do I think this gets me out of raking? Of course not. But several times a week flipped my bitch switch. And this wasn't even for the tree they were trimming. This bit of treeshrub is directly from satan. It shits berries all the time. It's constantly sending up runners on every other property. It was over my fence by about 4 feet the whole length of the fence.

I mean, just last week I was laughing at my neighbor to the back. As soon as he saw trimmers at my house he ran over here in a fit of hope I believe. He's been mad at that house for a long time. The tree that neighbor shares with them encroaches 15 feet into his yard. 15 feet! When we replaced our common fence, it was all the guy wanted to talk about. Last week I was like - glad I'm not that guy! Because everything seemed rosy at that point.

Well.... now I'm that guy.

I got back from Maker Faire and my neighbors had left me a bill. Even though I did say I would help pay, I was pissed. And I did pay, but that doesn't mean I wasn't going to tell them what a huge jerk of neighbors they were. It normally costs me about 300 bucks a year to trim the trees from that one neighbor. Now mind you, I pulled out all of the trees from my place. My neighbors trees are more than enough for me. These particular privets are more than two stories tall. I'm pretty sick of it actually. It isn't like it's just a branch or two. It's 40 feet X 20/25feet of shrub that climbs about four feet into my yard.. And let me remind everyone - I can't get a fucking trimmer to save my life to trim those shrubs. They all say the same thing. We don't want to get sued.

They did send me my check back. But the earth is already scorched. They basically told me they feel no obligation whatsoever to trim those trees. They can just plant whatever they want and I can suck it. The funny thing about their letter was, they said - our neighbor to the right has a pool that leaves fall into all of the time. That is a part of living "in an old neighborhood". So I google earthed their property, and it's their tree that is hanging over the neighbors pool. I bet 50 bucks he hates those neighbors too. I know the neighbor to my right isn't happy about their common shrub situation. But he's only got about 10 feet in common.

I bet good money if this situation was reversed they would think 'I' was the biggest asshole in the universe. Anyone would.

Maker Faire '07 - Part 5.

Is this the saddest kid you've ever seen - or what? For me not so much.

Mr Snarkolepsy and I dropped by the Dutch Baby House on the way to Maker this morning. Seated to Mr Snarkolepsy's back - my front - was a woman and her son.

This woman immediately got onto my radar because she looked like she wanted to die. The whole time we had breakfast - this woman's eyes did nothing but roam the restaurant. Her son (I assume - maybe I shouldn't) was playing a game boy or something. But he looked like an angry child. The mother and son were there before we got seated, and I don't think I saw her say one word to him. He was probably 10 years old.

At any rate she looked miserable, and I couldn't figure out why she would bother taking the child somewhere, because they both seemed very unhappy to be with each other.





About this time Mr Snarkolepsy and actually ran into some people we knew from a company that both Mr. S and I worked at several years ago. There were a ton of people there, and we wound up running into people we knew a couple of times. Small techie world I guess.



If you like puppets. Me not so much. But they were very nice people. The camera causes people to be very open. So I actually wound up talking to them a little earlier in the day.











Okay, I have to admit I thought these were the mooninites.