Maker Faire 2007

May 20th, 2007

Technology If you follow me on Twitter I mentioned the Maker Faire, the second festival centered around the hacking creative magazine Make. The wife and some college friends ventured over in the early afternoon, and it turned out to be larger and more nerdiliciously awesome than anticipated. Just imagine many of the strange links people send around while bored at work and appear on BoingBoing come to life, live and in the flesh: “Look! Here’s a Roomba Spirograph hack! See! The poster made by eBoy! Mentos and Coke! And the Pez Museum!” Explore more at their blog.

A big plus was an entire section devoted to Craft, another O’Reilly magazine. My wife is into knitting so she found a lot of funky stuff to keep her occupied while the rest of us nerded out. Smart hack observed: use this IKEA plastic bag holder for storing yarn - pull the thread out of the holes.

There seemed to be several themes at work:

Use your brain to recycle, or re-purpose: When the battery dies on your iPod, don’t just chuck it in the trash and buy a new one, figure out a way to replace the battery, hack a power supply, or take it apart and reconfigure the parts into something else. But this mentality was extended beyond electronics, as people were hacking bicycles, used clothing, and power tools. In a strange way, the way people “hack” in programming by cutting and pasting other people’s code is extended to hardware as well.
Completely pointless projects for fun or to learn, not because it’s practical: I don’t know how else to describe the “steam punk” examples of a Victorian House on wheels or an ambitious fellow who spent eight years building a gigantic bowling ball powered mouse trap.
Glimpses into the future: I was really impressed by the fabrication machines that are basically “3D printers” laying down plastic, sugar, and even metal. Check out these metal sculptures that are so unearthly yet mathematically inspiring. Freaking awesome.
Do it yourself: A general anti-corporate vibe, meaning why wastefully buy something new from some mega-corporation when you could just make it yourself. Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft had booths promoting their user-created-content tools, but it was an eye opener to consider that user created content need not be limited to Internet or software. Knitting a cat bed counts, and it always did, even before Web 2.0. I want an electronic Swap-O-Rama-Rama.

I picked up the cheapest of the Make kits, a mint tin iPod charger (MintyBoost) - perfectly suited for me because I have tons of mint tins lying around (I need to build that website). I think that was the ultimate point of the Maker Faire for me; it was inspiring to see people working on crazy projects just for the sake of accomplishment and learning. Thereby, inspiring me to work on my own strange projects. Anybody got some hacks for bottle caps?

Giant mousetrap.

These Doggie Diner heads are slowly disappearing from various locations around the Bay Area. Someone is obviously collecting them. Zippy The Pinhead likes ‘em.

This clock blew me away. It’s mechanical, and from what I could gather, the inner ring represents hours and the outer ring is minutes, with white marbles. Marbles are slowly carried from the bottom and dropped into the top via large arms. The arms take one minute to travel from top to bottom. Read more about this artist.