Over this past weekend hoards of thinkers, makers and doers descended on the gorgeous Xanadu of the O’Reilly Media headquarters in Sebastopol, CA. Invited by Tim O’Reilly to participate in a free-form weekend of focused and unfocused conversations and talks concerning current and emerging ventures in technology, it was a nerd’s paradise. There were talks on Cloud Robotics, The Slow Technology Movement, How to Get a Billion Views on Youtube and Better HTML5 Apps. One participant brought Nao, a $14,000 autonomous, programmable humanoid robot made by Aldebaran Robotics. It danced and entertained us with it’s version of MJ’s “Thriller”:

The Makershed was open for soldering blinking LED pins for our name tags and I took mine a step further by crafting an origami brooch around the light. I used a star box for the base and a modified balloon fold for the covering. After I folded the star box I marked the corners and unfolded it to draw the designs on the arms of the star with pen and ink:

Then encased the light inside the paper structure:

And cut the balloon to hollow out the middle and cover the light:

All in all the project took about an hour to make, and the light from the LED had a stunning effect on the paper folds at night. I met many amazing people at Foo and there wasn’t one person there that didn’t inspire me to keep the bar raised high and continue thinking, making and doing wonderful things. It’s important to have these resources and events for people to coalesce around and understand and appreciate the different perspectives and needs of each other. By meeting face to face it’s honestly the only way that we can gain enough perspective to broaden and deepen the impact of technology in relevant ways for it to contribute to the success and enlightenment of our people. Thank you again Tim and Sara and the whole O’Reilly team- you hosted an awesome event!

I got into a debate with my mom and my sister the other day about how much influence a person has over their personal network, how extended communities interact with each other and what happens to these communities when your actions show how you choose to live. My mom and my sister were not convinced that people on the individual level had that much effect, but I disagree.

We are by nature competitive beings who want the attention and affection of the people around us for acceptance of our actions so we feel that our lives have been lived well. When you start giving your time, energy and money to causes and people working to make the world better by your standards, not only does it flood your system with altruistic endorphins and promote public good; it pushes the people around you to recognize the benefits, figure out what your actions mean to them and adjust by doing or by appreciating to stay within your social circle.

With Facebook and Twitter and other social media networks we have taken advantage of our own personal ‘word of mouth’. The ability for us to know everything that our extended friends, family and interesting people we don’t know but like are posting to the web is free and addictive. It’s not a new thing that people have become individualized brands in and of themselves but the methods by which this happens is faster and more accessible to the general literate, internet-connected populous (which is actually only about 7% of the world).

Websites like Kiva (connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty) and Kickstarter (funding creative ideas and ambitious endeavors) are excellent examples of the literate, internet-connected world’s ability to push up sleeves and put the web and social networks to good working use.

These are some Kickstarter projects and Kiva loans I’ve pledged to fund (yep, I like funding poor women makers, ‘green’ things and golden books):

WindowFarms

Tigerbuttah: A Hand-Painted All Ages Story Inspired by Golden Books

©2009 Google

My friend kittenthebad did a rally call to her friends the other day to join an Intro to Java class she was teaching on Google Wave. She had set up instructions ahead of time for people to download Eclipse and when the time came we proceeded through her slides and demos while she held an open dialogue on the wave for questions and comments. She was super thorough with her examples and I felt well taken care of and slightly more knowledgeable than when I came in!

All and all an interesting experience, though GW was running a bit slow and we griped that there wasn’t the Chrome browser for macs yet. It was easy enough to set up an additional training session by the yes/no/maybe invite event function in GW and the next class will focus on an Intro to Processing (<3). A really neat tool for people to connect and work together over distance/disinclination to change from pj’s.

© 2009 Florida Center for Instructional Technology

“Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, objects in motion remain in motion, unless a force is applied.”

Ideas are fun to have, but they take work. You can’t motivate people with a static page of horn-tooting freebies. My Revised Goal: To spread delight and joy with the knife of creation on the bread of everything.

I got to take part in a user study on the effectiveness of said table in the context of meeting to discuss and plan a fictitious business venture and the collective conclusion at the end of the study besides new heights of appreciative wonder of Seth was that besides the growing pains associated with learning a new technology, the table’s ability to record/photograph/allow freeform drawing/upload web content/shoot lightning bolts allowed for a deeper non-interfering analysis of  the interaction between people as they talk through their ideas. And yes, I *would* like one for my birthday thank you for asking.

CCC Play Video

A while ago I was the self-appointed minion to Jimmie Rodgers’ creepy cave crab project for Willoughby & Baltic’s Halloween show at the Charles River Museum of Industry. as you can see from this movie the crabs are indeed creepy and crabby and liked the dark. 

[A single hex schmitt trigger inverter IC to generate the sound, 2 RGB color change LEDs to generate the light and 8 photo resistors to sense the light all held together semi-neatly with friendly plastic and silver paint] 

Here’s the link!

Successful spoils from MIT’s Swapfest today: 

Some stuff strange [vintage Burton-esque rake and the ugliest heat-sink ever] 

Some stuff questionably fun [Hermes 811 calculator w/ vacuum tubing + Heathkit ‘color generator’] 

Some stuff useful [a real clamp! and a hand-powered drill to replace my Dremel in case power goes out] 

Some stuff that I really did need [RGT rinse pump #2 and a solenoid for the crybot]

and I no longer can deny- vintage tools that are both aesthetic and functional hit a sweet spot in me. Sigh..

I took this pic in Oct 2008 when I first started collecting thing that would help form the basis of projects I was thinking of. A captured commemorative event of my realized and accepted geekness. I labeled all the compartments of this box with its contents:

PNP type transistors. NPN type switching transistors. IC sockets. photo cells. electrolytic capacitors. ceramic disk capacitors. LEDs. 1/4 watt resistors. 1N914 type diodes. 2 1/4 alligator clips. instructional data. other. 

Have since added to the mix:

servo motor. stepper motor. darlington arrays. various potentiometers. pc boards. ultra-sonic range finder. pir sensor module. an additional arudino diecimila. other fun stuff!

Things that have come in handy while I’ve tinkered with the project tentatively named ‘crybot’. More to follow on that later..