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Maker Faire
(edited to add youtubes)
Maker Faire was awesome. Hopefully they will be back next year, because I sure will be. There was a healthy crowd, but it wasn't packed to capacity so it's definitely got room to grow. Had a great time and saw a lot of neat & interesting things. I dropped $20 bucks on a component kit for the mintyboost 3.0 which I will be making during the week at some point. Yeah $20 was a lot for a bag of components that I could get from work, but I figure supporting the Maker Shed was money going to something cool. Also was wandering around the craft area early on waiting for my friends, and bumped into Scott. Thought you were just BSing so I came over to say hi but I realized you were catching up with an old friend or something. Sorry for interrupting, and thank you for the most awkward moment since a middle school dance!
Coolest things I saw (in no specific order):
Maker Faire was awesome. Hopefully they will be back next year, because I sure will be. There was a healthy crowd, but it wasn't packed to capacity so it's definitely got room to grow. Had a great time and saw a lot of neat & interesting things. I dropped $20 bucks on a component kit for the mintyboost 3.0 which I will be making during the week at some point. Yeah $20 was a lot for a bag of components that I could get from work, but I figure supporting the Maker Shed was money going to something cool. Also was wandering around the craft area early on waiting for my friends, and bumped into Scott. Thought you were just BSing so I came over to say hi but I realized you were catching up with an old friend or something. Sorry for interrupting, and thank you for the most awkward moment since a middle school dance!
Coolest things I saw (in no specific order):
- Guy who wired an NES zapper into an alarm clock. Click the gun trigger to advance the alarm time by 1 minute. Great to take at your aggression on the buzzing box
- Sooooo many 3D printers. This was just some of the MakerBot Cupcake CNCs
- companion cube made from a cupcake cnc! Yes, I still find Portal jokes funny.
- The moonisphere. Just read:
- lots of great t-shirt companies I wasn't aware of
- Guy that binds notebooks and video game box fronts as the covers. I've seen this done with a lot of things (old book covers, VHS boxes, etc.) but never with video game boxes. He even hole-punched the manuals and inserted them in front of the blank notebook pages. Would be even cooler if he got those game manual style notes pages
- Life-size Mouse Trap
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- Eepybird doing their diet coke & mentos shtick
- 3D printer that used Easy Cheeze as it's material
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- Rubik's Cube solving robot
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- "Mean Cards" - these things were hilarious. They are off-color in the same vein as someecards, but are not for any occasion, they are just mean. My favorite: "enough with the iPhone", and on the inside "it doesn't love you back (there's no app for that)"
- What better way to travel than in a giant fish. I felt like I was in Ponyo
- The knitted car
- Crazy awesome mini-golf at the New York Hall of Science. Will be back here with the wife (who is a mini-golf nut)
Comments
If anyone else is curious to see awesome stuff from the event, many of the other NerdNYCers were there, and there's a lot of pictures and videos going up in this thread: http://nerdnyc.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=47054
Sunday was my second-last day in New York. Oh no!
Now, when I was first planning my New York holiday, I mean vacation, I only bought my plane ticket out. For various reasons I made sure I didn't book the outward and home flights together, because doing exactly that meant I had to buy flight home from the EJC twice. So, my flight home was flexible up until just before I left for NYC.
My best-case flight home was Monday 27th, chosen so I could stay until the Maker Faire. It was the very last thing on my mental TO-DO-IN-NYC list, so I made sure I went.
The Maker Faire is all about building fun but useless stuff at home. As someone who has been building a room that rotates in my living room, this kind of things really appeals to me.
Not everything can be built at home. For instance, a "life size" version of Mouse Trap.
Or how about a propane powered rocket that shoots flame from the wrong end?
This is a fun musical instrument played by pulling on ropes. It's like bell ringing with different sounds.
The inside of a geometry puzzle.
A magnetic liquid kaleidoscope thing.
A machine that throws balls from a rotating funnel, through holes set in two oppositely spinning disks, and back into the same funnel (I think).
The highlight of the Faire (for me) was the EepyBird.com stage. you may know these guys from their experiments with Coke Zero and Mentos.
The smaller bearded half of EepyBird is Fritz. I know him from years ago, a time when he made his money as a juggler and diabolist, rather than getting soaked with sugar-free cola. I mean soda.
I took photos while they set up. Fritz told me it gets a bit crazy for their show, so said I could come inside the barrier to watch and take photos.
The "do this at home" method.
Results!
Celebration!
As you can see from this photo, the crowd was HUGE. These guys are the rock stars of the Maker Faire.
The Experiment (show) begins!
I got soaked too!
The reason they use Coke Zero is the lack of sugar. No sugar, no stickiness!
Fritz at the end of the show. I tried to take more photos of the show itself, but the fizzy pop on my camera lens kinda got in the way.
The aftermath.
Clearing up.
It's amazing how many kids (of all ages) wanted a half-empty bottle of mildly minty Coke Zero as a souvenir.
Later I cycled across Queens and into Manhattan for a burger, then over to the New York Clown Theatre Festival end-of-festival party. I missed the start, which included a clown funeral procession through Williamsburg. I joined in with the dancing for a while, but I couldn't keep up with a crowd of clowns doing silly things.
My bike route on Sunday.