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Workshop Weekend Oakland registration is now open!

Join us on  June 22 & 23  to solder, craft, program, build, make and explore. At Workshop Weekend, a flat $40 admission gets you as many workshops as you can handle!

Register online by  Wednesday, June 12  and get $10 off with code EARLYBIRD0613. Select your workshops at  https://workshopweekend.net/oakland/catalog

For families coming to Workshop Weekend together, we’re keeping our $10 discount for all parent admissions with the purchase of two or more admissions for children (under 18). Sign up on the same account and the discount will be automatically applied.

We have over 30 workshops to choose from at this Workshop Weekend — a few old favorites coming back alongside new crafts, computer, and music workshops — and more! Join us for:

• Hands-on Genetic Engineering
• Robots: Build a Beetlebot
• DIY Doll-making
• Taste Hacking
• Computer Dissection
• Arduino Automation Basics
• Hands-on Nutrition
• Exploring Electronics: Speakers from Scratch
• DIY Coffee Roasting
• Hands-on Anatomy
• Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream
• Arduino Programming

…and many more!

Register and select workshops online at  https://workshopweekend.net/oakland/catalog

I hope we’ll see you in just a few weeks!

Cheers,
Gil, J.D., and the rest of the team at Workshop Weekend

I’ve been watching Dr Who with David Tennant… season 4 from 2008. I just watched episode 12 “Turn Left” where history changes just a tiny bit and the Doctor doesn’t exist to stop all the bad things that might have happened.
Wow that’s surprisingly good TV!

A couple weeks ago I got some fun invites to two Google events. Eyal Hershko brought some robots from Israel from his FIRST league; he started the first hackerspace and FIRST league there. He wanted some help running them at this afternoon lunchtime event at Shoreline Amphitheater. I went down with Michael Shiloh and we spun some folks in circles for a while on the bots.

A couple days later the robots were off to Google IO After Hours… the party that happens at the end of the Google IO Developers conference. They had a lot of entertainment there, including us. Billy Idol was the musical headliner. With Hand of Man by Christian Ristow, MakrShakr (the million dollar drink machine with 3 car assembly arms), Eyal’s spinning bots, Jon Sarriugarte’s Serpent Twins, some air powered rock’em sock’em robots, and lots more toys!

Here is the headgear I added kinetic elements to for the SFMOMA closing show last week.

Back row starting at left (sorry for a lack of creative names!):

• Bright flickering and pulsating illumination on top
• Machine-like pulsing illumination in the tea strainer
• Colorful glowing kaleidoscope in the top-hat
• Nervously rotating crown
• Communications dish searching for a signal
• (no kinetics)

Front row starting at left:

• (no kinetics)
• tubes jerking suggesting fluid flowing through them
• (no kinetics)

I didn’t get a good shot of the best headgear:

Two lights pulsing out of sync with one another, illuminating the face of the wearer

A great shot of Desiree:

A shot of  the performance:

(view in 3D wigglevision)

I love my new Lenovo T530 Thinkpad Laptop except for one thing, whenever I grab it on the side and brush the DVD Eject button with my fingers, the door pops open! It’s way too sensitive! I found a bunch of software solutions that disable the DVD Eject button with a program that lives in the Windows System Tray but that just seemed wrong to me. A hardware problem deserves a hardware solution!

In brief, I opened up the DVD drive and used my Dremel to trim just a hair off the button actuator. Now instead of opening whenever I flutter my eyelashes at it, you need to actually push the button. Perfect!

I wrote an Instructable about fixing the DVD Drive Eject Button

First, turn off your laptop.

Then remove the drive from your laptop. On my computer, there were two slides I had to move and the drive came right out.

Next, eject the drive manually. To open most drives, you just stick a thin piece of metal like a safety pin in a hole in the front and CLICK! out it comes!

Take the faceplate off the drive so you can get to the back of the button. On my drive I didn’t need to fully remove the faceplate to get the access I needed.

After getting the first tab off, I realized that getting the other tab off was much harder [frownyface] but I also noticed that I didn’t need to remove the faceplate completely anyway! [happyface]

As you can see in the image, I bent the faceplate just enough so I could see the base of the button. The little nub sticking off the back of the faceplate is what pushes the actual button that is on the drive itself. I shaved just the tiniest bit of the actuator off with a Dremel tool and Ta Da! the button is perfect!

I did it in 2 goes, I shaved it off just a hair and reassembled it. Then I shaved off another tiny bit before I was happy with it. I was worried the button would become loose where it sits but all I did was reduce the spring tension on the button. Snapping everything back together took just a few seconds. And actually, it took longer to write this Instructable than it did to do the fix.

Hope this works as well for you as it did for me!

Iconography says a lot. I like this!

Out with the old…

…and in with the new!

Read all about it

I found out about this from Instructables.com!

I’ve been using Boomerang Gmail for a year now. It lets me schedule outgoing emails and “boomerang” emails if I haven’t gotten a response from someone. They’ve got a free trial. Use this link and you get a free spin of their wheel of free stuff when you sign up

Here are some of the things you can do with Boomerang:
1. Write messages now and schedule them to deliver at any time
2. Schedule messages to return to your inbox at a later time
3. Remind yourself to follow up on messages that don’t get a response within a certain time

(previously)

I haven’t seen a smartphone (android or iphone) that has a long enough battery life yet. This is asinine. My successful workaround is to buy a backpack battery from http://www.seidioonline.com

I am using an Android HTC EVO 4G 3D phone on Virgin Mobile ($35/month) with the Seidio backpack battery. With the stock (1700mah) battery, my battery sometimes runs out as early as 9pm under “normal” usage. With the (albeit somewhat bulky) backpack battery (4000mah), I can geek ALL day and not run out of power, I can get 2 full days of light-use.

I dunno about rootability yet. The internets says “yes” but I haven’t tried it.

The 3D camera and 3D Lenticular screen on the phone is a pretty cool toy too.

Previously I had a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone on AT&T. I got a Seidio backpack battery for that one too and was quite happy with the battery.

Come make tin foil hats at SFMOMA this Sunday. The future will be subsuming the space after the event, excluding all possibility of future partakings there (SFMOMA is closing for 3 years for renovations directly after the event)

Fulfill your destiny! Make hats! Bring them to the event.
Hat making supplies and instructional sessions will be held throughout the day!

(via)

(Previously, Close SFMOMA With Me)

About the Sunday 5:30pm procession (via):

As SFMOMA exits its current campus to build our upcoming expansion, artist Desiree Holman conducts a series of movements that bridge our present potential to our future tense. Drawing on eccentric histories of time and space, from New Age culture and extraterrestrial encounter to paranormal powers, Holman mobilizes extraordinary characters, costumes, and objects that can make the Museum’s and our own futures happen, now.

Four columns of agents will conduct our journey. The Indigo Children, a living and evolving humanity whose emotional and intellectual intelligence outstrip our own, lead us through sound from our current place. Ecstatic Dancers demonstrate how our focused present can always lead us to a visionary space. Time travel captains sport empowering sculptural helmets, built by Holman, that open portals to where we want go. And the public joins us, in your own key to the future, with a final column populated by your visions of time travel, goddess worship, spaceships, aliens, druids, additional dimensions, and alternative worlds.

We all have a key to the future, in each of our traditions and fantasies. Holman invites the Bay Area to bring all of these personal keys to her “Motion to the Future.” Inspirations for her work, and for your participation, are here.

I worked on making some ridiculous kinetic time travel headgear with artist Desiree Holman. They came out pretty sweet.  The headgear is part of an event that will close SFMOMA. Yes, my techno-hats will be some of the last things you see at the current SFMOMA space. They are closing immediately after our event and reopening in a new space spring 2016!

Join us!

Admission to the museum and event is free, but it can’t hurt to register online.

Update 5-30-13: SFMOMA wrote to me, “We expect crowds and long lines to be part of the experience. Insider tip: bring a fun friend or a good book just in case!Your RSVP helps us anticipate numbers of guests so we can plan accordingly, but it is not a guarantee of admittance. With free admission and limited building capacity, we thank you for understanding that we may not be able to accommodate all visitors at once”

I will be there from maybe 3pm-6pm this Sunday. People will be making Future-Perfect Tin Foil Hats  Sunday from noon to 5pm and then the procession into the future happens at 5:30. By 6pm we will have closed the place down!*

Oh and the event is  co-sponsored by BoingBoing, check out their post.

* unless the time travel hats actually work. In that case, Happy New Year!