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Since I am done feeling bad, I am happy to report that it is time to feel good.

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

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!

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)

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.

This image has gone around Facebook:

So I wondered, “Do American’s worry about different things depending on who is in the White House?”

I found the Gallup poll mentioned in the Facebook post. It’s pretty interesting. Every few years they asked this question:

In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future — big business, big labor, or big government?

The images were broken on gallup.com so I took the data in the full report  and made my own chart. Take a look:

This chart says a lot!

For instance, big labor? Look at that long slow slide. Nobody worries about  big labor any more.

“No Opinion”? No way! Everyone has an opinion now, which wasn’t the case 50 years ago! Maybe this is due to the increased connectivity of our country now (CNN, internet, etc…)

Look at the long slow trend of worry about big government. Is this trend based on the political affiliation of the president? Not really. Is it based on individual president’s actions? Sometimes, yes. For instance, people got more concerned about big government with Johnson’s big-government programs. And look at how Bush temporarily shifted worries toward big business. But there is an overarching trend of worry about big government over the past 50 years that supersedes any president.

Now to the question at hand, “is the federal government too powerful?” This chart can’t answer that question directly but it can say that for the last 50 years people have very consistently been almost exactly twice as worried about big government as they have about big business.

Compared over each president’s full term:
Johnson shifted the worries a little toward government and then it recovered after his term.
Carter, Reagan, and Clinton kept relative worries about even.
It looks like Obama is shifting worries a little toward government.

My initial take away is: Obama isn’t making people much more worried than they might otherwise be about big government.

Discuss!

After 13 years of having the same pair of eyeglasses (wow), I got a new pair this past week.

I think they look pretty rad. What do you think?

Thanks mom!

And now the weird part. A few minutes ago  I tried on my old glasses to compare them to the new ones and….. and they broke!  After 13 years they broke just a few days after getting my new pair!!! No… better yet… I’ve only worn them a total of maybe 2 MINUTES after getting my new pair! Yes, after 13 years, my old glasses broke 2 minutes after getting my new pair!

Deets on the new glasses: made by Silhouette. They’re the TNG shape 5227, 40, Color 6059 19, 145. Got them at  Meredith W. Morgan University Eye Center  AKA Cal Eye on University of California at Berkeley Campus.

Deets on the old glasses: Sferoflex darksteel, 160mm temple, cable temples  (which are awesome), 50, 19. I think I got them at Lenscrafters in Medford, MA in 2000.

You probably like to keep your Facebooking moderately private. Here’s a tip:

As you go about your day, you sometimes allow Apps on Facebook access to your information. Some Apps get access to your posts or your list of friends. I would suggest that every now and then you remove any unused Apps because… well, there is no need for miscellaneous website operators to keep looking over your shoulder, unless you like that sort of thing!

Removing unused Apps is easy. Go here:
https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

You will see a list of “Apps you use”. Just click on the little “x” to remove any Apps you don’t use any more. This will break the link between Facebook and the other website.