Maker Faire a geek's dream

[brina]

i thought some of you might enjoy this article...


Maker Faire a geek's dream
By Daniel Terdiman, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: April 22, 2006, 8:40 PM PT


SAN MATEO, Calif.--It's a good thing I don't have much hair, because the
huge plume of fire that just blasted out of the top of the fire engine a few
feet in front of me would likely have burned off a real mane.

I'm at the Maker Faire here, a geek and hacker's dream of a crafts fair, and
the brainchild of Make Magazine, the do-it-yourself quarterly that's like a
Web 2.0-era Popular Mechanics.

Maker Faire, which is taking place all weekend in this city about halfway
between San Francisco and San Jose, has drawn many hundreds or even
thousands of the types for whom the insides of a torn apart computer are
something to smile over.

Befitting a celebration of the do-it-yourself spirit, everyone in attendance
is invited to get up close and personal with the projects. And that's why,
as I'm talking to a woman from The Crucible--the Berkeley, Calif.-based
nonprofit that teaches fire art, welding and all kinds of metal art--the
organization's fire-spewing fire truck, known as the "Educational Response
Vehicle" is shooting fireball after fireball into the air, heedless of the
blasts of heat that are overwhelming anyone in the area.

Freshly baked, I make my way into one of the exposition halls at the San
Mateo Fairgrounds, and I'm greeted by wall-to-wall stimuli. On one side is a
gorgeous white metalwork giraffe, known as the "Rave 'Raff," which is
spewing out electronica and attracting kids left and right who walk right up
and touch its head.

On the far side is a life-size Simon, the '70s-era machine from Milton
Bradley, which tasks players with punching one of its four colored bars in
the same order that they lit up. And now, at the urging of a friend, I'm
bouncing up and down on its red, yellow, green and blue trampolines, trying
on the one hand to repeat the proper order the lights flashed and on the
other not to make a complete fool of myself.

But the truth is it's too much fun to worry about how it looks. So I forget
about being bashful and concentrate instead on getting the sequence right.
And I relish in the occasional compliments I hear from the gathered crowd
when I stick a particularly hard combination.

Just outside this hall is the one thing that everyone at Maker Faire seems
to want to try, but can't: Segway polo. Just as it sounds, Segway polo is
polo played on, well, Segways, the super-cool, gyro-stabilized two-wheelers
invented by Dean Kamen. And right out here, in front of everyone, a team
from the Bay Area Segway Enthusiasts Group is holding exhibitions every half
hour or so.

Art and industry heavyweights
Hidden amid the group of players, wearing what looks like a bicycle helmet
and a blue shirt with black short sleeves, is none other than Apple Computer
co-founder Steve Wozniak, and it's heart-warming to be at an event where
such an influential and famous man can go fairly unnoticed.

Indeed, Maker Faire has attracted a significant number of tech industry and
art world heavyweights. Among them, Google co-founder Larry Page--or so I
was told by someone who claimed to have been standing in front of the
mega-billionaire in a food line, as well as some of the biggest names in the
world of Burning Man art. And that's not even to mention the Make Magazine
crew, among them Mark Frauenfelder, Dale Dougherty and Phillip Torrone, who
are heroes in this crowd.

In fact, the crowd is a fantastic mix of Burners (Burning Man attendees),
crafters and robotics geeks, Aaron Muszalski, a visual effects instructor at
San Francisco's Academy of Art University suggested to me. He imagined Maker
Faire, with a delighted gleam in his eye, as a breeding ground for the many
kids here who he sees as the do-it-yourselfers and hackers of the future.

"I didn't get to see stuff like this until I was in my 20s," said Muszalski.
"What if you get to see this stuff when you're five? We're recruiting
(them)."

It's hard to disagree with him. A little earlier, someone had been riding
around the central lawn area on a bicycle tricked out with a broom for a
frame so it resembled something Harry Potter would ride in a quidditch
match.

And as people grinned and laughed at the sight, an attendee named Nifer
Fahrion called out the real truth of the situation.

"I mean," Fahrion said, "tell me how many kids would love that."

In truth, Maker Faire is what anyone who loves science or computers or
robots or welding or fire art or high-tech crafting or Lego should come to.

To be sure, not everything at the event was noteworthy. In truth, much of
the exhibits were rather mundane and easily slipped past. But every few
minutes, as one wandered around, something would appear that would make you
stop and stare in wonder.

Some of those, of course, were entirely simple. For example, I talked with
Thomas Zimmerman, an IBM researcher whose "Z's Stop-Frame Animation" table
was a big hit with kids. The idea, he explained, was to provide an
after-school program that would teach little kids the art of stop-motion
animation and photography.

So he would provide them with index cards and pens and pencils and show them
how to draw on each card, a single frame in a multi-frame animated story.
Kind of like the books of images you used to flip to reveal a rudimentary
cartoon. In this case, the kids would draw the cards and then photograph
them using a home-made camera built into a piece of PVC pipe. And then a
piece of software would blend the pictures together into a short animated
film.

Nearby was a self-fencing machine, in which two robot arms controlled
battling swords. No robots were harmed in the making of this machine.

And perhaps the most fun I saw people having in the course of the day was in
one large room where hundreds of kids and parents were eagerly ripping apart
old computers and trying to put them back together again.

The sounds of breaking plastic, metal and glass dominated the room, as did
laughter, shouting and a feeling that if this wasn't geek bliss, what is?


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