22 June 09
One Million Giraffes
Ola Helland had a bet with his friend Jørgen that he’d be able to receive one million giraffes by 2011. Hand-drawn giraffes. Why not send him one? Click here.
21 June 09
Tracker
Continuing down my list of projects following going to the Maker Faire, I just built a GPS tracker, the OpenTracker+. It’s the lowest of the three gizmos in the photo (the upper two are my handitalkie and my Garmin GPS).
We use these GPS trackers a lot while working the Double Century: they report the position of the sag vehicles so the folks back at start/finish (including me this year at net control) can keep track of where all the support vehicles are. I decided it would be fun to build one of these units, and finished the project this afternoon. Half the effort was putting the cabling together. After configuring the tracker, and checking the website where these locations end up being displayed, I can report it all works!
18 June 09
Arcane Knitting Gear
Saturday was Knit in Public Day, and knit in public I did, in Lafayette. There I met the extraordinary Agres who has taken it upon himself to learn as much as possible about pre-machine knitting in the British Isles (and pretty much anywhere else). The best way he can think of to learn how they did things is to try and replicate the tools and try them himself. He grinds his own steel-sprung needles, makes sheaths (the clothespin-like artefacts in the photo; they attach to a belt or apron string and a thin double-pointed needle is anchored in the tip). It was an amazing day; we were joined by Barbara and Elyse and a grand time was had. I have learned that Agres considers me to have learned “excellent pit knitting skills” growing up in Spain and for this I pause for a moment and say thank you, Francisca.
The leather pouch (knitting belt) I bought from Schoolhouse Press, imported from Scotland, used in Shetland for Fair Isle knitting, which I’ve been learning how to do as well. The vest, at right, is nearly finished (I ran out of the gray-purple yarn and don’t like the white sleeve facing I came up with as an alternative, so I am waiting for a final ball of yarn to polish it off with). This vest is for a very dear friend who lives in Sweden, and I imagine her wandering around the forest and mist in it, which is a nice thought. Because: It’s 96° here and I’m thinking and talking about knitting??
17 June 09
Dream Cake
A theory of mind in a raspberry torte
Top layer sensing — luscious crimson seed eyes
Underneath cream cheese filling deep cogitations
Crumbly base rich buttery motor actions
Food for thought.
13 June 09
Be-longing
Only the music belongs completely to itself…
Tosh, she thought.
The string-section shimmer of sapphires and turquoises on a mid-afternoon mountain lake, edging into the dark purple bassoon murk: they own the music. The gray pines that sang her their song that day in the rain. The clarion “play ball” and thwack of the bat on ball, the sub-human bellowed glottal stop of the umpire. Ours. The sweet saxophone solo: maybe it doesn’t belong to Charlie Parker, but it belongs to the night, to the smoke and the sweaty sex and the swilled liquor and the bebby Jesus.
We are along for the ride. We gulp what is here and ours and nobody’s and nothing’s.
(This is the fifth post in an ongoing online game of Consequences. Each successive entry begins with the closing lines of its predecessor. Entries are 250 words long, and are linked thematically. The series started with Hydragenic and was followed by Patteran Pages, Porous Borders, The Middlewesterner, and Feathers of Hope. The series will continue in a day or two at Blaugustine. )
11 June 09
Avian Sasquatch
My officemate wasn’t in this morning which means I get to field his phone calls most of which aren’t as interesting as the one today — the gentleman on the other end explained how he had found a flight feather a good bit longer than his outstretched arm (and he is 5’ 7 1/2”) but had lost it and this was up near Klamath Falls and there was an account of such a giant bird from Mexico in 1921 (killed — the 25-30 pound bird probably fed a family for a week) and another account from Switzerland of a different type of bird much bigger than a condor — these are high altitude birds, generally soar at 10-12,000 feet which is why no one ever sees them…
So do look up — you never know what you might spot up high.
10 June 09
In Search of the Cachapa
I went to a retirement party on Sunday, a friend who has worked in communications for sustainable agriculture and who gathered her various communities at her home. We spilled out into the Village Homes common area, laughed, talked, caught up. I’ll miss her searing intelligence, cheek (well, chutzpah), and questioning in meetings, her role as chief bullshit detector…
One of the delicious morsels served at Lyra’s party was carrot cachapas. Cachapas are Venezuelan pancakes usually made with fresh corn. Corn’s not quite available here, fresh, so the chef at Tuco’s used carrot puree instead. They were tiny carrot pancakes encasing a fresh goat cheese (which didn’t taste goaty in the slightest; I was surprised to learn it, and I have a very strong goat-sensor), like a sandwich.
They were incredible. I am going to try to replicate them, kind of smooth carrot latkes with cheese…
9 June 09
Christmas Lights In June
I’m well into my list of projects inspired by the Maker Faire. First up was building a TV-B-Gone. This is a device that can get you excommunicated from sports bars mighty quick: it acts as a universal remote off button to turn off TVs in public places that are harassing you. (We don’t have a TV to test it out on, so I don’t know if it works yet).
Second, I am starting to play with the Arduino physical computing platform. This evening I had fun blinking different colors of LEDs on and off, as can be seen at right.
6 June 09
World Drawing Day!
It’s World Drawing Day, where we’re going to try to get one million drawings online… I’ll be posting here my efforts from throughout the day.
I’ve also posted a couple of bird sketches on Bird by Bird.
31 May 09
Steampunk Tofu
We traveled to the Maker Faire today, carpooling down to San Mateo with Virginia and her daughter’s friend Courtney. It was, in a word, overwhelming. Far too much to see in a single day, probably too much to see if we were to go both days. It seemed like every geeky-crafty-hands-on subculture in Northern California and then some were represented at the fair. Everything from workshops teaching people how to do SMT soldering to demos on making tofu. Pica was given a lesson in how to spin on a spinning wheel. I marveled at all the LED blinky things people had made with Arduino microcontrollers.
What was neatest about the fair for me was seeing all these DIY subcultures intermingling: the three-story-tall robotics folks, the rocketry types, the grow-your-own-mushroom folks, letterpress folks (the San Francisco Center for the Book had a booth where they were getting people to do a bit of letterpress), telescope mirror grinders, any number of fiber arts folks, and happily enough the ham radio crowd (Pica and I both wore our call sign hats).
We were struck most of all by the steampunk folks. I’ve been aware of steampunk as a genre of fantastic literature imagining alternate Victorian technology, but didn’t realize steampunk has become something of a cultural movement. They had their own little section of the fairgrounds, purveying elaborate leather masks and brass goggles. Across the way, the St. Clair Aeronauts were dressing in
what we imagine a Royal Zeppelin Airmail Crew of 1883 would look like. At our table, we have parchment paper, envelope patterns, stamps, pen and ink, and glue. People can come to the table and write letters to their friends. My crew then delivers these letters.
(Virginia tried to send a letter that way to her daughter, without initial success.) In a way the steampunkers remind me of the Society for Creative Anachronism folks (who had a presence at the fair today, though I never ran into them), both craft-making sorts who like to dress up in period costume. It’s interesting though that the SCA came around in the late 1960s and looked towards a mythical preindustrial past, whereas steampunk is a 21st movement that is reimagining earlier days of industrialization. 
We all had a great time today. And I return home with projects! Of the radio and electronics ilk. I didn’t pick up any bits for these today, but I have lots of ideas to follow up on.