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.
29 May 09
Going to Meet the Makers
We’re off to the Maker Faire in San Mateo tomorrow morning. This is the annual gathering of creative types who make stuff — kind of like Burning Man with a point, but without the dust, wind, and gratuitous nudity.
I’m going to look for the spinners, the bookbinders, the printers. Numenius has his own agenda and we’ll be taking radios to coordinate.
The Shy Turtle is a good example: using technology to teach children how to respect nature.
29 May 09
Fivefold Pestilence
Don’t ask us to save the world. We are now 0-5 in games of Pandemic. This is a cooperative game from two to four players who form a team who try to rid the world of four nasty diseases before they do in much of humanity. The game turns out to be very hard to win. In the last game we played we eradicated the disease threatening North America and Europe, but got felled by cascading outbreaks of a second disease in the Middle East. Finally, an unrelated outbreak in Santiago, Chile spelled our doom.
27 May 09
Gardening as a Board Game?
Scenario: you have some of the finest soil in the country (30 feet of loam with silt, an old flood plain now spared from flooding by a somewhat compromised levee and decades of illegal water diversion), though the soil contains almost no organic matter (something you can remedy by getting truckloads of horse manure and bedding from the horse barn across the road and working it in; the compost pile you tend assiduously is never, ever enough). Your climate is extreme Mediterranean. The landlord has said you can use a triangular plot with 12+ hours of sun exposure but that is overrun with weeds and ancient grape vines put in maybe 30 years ago which now host a strapping colony of ground squirrels (the landlord’s only request is that you put in a large assortment of sweet curcubits, such as melons, muskmelons, and watermelons, all of which require copious space). Other creatures willing to eat everything you put in the ground are pocket gophers, jackrabbits, cottontails, introduced wild turkeys and the usual earwigs and slugs after a wet spring (we haven’t technically had a wet spring but the timing of our two big rains has conspired to produce a bumper crop), aphids and other beauties like the tomato hornworm, plus Zonotrichia sparrows in winter.
You are given 100 yards of chicken wire, 12 T poles, assorted seeds which, if they bear fruit, will include ratatouille fixings and then some, an inflatable snake to deter birds (ha!), and a copy of Sunset Western Garden. Toxic chemicals are forbidden (don’t look at what they’re putting on the adjacent alfalfa field), but you can use cayenne, garlic, fish oil, and any concoctions made from them, if it makes you feel better. You are to observe the time-honored principles of not planting the same vegetable in the same spot for at least three years.
Your challenge is to get as much as you can to a) germinate (1 point per plant), b) get more than two sets of leaves before it gets eaten by insects and molluscs (2 points), c) encourage pest predators (in this case coyotes, ladybirds, etc.) (3 points per creature eaten, except for aphids, which are 3 points per 1,000), d) flower (4 points per plant), set fruit (5 points), and e) make it into your kitchen after it ripens but before it gets eaten by some creature (remember, ground squirrels can smell exactly when a cherry tomato is at peak; you can’t). You lose points for rotting stems and fruit, infestations of toxic weeds, insufficient or too much watering, and every zucchini that grows over 6” long.
You win the game when you have successfully cooked a ratatouille for eight people in the solar cooker (which will take at least three rounds).
26 May 09
Black Stone, White Stone
My rediscovered interest in board games has not abated. We’ve been playing lots of games of Carcassonne lately. Today on a trip to Berkeley we stopped by the friendly local game store and picked up a couple of Carcassonne expansions as well as a copy of Pandemic. I don’t wander very long in this gaming direction without contemplating learning the ultimate board game — go. Usually this takes the form of downloading a computer AI version of the game and practicing against it on a 9 × 9 board, routinely getting thrashed. But that is because I am exceptionally lousy at this point. One of the refreshing things about go is that unlike chess, computers aren’t very good at the game. A reasonably experienced amateur is better than the best of the computer programs. It’s a long way to go before I become reasonably experienced, however. Yesterday online I played my first game against another human, someone who was also an absolute beginner, and even won, which I suppose is a good start. I’m still worse than 99% of the people who play on that server though. It’s a long road of study — will I start travelling that way?
22 May 09
A Million Drawings
World Drawing Day is coming up… June 6th, help us put one million drawings online! They don’t have to be masterpiece: go out and sketch and have a blast. Then scan and post your drawings, and report them.
I may user this occasion to start my new sketchbook. I’ve been thinking about what to do with it. Time to stop thinking and start drawing…
21 May 09
Even The Petals Are Edible
Our guava bushes are blooming profusely!
17 May 09
Burning
Like this, he said.
A stone circle first
then paper (FT’s best)
then twigs then kindling
then, when that’s caught,
a log.
And another:
a teepee or crossways.
A path for the air.
Camping chairs shifting forward then back
a dance with the cold and
the size of the fire
the kind of wood
(oak’s best, well seasoned)
and how many clothes
we’d lugged into
which Castilian landscape.
Bottles surrounded us
(Chinchon’s good, but best
with coñac).
The bonfire beacon
summoned
shepherds and in pairs, guardias,
and frozen, parched hikers:
all offered a copa
and given a smoke.
Those fires: the cracking and
smoke and bane of
scorpions, spiders, the beasts
that emerged from their midst:
swallowing, omnomming
the night. My youth smells like this.
But the first time —
when I had just learned
to read —
that time, when we walked half a block,
he and I, with our tent and two bags
and the matchbox that held
“cosy” and “warm”
The dry thistles caught and
he beat them: slap! thwack!
the bag snuffing the life
yet there was the mock, the crackling
flames, rebirthing themselves:
That time, I saw something bigger
than Dad
and learned fear.
Ten years
since the flames took the flesh
off his bones
and consumed it all:
fire bigger than Dad —
the land cracks,
the breeze lifts,
and it’s
re-licking its
lips.