Weekend Geekery
 

Yesterday, Heather and I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo. It was a huge collection of hackers, DIYers, freaks and geeks. I expected to breeze through the show in less than an hour, but we wound up spending the full eight hours (we didn't return today, however).

Some pictures:










You can see my whole Flickr set here.

I'll upload some videos later tonight...

I adore this event and would totally go if I lived up there. Awesomeness.

How fun! Are those the Mentos gents?

I love the crocheted Atari 2600, complete with a game of Pitfall on screen :)

and here's a sample of the musical entertainment.

How randomly cool

looks like a blast - so did anyone try out that Jet Pack next to Robby the Robot? It's 2007 and I'm still waiting.

whoa.. love that atari.... thanks MP....

You can buy a jetpack. There was a guy on NPR a couple weeks ago (can't remember if it was All Things Considered or the local interview show) who wrote a book about the great SciFi inventions promised when he was a kid that hadn't been invented yet.

When he started looking around it turned out most of them had been invented and just weren't economically viable for mass consumption or on a large scale. Smell-o-vision (turns out nobody wanted it), jetpacks (too inefficient), and teleportation (only works at the quantum level and considering how it works nobody would subject themselves to it anyway) were three of the things he talked about specifically.

Turns out there's a reason it was called science fiction and not economics fiction.

I want a jet pack I can commute to work with - though I'd be willing to try out a personal Zeppelin and try out the 19th Century version of the future.

A Theremin! Cool!

Apparently the cheap remotely economical jet pack only works for three minutes per fuel load which is why the military stopped funding the project.

Some guy overseas (I forget where) bought the rights and sells them as novelty things.

I don't need a jetpack (doesn't actually sound very comfortable to me) but wouldn't mind the road controlled automated cars found in various scifi stories (the first that comes to mind is one of the segments in Heinlein's Job). But then I'm also waiting for Heinleins other great invention to come into existence: the moving sidewalks from the short story The Roads Must Roll.

I adore this.

As usual, Rob Cockerham was there and took lots of pictures.

how embarassing....I still have one (a real one)