We ended up getting 140 groups to do readings of Boggle and Sneak, for a total of close to 300 people. I’ve been saying that the story of this Maker Faire for me will be that 300 people walked up and knowingly did me a personal favor (and this was on top of the giant-sized favor that my crew of Ed, Andrew, Will and Susan all pulled out.) My main reaction is basically stunned and bewildered gratitude. People can be pretty great!
Archive for the 'diy projects' Category
Ed, Will, Andrew and I spent the day at Maker Faire asking fairegoers to read pages out of Boggle and Sneak in our time machine. Each person or group read a single page, and we’ll be editing all the the pages into chapter-length videos. The readers were great! We had individuals, couples, parents and kids, moms and babies, groups of friends, and a man with the devil on his back. We’re still hoping to get R2D2, but we haven’t been able to get his attention yet.
The Time Machine and I will be attending Make Magazine’s Maker Faire in San Mateo May 3-4, to film the Boggle and Sneak videobook! Read all about it!
I built a video booth (same idea as a photo booth) where users can sit and read off a teleprompter screen and make short videos of themselves reading from my stories.
The project Instructable, Teleprompter Assisted Recording Device In Shipping crate, just got featured on the Instructables homepage!
I’m hoping to take this thing to Maker Faire, where I can put it to good use.
In the course of doing some research for the Pismo story, I came across the following items:
Town Gas: Evidently, natural gas was not in common use in the U.S. until after the Second World War. Each town manufactured its own gas– town gas– out of what was available: most commonly coal, but also rutabagas. (I would use rutabagas at any rate.)
Wood Gas: A cursory googling will yield a number of cars retrofitted to run on wood. Big tanks of wood.
Homemade Gasoline: This seems obvious in retrospect, but if you have a source of crude oil in your backyard and you rig up a makeshift still, you can make your own gasoline. It’s easier than making moonshine.
I started a batch of whole-wheat bread and set it out to rise on the fireplace hearth. (It makes sense to do that when there’s a fire burning, but no sense at all in the summertime. I seem to do it year-round though.) Then my parents showed up and my dad and I took off for the lumberyard while my mom took care of the girls. We bought a van-load of hardware, swing set parts and treated lumber, and Dad double-bungeed the van door shut over the twelve-foot stock sticking out of the back. We started out drilling and bolting in the carport until I pointed out that the growing assemblies would soon be too heavy to actually carry out to the yard, so we stuck an extension cord out a bedroom window and set up under the big oak tree. Every half hour or so I went in to check on the lifeless dough. The girls were watching Charlotte’s Web and jumping up whenever the weather radio went off, calling out approaching storms. In fact it did look like rain, so Dad and I worked as fast as we could, trying not to drop four-by-fours on each other’s heads. We got the frame for the swing set done and rolled upright just as the rain started to fall. Mom and Dad took off to get Dad to work a seven-to-midnight shift in the emergency room. I stuck the dough in the turned-off oven with the oven light on and took over with the girls, who were engaged in an all-out grunting duel on account of the pig movie.
After grunting and dinner and half a conversation with Rachel and the girls’ bedtime, the dough had finally risen and proofed and was ready for baking. I got two scenes drafted, but there appears to be some danger that each scene, though complete, will be shorter than the last. Things will get interesting once I get down to one-word-per-scene and under. The bread turned out okay. We had to use up stale tortillas and pitas all day today for lack of regular bread, but now I’ve replenished the supply. I feel good about that.