Ye Olde Geek Show Draws Thousands By Ryan Singel Wired News
02:00 AM Apr, 24, 2006 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70724-0.html SAN MATEO, California -- A high-tech version of an old county fair brought hundreds of inventors out of their garages this weekend, to show off such innovations as an iPod jukebox, a power sander-turned race car and a vegetable-oil powered supercomputer. Make magazine, a quarterly tinkerer's journal published by O'Reilly, took over the fair grounds here for a two-day celebration of do-it-yourselfers that placed emphasis on turning spectators into creators. For those inclined to simply gawk and gee-whiz -- and about 20,000 people were so inclined -- there were spectacles galore. On the Segway polo field, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak busily trash-talked his opponents, while just 30 yards away, a geyser of fire shot up intermittently from the top of a fire truck retrofitted into a mobile blacksmith shop. For sports fans, Stanford Mechatronics students hosted a hockey-like game featuring robots that took turns slinging miniature tennis balls into each other's goals, while nearby a remote-control humanoid robot thrilled young ones with improbable robot back flips. In the transportation room, a gang of middle-aged engineers alternately pored over wiring diagrams and answered questions from fair goers as they attempted to turn a traditional hybrid car into a plug-in electric model that gets the equivalent of 100 miles a gallon. Out in the parking lot, ZAP! offered free test drives of its urban electric vehicle known as the Xebra -- which resembles a three-wheeled Yugo from the future. But even the future is not yet adolescent proof, as demonstrated by two teenagers who promptly plowed the precariously perched vehicle into a chain-link fence. For those who wanted to get their hands dirty doing something productive, there were plenty of options, including one booth which took the phrase literally by inviting attendees to create plastic molds of their hands. Tucked in a far corner of the fairgrounds, a warren of barely chaperoned young would-be-builders popped the keys off discarded keyboards, took drills to old hard drives and soldered LEDs to switches. The diligent deconstruction work brought to mind anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's famous maxim, "The urge for destruction is also a creative urge." Five-year-old Cameron Li was investigating of the inside of a dot-matrix printer, with some assistance from his father Damon -- a Silicon Valley engineer. He took a break to tell a reporter that his favorites included a "tank robot that has an ax" and the remote control hand vacuum that would be good for his mom. "That way she won't have to push the handle," Cameron said. When asked what he planned to build, Cameron first hesitated then proclaimed, "I'm going to make something that clicks." Just a table a way, a more serious group of tinkers, mostly adults, also worked on making things that click -- a light switch that takes commands from a TV remote control. On a nearby patch of grass, inventors demonstrated a gyroscope-controlled, electric unicycle, and daring fair goers mounted and crashed innovative bicycles. A trio of young Bay Area programmers -- Wes Steed, Randall Meyer and Ammon Skidmore -- said they weren't old enough to remember Silicon Valley's famed Homebrew Computer Club from the 1970s, but that they felt its spirit at the fair grounds. "The home inventor is still alive," Skidmore said. The garage tinkerer also is not invariably a guy anymore. Though Meyer said he was interested in learning to program robots and Steed has subscribed to Make magazine since its first issue, the trio was adamant that they were there because of their girlfriend, fiancée and wife. "They are in a workshop somewhere," Meyer said. ================================================= George Antunes Voice (713) 743-3923 Associate Professor Fax (713) 743-3927 Political Science Internet: antunes at uh dot edu University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3011 Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
