Maker Faire

[cjsmith]

I saw syren72 but did not see plymouth, and I heard someone (in a car?) call my name as I was heading toward the entrance but did not see who it was. xthread and crasch, I gots no clue. Never saw ya, and I couldn't possibly have heard my cell phone over the din.

Having skipped a year, I see a lot of contrast between this one and the first one. It's gone mainstream. There's cool stuff, don't get me wrong, but man oh MAN find parking before 10am.

I loved the cupcakes. Kids loved my scooter. I was sorely tempted by the marquetry club, but they meet exactly when I work. The hair on the enormous kneeling woman was fabulous, there was a rather spiffy Dance Dance Revolution-like SunSPOT demo, I entirely missed the battleship fight and the diet Coke and Mentos demo, and if I'd been by myself I might have spent way too much time in Swap-O-Rama-Rama. I was quite pleased to see EAA there; it didn't occur to me a couple years ago, but they're some of the world's ultimate makers. I wish I'd been willing to stay late enough to see some of the fire demos, but I have a houseguest coming.

I'm sure I'm forgetting TONS of stuff. It's hard to see everything when you're three and a half feet tall, two and a half feet wide, and can't go sideways or backwards. On the other hand, I'm not in pain, so there's the tradeoff.

Every year I see a few things that make me think "I could do that!" And every year I don't "do that". Am I busy, burned out, or just not much of a maker? I know I used to be more of one. I'm going to guess it's a little of all three.

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I actually like boxed kits. Or rather, I like that they exist. I don't buy them often and usually when I do it's to use some of the parts along with other parts from elsewhere and make something else entirely... But I was actually thinking while wandering around today that it's really neat that there is this whole continuum between "make completely from scratch" and "buy outright" and that one can drop in pretty much anywhere along that continuum and find a project that works for them and fits their skill level.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

One great thing about boxed kits is that they often have the volume to support having one critical piece custom-fabricated. Sometimes it's worth it to pick up the kit just for that piece.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, I agree with that in general. It was mainly that one kit that seemed a bit excessive, even with the presumably custom-fabricated nozzles.

Mostly what I was noticing that in was the books. The table we happened across was full of books that were chock-full of instructions that looked a bit entertaining to read in a flipping-through sort of basis for a minute or two, but were nowhere near detailed enough to actually be of any use. And it seemed like the whole vendor area was full of that sort of thing.

I wasn't too impressed by the copy of Make magazine that we flipped through, either. tiger_spot picked it up because of the cover article on "Hack your plants!" This turned out to be two and a half pages of a very basic intro to grafting, cross-pollination, and something else relatively trivial. It wasn't really enough depth to actually explain the tricks to how to do it in more than an extremely cursory way; if I were actually wanting to do it, I'd want to do rather more research first, at which point the article isn't very helpful. And those sorts of tricks are the things I find interesting to read about, too, so it also failed that test.