

We're very happy to announce that we've lined up some fun workshops this coming week leading up to the main event on Saturday, September 19. These workshops are free and open to the public; some of the workshops will have materials fees if you want to make something and take it home.
Here are some of the workshops (all events are at Slater Mill in Pawtucket RI unless noted):
To sign up, join the attendee network and click "Add to my schedule" on the workshops's page. For a complete list of workshops and events, visit the Maker Faire RI calendar.
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Sam Seide made this nicely constructed mini arcade machine for his son, using a 12-in-1 arcade joystick and the screen from a broken DVD player.
You might remember Sam from his interactive punch-out dummy project.
(thanks, Kip Kay!)
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DIY Electric El Camino @ Wired.com
The electronic controls engineer from Franksville, Wisconsin, electrified an ‘81 Chevrolet El Camino, a poster child for the darkest days of American automotive design and a car with enough steel to shrug off a collision with a Sherman tank.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!
A better analogy would be if the replicator only made tomatoes. You could have as many tomatoes as you wanted, they'd always be perfect and delicious, and they'd always be free. This would put tomato farmers out of business. But these tomato farmers could likely start growing something else instead. And what happens to the rest of the economy? Pizza and pasta restaurants suddenly find that a major ingredient in many of their dishes just became free. Now, for the same dish, they can charge less, or buy higher quality ingredients, or make more profit. And if you're a really talented cook specializing in tomatoes? Your skills are now in very high demand.Read that over a few times. It's about the best description/analogy of what we've been trying to say here that I've ever heard.
And there is still a demand for the people who bring the tomatoes from the replicator to your table. There is still a demand for the person who stews and cans the tomatoes, or dices and seasons them. And all the other food items, the ones that aren't in infitnite supply, still need people to produce, process, and distribute them.
This is what's happening in the music industry, and starting to happen in the publishing industry. Some parts of the industries are finding their functions obsolete. Instead of looking at the money they could save with electronic distribution, and what good use they could put that money to, the industry is seeking new laws and regulations to limit the infinite supply so business can continue as usual.
Even if every single song, book, and movie was distributed digitally for free, there would still be a need for the music, publishing, and movie industries. There would still be demand for editors, producers, marketers, and all sorts of other services that these industries have always provided.
Reasonable people aren't calling for the abolition of the music, publishing, and movie industries. They're just asking these industries to look to the future, and stop trying to limit supply to protect obsolete business models.
Update, 5:55pm PDT: Heard just now on Mission Control audio: "Home! (...) Welcome home Discovery, after a successful mission, stepping up science to a new level on the International Space Station." A beautiful touchdown at 5:53pm PDT, and damn tootin' we heard (and felt) the twin booms here in LA.Southern California BB readers, here's your evening forecast: breezy with a chance of BEWMMMM! Expect a large sonic boom between 530-555pm PDT this evening if you're in one of the colored areas in the map embedded at left (click to see large size).
That's when the Space Shuttle Discovery is scheduled to land at Edwards Air Force Base out in Mojave, instead of KSC in Florida (due to sketchy weather back east). Snip from LA Times item:
The so-called "deorbit burn" is scheduled to begin at 4:47 p.m. PDT for a 5:53 p.m. landing at Edwards in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, according to details published on NASA's website. The second opportunity for leaving orbit will come at 6:23 p.m., ending with a landing at 7:28 p.m.The mission to deliver supplies and equipment to the International Space Station lasted 2 weeks and spanned 5.7 million miles. More: LA Times, NASA "Landing Blog."
Wooo! The deorbit burn is beginning as I type this blog post. Snip:
Discovery's orbital maneuvering system engines are firing now. This two-minute, 35-second deorbit burn will slow the orbiter's forward speed by about 267 feet per second, enough to begin its descent through the atmosphere.
Update: Sonic boom + unsuspecting dog = the video below (via @caseymckinnon via @georgeruiz).
I just climbed back down from my Brooklyn rooftop. An airplane has flown into the World Trade Towers. There's thick black smoke billowing out of several floors of both towers. Let me pause for a moment to say with all the lucidity I can muster that it is the strangest sight I have ever seen in my life.And Cory wrote:I can hear the sirens of multiple emergency vehicles, 360 degrees around. There were people on other rooftops in my neighborhood, some of them talking on their cellphones. Down in the street below me a workman was shouting in some language other than English for the rest of his work crew to come out of the house they're renovating and see what's happening. I couldn't make out a word of it, but there was no mistaking the sense.
Patrick called from the office. He says from where I'm standing I can't see the big hole in the side of one tower.
The Internet's major news sites have been shut down by a massive flood of traffic as everyone in the world calls and emails everyone else in the world to tell them the news. God, this feels so apocalyptic. Five people have just called me to tell me about this, and more -- all flights in the US have been grounded, the Pentagon's been hit, the flights were hijacked commercial airliners... Holy crap.And Mark linked to this prescient piece by Dan Gillmor:
What happened on Tuesday was an act of war. The American government and military should and will respond in kind. If law enforcement and national security agencies declare war on the American people in the process, they will give the terrorists a gift. The despicable people who planned this will triumph if we add to the damage.On 9/11, Boing Boing linked to this, from John Perry Barlow:
Control freaks will dine on this day for the rest of our lives. Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little - largely illusory - safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously.Boing Boing: September 11, 2001.
From a 2001 story in New York magazine written a couple of weeks after the attacks, by David Carr:
# Everyone who comes after will never understand.18 Truths About the New New York (New York, 10-2001)
Not a new brand of New York provincialism but a cold fact. This is the place where the world seemed to end in a single morning. That day, as it was experienced here, was not televised.# The jumpers will always be with us.
Faced with the most horrible of all human choices, the kind of riddle that grade-school children use to torture each other, many leaped rather than burn. And as the debris falling from the top anthropomorphized into human beings, people watching understood that for the time being, we were all beyond help. "I don't remember faces, just bodies jumping out," says Alexandra Rethore, a second-year analyst at Lehman Brothers. "And the girl next to me was hysterical. She kept saying, 'They're catching them, right?' I said, 'Yeah, they're catching them. Let's go.' " It was a noble act, a message to loved ones: "I'm gone but not lost. I'm still here. Find me."
Worth reading today:
A Fortress City That Didn't Come to Be (NYT, 09-2009)
What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media? (LA Weekly, 09-2009)

In LA's Koreatown district, two dueling billboards over on Wilshire Boulevard. Two enter, one leaves. Guess which?
At left, Consumer Watchdog's ad, arguing that you can't trust Mercury Insurance. Yup, you guessed it -- THAT billboard was dismantled last week when the subject of the ad issued lawyergrams.
At right, the Absolut vagina Mango ad, which still flaps proudly in the Southern California breeze:
"If you drive three to four blocks east of where ours was," said Jamie Court, "there's a huge Absolut Mango ad, and it's really not a mango." Court said he was alerted by his wife, who happened upon it while driving and made the following observation: "There's a five-story vagina on a building."So, happy mutants, lesson learned: You may or may not be able to trust Mercury Insurance, but you can trust humongous hoo-hahs.
Read: LA Times via MSNBC. Images from Consumer Watchdog; howunoriginal.com.
"In light of Citizens' apparent delay in complying with FFIEC security standards, a reasonable finder of fact could conclude that the bank breached its duty to protect Plaintiffs' account against fraudulent access.... If this duty not to disclose customer information is to have any weight in the age of online banking, then banks must certainly employ sufficient security measures to protect their customers' online accounts."Chalk one up for those who believe "identity theft" is actually a "bank robbery."
Got a wonderful invention or art project that you think will inspire the next generation of makers? The GO campaign is offering a number of GO Ingenuity Awards to help fund your idea. From their website:
The GO Ingenuity Award (GIA) is awarded to artists, inventors, and small business entrepreneurs to stimulate the next generation of "makers." Building on the momentum of Maker Faire Africa, GO Campaign will award one-year, one-time fellowship grants to individual applicants who are eager to share their skills with marginalized youth in developing countries in ways that educate and inspire youth to harness their own ingenuity. The GIA emphasizes the sharing of innovative artistry and technology in informal, hands-on learning workshops in places where youth already gather.
[via Boing Boing]
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A $1-million reward has been offered by an anonymous source for information leading to the recovery of the paintings. Weisman, who was friends with Warhol, commissioned the silk-screen paintings in the late 1970s - a time when Warhol produced hundreds of pieces of work for wealthy patrons able to pay the roughly $25,000 he charged for portraits.
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