Make Faire: Meet the Makers

I’ve been in the San Francisco Bay Area (aka “Silicon Valley”) this weekend and have been trying to keep myself busy. I used to live in the area (during an internship at a tech company in Sunnyvale) and I have some friends who still live here. My friend Amber was kind enough to suggest a few interesting things happening this weekend and I decided to attend the Maker Faire. It turned out to be very entertaining! Unfortunately I didn’t bring my proper camera so you’re going to have to live with the pictures from my mobile phone or pictures I can find elsewhere online.

The event is put on by Make: Magazine, which is a quarterly magazine for people who like to make things (usually technology related). It a very entertaining magazine but I’m not enough of a “Maker” to justfy the exorbinant cover price (New Scientist is the only magazine I subscribe to FWIW). I acutally saw Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of Make: Magazine while I was there:

Mark Frauenfelder - not my photo

While not exactly what I would consider a celebrity encounter, he is the only person I’ve ever seen in person who has appeared on the Colbert Report.

But I digress. There was all sorts of cool things there including GIANT TELSA COILS there! YEAH:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2oLQ2ZEnc]

This guy was lighting a fluorescent bulb with his Tesla coil:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoHxLyDJ81U]

Posted about were warnings like this one:

Waring - Telsa Coils

They had electric vehicals:

Electric RacecarElectric Bike

Antiquated technology:

A pile of old cables

People who made all kinds of wacky stuff, including giant robots:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE0hW77XEpQ]

And, of course, the truly insane, like this guy who was knitting whist playing the drums:

Knitting Drummer

And the “Redneck Pool Heater“:

Redneck Pool Heater

The event was much bigger than I expected and I never did end up meeting up with Amber while I was there. The SF Bay Area is one of the only places that can support this kind of insanity at this level. Between stuff like this and the beautiful weather it makes me almost miss living here!