Month: August 2011

Last week I visited Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany, Europe, Earth, Milky Way, Universe for the Chaos Communication Camp conference.
The conference was billed as a conference for Hackers and Associated Life Forms. This photo, taken by Jake Blau, is of a rocket sculpture in the center.



The talks included everything from DIY solar to e-waste to how to avoid having your Whole Identity Stolen by hackers. Workshops included RFID hacking, sushi making and building the TV-B-Gone.
There was tons of conversation about Social Engineering and quitting your job to do what you love.
I’m a big fan of the sport of Hardware Hacking and also thought there might be something there to learn about RF communications, so I went. I was also able to Social Engineer my way in with no ticket…YEAH!

This conference was a camping conference, with lots of big weather-proof tents and the talks set up in hangars. At night everything was lit up with creative LED blinkie-ness.



Since it was raining, I camped under a plane. Notice the knitting bomb that someone kindly left for us to enjoy!



The badges were the coolest I’ve ever experienced. You could update the firmware on them and get games. And they text messaged with people nearby. Someone attached a Geiger counter to communicate with their badge. Geiger counters have lately, in my opinion, gotten far too popular….the tubes are now too expensive and difficult to source. Grrrr.



Some of the people I met were Hao Zhang, who is organizing a Hacker event in Beijing next April and looking for hackers to exhibit, attend and give workshops. I met the inventor Jimmie P. Rodgers, who makes the LoL shield for the Arduino. A couple of 3D printing projects were there MakerBot and RepRap. Mitch Altman is really smart and is a quit your job and do what you love evangelist.
I also met various people from Hackerspaces in Berlin and Vienna and hilariously, in New York City.
A great trip…I highly recommend it, the next one takes place in 2015.

Every Maker or Engineer needs some kind of workshop to create in.
In 1994 I rented a barn on the property of a friend’s rental in Olympia, WA. The barn was awesome, with a high ceiling and huge doors that opened up to the outside. In October, when we arrived, it was warm outside. In January, the owner of the huge barn doors removed them from the barn and took them away. I was really into making sculptural hats at the time and I needed my fingers to sew. Brrrr.

In 1995, Tucson, AZ, I bought cubicle dividers and put them up in our kitchen to create some workspace. My good friend and roommate Andrea would call over the cube and ask me if I wanted some stirfry. At that time in my life, I was deeply involved in fish tank building, specifically from junked stainless steel wood stove pipes. The tanks were modular, each tank holding just one Fighting Fish. They plugged into each other to make different shapes.
We ran out of space within the month and moved to a more spacious palace in another neighborhood. People would knock on the gate outside our house asking for drugs and money. The upside was that the rent was so cheap I got an entire room to myself to work in.

In 1996, I moved back home to NY and rented a barn in New Paltz. This barn had a propane heater with a blower and a door with a key. At this time I was doing a lot of silver-smithing, a craft that I pursued seriously for several years. I kept this space until the heater broke.

I moved my workshop to Kingston, NY in 1997. This was a glorious space, a 1200 square foot ground floor space with wood floors and big windows. And super cheap, because the building was for sale. I split the space with Alex Hamilton, one of the most creative people I’ve ever met in my life. I started getting into animatronics in a big way, building remote control bat wings and puppets with multiple motion eyeballs.

When the Kingston building got sold in 1998, I moved to Manhattan and briefly tried to work out of my 9′ x 9′ bedroom, kicking the dog, Kyote, out whenever I needed to spray glue. Within a couple of months, it was clear I’d need to rent another space. I lucked out, sharing a space with Kelly Gleason and Robert Perez in Dennis Oppenheim’s (who died recently but is alive on Facebook, WEIRD) building on Franklin street. Kelly was a Special FX makeup artist and she had crazy jobs coming in all the time. She’d hire me to make gallons of blood, a burnt replica of that guy in 90210, an exploding head. Robert is a photographer who shoots primarily glamour shots- gorgeous photos of women without much clothing on. I’d come to work in the studio and there would be half a dozen naked girls sitting around in one room and severed body parts in another.
I loved that studio and stayed there for 5 years.

Now I have a space in Kingston, NY again. I’ve had the same workshop since 2002.
Here’s a candid shot of my workbench.


Every engineer needs to have a whiteboard…and a blond wig!

Shutter glass goes opaque when current is applied, and clear when there is none. I grabbed the following gif from Liquid Crystal Technologies.



I had the cost of 100 1″ x 3″ pieces estimated and it was in the $4,000 range. Sigh. Since this material is essentially glass, the material is fairly stiff, even in the flexible form.
You can apply an analog voltage to this, essentially being able to make this glass any color between clear and black. I would like to make a dress out of this type of material.
Just imagine a little black dress that turns transparent!