Monday, August 27, 2012

 

Montreal Mini Maker Faire

Hacklab.to exhibited at the Montreal Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, we drove up with a carload of stuff and people and had a total blast! I showed off my sensebridge stuff, we brought the flipdot display, and we had two 3D printers, hacklab's makerbot industries cupcake, and a prototype of PandaBot, a 3D printer that some friends of mine have been developing (kickstarter soon!). My Montreal Mini Maker Faire Flickr Set includes some shots of Foulab as well, which we visited Saturday evening. On a final note, we used AirBnB to find a place to stay, and it was AWESOME, we got a great house with four bedrooms only about 2 miles from the faire venue, only a block from some great restaurants on Sherbrooke, it even came with kittens! All that for only ~$100 a night, incredible deal.

As usual with a maker faire, there was tons of interesting stuff to see, including the lego-based WALL-E pictured right, some awesome tiny "ladybird" quadcopters, some cool steampunk stuff, a lot of great 3D printers (including some RepRaps by Foulab, the Up!, and an Ultimaker), several clever interactive motion-sensing games, and most mind-boggling for me, games of Muggle Quidditch. I kid you not, apparently it's been adapted for play by us mere muggles, and includes bludgers (dodgeballs), the snitch (a player dressed in all yellow who can use an area of play as big as "campus"), and of course the three hoop nets. Is there no limit to how silly a sport can be? For fans of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think it's worth noting that actually catching the snitch is apparently worth only 30 points in Muggle Quidditch, so the game is more balanced!


Sunday, August 12, 2012

 

Awesome Foundation Winners

Surprisingly, I haven't blogged much here about the Toronto Awesome Foundation. We're still giving away $1000 every month to the most awesome idea. Pictured to the right is a recent winner showing off her rainbow flame gun :-). For Canada Day, the harbourfront center gave us a tent, and we held court all day, check out the photos, Video of the Pitches, Video of random fun. I've been doing all this video editing, which is a new thing for me, certainly gives me a new respect for making movies, since I know how much work a 5 minute video is! For those of you into guerilla gardening, there is also a video update from Terry on the Toronto Guerilla Gardeners. Other recent winners include: StopGap, the complete street band, Dr. Cornelius von Martlehüp’s Fantacular Tent of Spectastic Oddities, the love lettering project and numerous others... I'm having a lot of fun as dean, but only because I have a lot of great trustees who so most of the real work :-)

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