End of Day 1 at Maker Faire

Day 1 has already ended and so much has happened so far. Unfortunately I am unable to retrieve the pictures off my camera with the devices I have with me. I have a lot of exciting things to share and will post them as soon as I get back home to the office. Look for some live posts tomorrow. Feel free to comment about some of your favorite things about the Maker Faire.

Finally Arduino Leonardo.

Today you can buy the Arduino Leonardo at Maker Faire in San Mateo.

Center Stage - Massimo Banzi 'State of Arduino'

Day 1 at Maker Faire

Some pictures from the Maker Faire today.

Ian Lesnet  presenting ‘Get your stuff made’ 

Make: Pavilion

Life Size Starcraft Marine

Defuse the Bomb by DFRobot.com

Make: Pavilion

How To: Fly With Homemade Electronics

Something I found that could be really helpful from grathio.com.

"About once a month I see an article about some ambitious maker who’s project  created an alarm at airport security. Most makers who travel with homemade electronics and other prototypes have a fear that their innocuous project wil catapult them to the front page as a threat to national security. While these news reports make up a good list of how to travel with bespoke electronics, but what I really want to collect is information on how to avoid getting into these situations to begin with."

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What is your dream smartphone?

The smartphone industry is growing like mad, more devices from more manufacturers. A lot of options for everyone's taste; or you would think. It seems like you would be able to find the perfect smartphone with all these options but there is always something missing or just not quit right, in my opinion. As time goes on and technology evolves what you want from your smartphone changes and improves, constantly trying to do more with it. What is that device that can fill the void? That is what I want to find out. Here is what I have in mind at this point in time.

Side Project - VMWare ESXi

Some time late last year, I decided that most off-the-shelf routers are terrible and I needed to find a better solution. After looking high and low on the interwebs I settled on pfSense, a FreeBSD based firewall. The only thing I needed was another network port, so after some research I bought a dual port Intel NIC on eBay. That didn't work out so well. I was running VMWare ESXi 4.0 which wouldn't cooperate; giving me PSOD's. Thinking that ESXi 4.1 would solve the problem, I then took the risk of upgrading. The reason I say risk is because to this day I haven't figured out how I got ESXi to work on the MCP73 nForce chipset. I had to uncomment a driver in some file to load the nv_sata.o file. Thankfully upgrading didn't mess up the config file. Unfortunately this didn't solve my PSOD, so it was back to looking for a compatible NIC. Finally, I settled on a single port Broadcom. This worked great and I've had no problems at all, so far. Great this is working out, so I thought.

New Domain Name

I finally got around to getting a domain name. You can use either listed below.

http://www.mobilewill.us

http://mobilewill.us

Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview detailed impressions

The early days of Windows were inauspicious ones. Sitting on top of DOS, it was hardly a revolution in personal computing -- instead it felt like a disjointed platform perched uncomfortably atop a command prompt, ready to come crashing down at any moment. That's what it was, and often that's what it did. The early days of Windows required constant jumps from GUI to shell as users ran a wide assortment of apps, only some of which played nice inside a window.
It was over a decade later, after Windows 95, that the operating system would truly ditch its DOS underpinnings and feel like a totally integrated system. Why are we reminiscing? Because we're reaching that same point again. With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft is showing off the most complete version of the company's most modern operating system, yet in many ways it feels like 1985 all over again -- like there are two separate systems here struggling to co-exist. How well do they get along? Join us after the break to find out.

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