SF - burnt house on Valencia

It's hard to see, but there is a burnt mannequin in the lower corner window.

This guy was blasting the rock n' roll.

SF - The Roxie Theatre

I've already seen 3 movies at this tiny little art/rep theatre in the Mission District!

Astute readers may notice The Beetle parked in front!

SF- solar eclipse

Here in the Bay Area, we got about 90% of the eclipse.  You had to go a few hours north to get the whole thing, but it was still a really cool effect here and turned into a fun little social event.  We went up to the track where there is a good view to the west.  It was not all that exciting at first, beyond the initial neatness of seeing the sun reflected on a piece of paper with a crescent eaten out of it.  You really wanted to look right at the sun and see it, but we all know that is not a good idea.  There were not that many people there at first, but as we got closer to the peak moment, more and more people showed up.  One guy had built a really nice viewer out of two shpping tubes and a box.  He leaned it up against the bleachers and you could see the sun almost an inch high reflected on the cardboard box at its base.

But the show really amped up when everybody realized how it was making crescents out of everywhere where the light was filtered by a shadow, especially in the dappled shadows of leaves.  At its peak, it made the edges of one's own shadow slightly warped and curvy and that coupled with the strange dim light gave the whole evening a magical air.  People were dancing to their shadows and playing with the reflections on their clothes.  After a while, if you stared at the crescents in the shadow of the tree, they started to have a 3-D effect and pop out, like little hillsides on a map or a crowd of ghostly hooded figures.  It was pretty cool.  When we were leaving, we ran into a guy who had a piece of welder's glass and we were able to look directly at the sun through it and see the eclipse directly, which ended the whole event perfectly.

There are some higher-res photos of the ghostly crescents at the bottom of the page that I took with my phone that may give a better sense of it.

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SF - Makers Faire

My dad heard about this and thought it might be interesting to go to.   I've seen the magazine, but didn't realize how huge a thing it has become.  It's a weekend convention at the San Mateo fairgrounds dedicated to making stuff.  They have another one on the east coast as well.  I really didn't know what to expect, predicting some mix of hipsters and nerds, with a spicing of Burning Man.  It is that, but a whole lot more and there were quite a lot of normal looking families there.  On the computer side, the hot things seemed to be 3-D printing and little mini kit computers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.  People are doing some really cool shit!  Below, an essay in Clap photos.

Anti-Zombie Weapon

This was one of the coolest things, an entire miniature city made out of tiny figures of masking tape.

Here's some examples of things made with 3-D printing.  Much of it was plastic-based, but there was one using concrete.

A consumer wireless router hacked to become a web-accessible sensor (temp, movement, light, etc.)

Part of the video game museum exhibit. Lots of old guys like me going "ooh, I finished that!"

This is a printout of the original Adventure! game.  It's amazing how small the whole thing is when as  a child it seemed like an entire universe to me.

These are 5 beagleboards, teeny little computers, that together are powering a hi-def display.

The Raspberry Pi, all the nerdrage right now, a teeny computer with all you need for $35.

Hard to see, but this is a manual machine for scanning books semi-automatically without cutting the spines off and running them through a feeder.  Quite clever, it had two digital cameras calibrated on the top and a mechanism to raise and lower the book.

The old computer museum.

Old freak with an Altair

That's part of Woz's signature on the upper left.

Talkin' 'bout the good ol' days!