Tag Archives: austin

Austin Mini Maker Faire this weekend at Pine Street Station

The Austin Mini Maker Faire is this weekend!

This is the first Make: sponsored event we’ve had since the “big” Faire in 2008. It’s being held at the Pine Street Station in East Austin (5th and Waller).

I’ll be there checking out all of the cool exhibits, including the soldering workshops being run by my friends at the ATX Hackerspace.

Click the poster below for more information, or visit austinmakerfaire.com.

See you there!

I was not prepared for this.

Still really warm here.

People said that it gets hot here.

I thought that I understood hot. “I’ve lived in hot places before”, I said to myself.

Sure, Sacramento gets pretty warm in the summer. Maybe one or two weeks of 100+ weather in August.

But never have I experienced anything like this.

In January, we had snow one week and 70 degree weather the next. By February it was in the 80s, March and April in the mid-90s. By May, we had our first 100 degree day, and I suspect that it has only dipped below 100 briefly a couple times since.

The house AC has been running constantly, I’m scared to open the power bill every month, the lawn is dead (we’ve had just over 4 inches of rain so far this year), and I pretty much hide indoors anytime before midnight.

I guess the good thing is that unlike last August, when we first moved to Austin, the temps have been dipping down into the 70s at night. I remember when we first moved here, it was 100+ during the day and 95 at night.

That was rough.

Amusingly, when it’s this hot for this long, you do sort of get used to it. Kylie and I have gone out a few times lately and said to each other “wow, it’s nice out tonight”, then checked the weather:

95 degrees.

Austin Dorkbot / SXSW Ignite this Friday

This Friday, March 11th, Austin’s Dorkbot chapter is holding a science fair in conjunction with Ignite Austin for SXSW Interactive.

I’ll be demoing my Wifi Radio project and showing off various other projects.  There is a list of presenters here.

General Admission is $10 ($0 for SXSW badge holders), but if you RSVP right now on Dorkbot Austin’s Facebook page there might be some free passes left.

Wifi Radio / Dorkbot 27

KVRX

Last night, I dusted off my Wifi Radio project and gave a 15 minute presentation about it at Austin Dorkbot 27: Electric Boogaloo.

Dorks who want to download the slides can do so here: Jeff_Keyzer-Wifi Radio Project

I had a particularly challenging evening because the hastily assembled wireless network in the ACTlab refused to hand out an IP address to the radio.  After wrongly suspecting that the 802.11n network was causing problems (my home network is b/g), I discovered that if I set a static IP and default gateway, I could get a stable connection to the router.   That process of discovery took something like an hour of tweaking settings, trying to remember iwlist arguments, how to set up routes, etc.

In the end I got it all working and gave a very successful demo of the radio.   Whew!