You need an oven, a food processor, lemon, flatbread, a bunch basil, a head of garlic, aluminum foil, olive oil, Parmesan.

Maker Faire 2009 was basically epic to the max.

Highlight of the day (demonstrated above by Josh Carr) was an “adult sized playground” that was composed of two sets of swings and a see-saw. These were then connected through the magic of arduino (a Barbarian Group favorite) to a computer, which then generated music using the measured voltage to modulate the signal. A swing set, that was basically synthesizer. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?

Are you still not convinced? There was also a life sized version of that board game Mouse Trap that was basically this epic Rube Goldberg. AWESOME! Do you love socially awkward people wearing corsets, welding goggles, and far too much make up? OMFG SO DO I!! There was about a gabillion steampunk kids at Maker Faire as well. I also saw a Tesla Roadster, infinity robots, a belly dancer, a diet Coke + Mentos explosion AND a high school band whose guitarist played a totally amazing flying V guitar. Shred Nation!

You’re super duper jealous, admit it.

I set up a file server at home so that I can access my files from any computer in the house. I put new files on the box all the time, and don’t always remember what’s new when I want to grab new songs or put photos online, so I wrote this thing in ruby to run through the files on the drive and make a list of new ones. A cron job runs it once a week. Next on the agenda, I’ll make it email me the list and copy all the new files to my backup drive.

It gives you a total new file count at the end, and some spiffy output to look at while it runs. It also skips those dot files that OS X leaves all over the place. Read on for the script.

Vegan. Give yourself about two hours if you have two people working on it. It’s totally worth it. You need an avocado, a red onion, two 15 oz. cans of black beans, 2 15 oz. cans of vegetable broth, a white onion, a green pepper, fresh cilantro, a plum tomato, a cup of chickpea flour, a cup of white flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, salt and pepper, olive oil, 4 cloves of garlic and a cup of white rice.

Easy vegetarian pasta. This takes about an hour. You need mascarpone, Parmesan, pasta, a bulb of garlic, two cups fresh spinach, a red bell pepper, a small onion, a bunch of fresh parsley, a head of broccoli, salt, and, well, water. Read more for the instructions.

Here is my initial official video address!

So I got a few comments on this Musical Things post asking how we made that little visualizer. Honestly I don’t know who made it! But I do understand how it works! Basically the cathode-ray tube was hacked to be an oscilloscope. This is something that can potentially be done to anything that has a cathode-ray tube.

Here is a nice little video by a teenager on how to make something similar:

Disclaimer: cathode-ray tubes retain high voltage charges even after they are turned off and unplugged, you can get seriously injured if you touch the wrong things. Do not attempt anything like this unless you know basic electronics.

I joined TripIt (my profile) a few months back and have been really impressed. Over that time I’ve gotten many of my friends to drink the TripIt kool-aid. The beauty of TripIt to me is that it prints wonderfully, integrates easily into my LinkedIn profile, and is really a nice travel app that doesn’t let its UI get in the way of doing what I want. But it does have its faults.

Specifically, the biggest fault to me is that it does not yet, after 2 years, have a Facebook App so your friends can see your travel plans. So like a traveler in the desert in search of water, I set my sights on finding some possible way to get my travel plans into Facebook for my friends to see.

There was plenty of talk across the web and even on Facebook as to why TripIt should have a Facebook App, but absolutely nothing on if they had a secret one in development or even have any plans at all to make one.

Then, like an oasis in the distance, I found this blog post right under my nose, at TripIt’s own website! The commenter says that they figured out a work around by actually using TripIt’s competitor, Dopplr, and importing in the calendar from his TripIt ical feed. Ingenious!

I set it up and it works perfectly. I find it quite amusing that users are resorting to using the competitors tools against them so they can enjoy TripIt more. I so wish I had thought of that first!