Articles by spetku

I sit here in my bathrobe, numb from the events of the past few days. Even though it was really cool, I don’t think anyone else aside from the volunteers who participated in it realized that this was “Science and Technology Week” here in Las Vegas. SYN Shop answered the call of duty for this festival. It was coordinated to coincide with First Friday, which made for a brutal gauntlet of setting up, tearing down, and giving attention to endless amounts of people. All of the excitement began on Thursday night downtown in new Fremont with the Science Crawl. The first event was family friendly and held at our hackerspace, attracting a wild herd of parents and children for an hour of building ‘light sabers’ out of pool noodles and electrical tape. (doesn’t that not sound horrifying??) Luckily, Jeff and I escaped this madness by the skin of our teeth and went for some dinner before…

I was at Robo Day two weeks ago where I was approached by independent film maker, Rick Barcode to have a pair of my goggles used as a prop in one of his short movies. Now, normally I am an untrusting wretch who hordes her precious things away from any possible dangers, but lately my mantra has been “yes”, because cool things don’t happen if you keep saying no to people. That being said, I was still hesitant about lending my babies to someone I didn’t know all that well. So, I agreed to let him use them under the condition that I tag along while he filmed. I figured It’d be a good opportunity to learn something new. Besides, it wasn’t like I was going to get drugging and featured in a snuff film or anything…? It turned out that they were extremely cautious and respectful with my goggles….

I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was ten, I’ve had surgery on my head recently… and this event involved consuming alcohol. That being said, going was a great bad idea! Luckily Krux had an extra working bike for me to use. Needless to say we had enough ‘blink’ between the two of us to decorate my ride. He even got me a shiny red helmet to protect my fragile brain… just incase. The route started at the Huntridge tavern down town which is riding distance from our usual Saturday meetup at the shop. We left just before sundown and joined the horde of people prepping in the parking lot. It didn’t take long to discover that the apparent theme was green due to it being 4-20, something that failed to occur to either of us. No one in our group really bought into the green paraphernalia trend though. We…

This past Saturday was Robo Day, an event at the Cheyenne campus of the local college where humans could come and acquaint themselves with their future dominators. Syn Shop was offered space at the event so myself and a few of the other robot enthusiasts brought our babies down to show to the world. My delta robots, Jeden, Sznurek, and Squanto made their debut as I demoed Jeden all day with an interactive GUI : Krux finished repairing Nomad the previous weekend and had him running with a new upgraded brain and power supply. In addition to the hulking beast on wheels we brought stationary, the little treaded rover that resembles Wall-E : I had the honor of sitting next to ‘Amber’, Mark’s lovely white delta robot… who as of that particular day could only move on a thrusting z-axis. Nathan had his cute spider-like hexapod crawling about while he…

I decided last week that my next set of goggles will be Polkamatic. Previously I had been mulling over the notion of creating a radio themed pair, but that was less quirky and less interactive than the recent Theremin goggles I have finished… and I can’t allow myself to digress. ‘Polkamatic’ goggles? What the hell is that? Well, my interest in sound and the fact that I am a blazing Pollock have intersected into this lovely idea of an interactive sound mixer consisting of polka riffs and the like. These goggles will look like they were carved from wood, will have floral babushka fabric for straps, and no less than two bellows to simulate working accordions. Silly? YES. Very silly… I have the image of a one man band contraption with moving parts and knobs in my head… the only problem I’ll face is running out of surface area on…