Please accept our humble apologies, but Dorkbot is cancelled for August. We will not be holding dorkbot this Thursday.

Truth is, we had a little trouble wrangling enough presenters to make for an interesting evening due to vacations and August weirdness.

The good news is that we are expecting a super-duper-happy-fun time on September 14, 2006, 8PM at Cafe Mundi and already have some really incredible speakers lined up.

In lieu of dorkbot this week, here’s our challenge to you:

Put at least 20 minutes into making something today. **

It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top technical or revolutionary. It just has to be 20 minutes of solid effort. 20 minutes is small. It’s doable. It’s not staying up all night. It’s just making the commitment to your passion for about 2.404750594 as long as it takes light to reach earth from the sun. from the SUN!

Oh, yeah. Spend 20 minutes getting your hands dirty on something - physically working on something with your hands.

It doesn’t count to just read about a project or surf the web for ideas (those things are important, but our challenge to you is to get past WONDERING and get to BUILDING).

If you have a project you’ve been kicking around in your garage - tinker around on it for 20 minutes right now. Got a software art project that’s been gathering dust? 20 minutes to add a new feature. Go. T-shirt with a stitched octopus that lights up with LEDs? 20 minutes to create the design.. no coffee break, please. Robot chassis modification? 20 minutes with a dremel and you’re done. That “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if” idea you have been sketching in your notebook? It ain’t all that cool unless it becomes real.

So make it real.

Then let us know about your project, no matter how “incomplete” it happens to be. At dorkbot, the process IS the art… and this community could probably help you along the way.

We have an unmoderated mailing list for all us dorks to kick around build ideas. Sign up here: http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotaustin-blabber

Thanks again for your patience and we can’t wait to start hearing about all those mad science projects in Austin!

dork on!

A little over a month ago, Dorkbot dropped from outer space onto an audience of over 120 curiosity seekers, geekophiles, and mad scientists.

We were featured on News 8 Austin and had a write-up of our inaugural insanity (with some great photos of the presenters’ dangerous creations) in the Austin American Statesman last Saturday: “Get your dork on - Grownups who like to play with electricity get a charge out of showing off their projects at Dorkbot Austin.”

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And now we’re at it again!

If you know what’s best for you and for humanity, you will NOT miss Dorkbot Austin 2 Thursday, July 13 8PM Cafe Mundi

Dorkbot Austin 2 June 13, 2006 - 8:00PM Cafe Mundi, 1704 East 5th St. Very kid-friendly event.

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Please forward this email to everyone you know… before it’s too late.

It’s a celebration of tinkering - people doing strange thing with electricity. Fringe finding at its finest.

We have some amazing presentations lined up:

• Joel Greenberg demonstrates how to beat movie studios at their own game with his cost-effective zeppelin microphone

• disturbed members of Austin’s very own Robot Group (http://www.robotgroup.net) bring the relentless sea shanty singing Babbling Head. Be very afraid.

• Rich LeGrand, from Charmed Labs, shows you how coerce a Nintendo Game Boy and some legos into a robot - one that can see images and can be controlled over the Internet

• jamie O’shea shows off creations including his Wamcam - a device that prints photos on your eyes instead of film

In addition, You’re invited to show off your dark, garage experiments (you know, the one that creeps out your neighbors and runs up the power bill) during “Open Dork,” a rapid-fire open mic.

DJ KDH spins between presentations.

Hope to see you there!

I migrated away from Drupal to Typo as my blogging platform.

I decided to migrate my blogging platform after I saw Katie using the admin interface.

Reasons

• Just for giggles, mostly.
• Drupal was fun, but it was way too bloated to allow me to do the kind of exploration I was hoping to accomplish with my blog.
• Also wanted to force myself to bone up on Ruby.
• There seems to be a more wide open opportunity to contribute to the project vs. Drupal which already has a pretty mature community.
• Wanted to see if switching mediums is a way to spark your creative productivity.

TODO (no implied priority on the list):

• Still need to import / migrate the comments.
• Migrate tags => keywords field properly
• Do redirects for named pages in Drupal
  • Lazytown
  • sxsw
  • contact
  • about
  • Other(?)
• <strike>Do feed redirects</strike> completed 2006.04.24
• GoogleAds on Lazy Town entries
• Scour drupal installation to find any additional migration points
• migrate drupal types besides “page” and “story”
• Create and Upload Guide to Drupal - Typo migration
• Better Theming
• <strike>Upload to Server</strike>
• Think about backup / maintenance plan
• Think about update schedule
• Implement Parent - Child features
• Implement Del.icio.us and flickr feed to article features
• Implement creativity framework features
• BUG: Switching textfilters on article does not apply textfilter on save unless you touch the body of the content
• BUG(?): Is there an issue with the inject method implemented by archive sidebar component
• Make sure post pings work correctly

I did some pretty hacky / kludgey things to get the old articles to migrate over. I’ll try to document them (see the above todo list for that action item), but my focus was to get this up and functional before Maker Faire so I could blog about that. Thus I have to make the following caveat:

Warning: Everything before this article (or for the entire blog, for that matter, has the potential for being massively screwed up and potentially massively screwing up your own computer / content / newsreader, etc. I’ll keep an eye on it. But please email me (david at davidnunez.com) if you notice massive problems not addressed in this post.

Updated: Tuesday; April 25, 2006 - 12:32 PM

Last year, I wrote The Unofficial Geek Guide to Getting Over Yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005.

This is the new version for 2006. It’s mostly the same. I’m kinda the same. My relentless friendliness is the same. And yes, I’ll have the damn, orange stickers again.

And this year I intend to pull out my PowerBook.

Bookmark this page, I intend to update it frequently over the next 7 days through sxswi.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to meeting you.

The Unofficial Geek Guide to SxSW-I 2006

So what is this guide all about?

Soon, you will be at SxSWi in Austin, Texas; I call Austin home and I welcome you with wide open arms. I hope you hug me back. (…)