do-it-yourself

Watching the makers make Maker Faire

SAN MATEO, Calif.--"They're putting Josh in the cage!"

It was early this afternoon, and a group of school kids were excitedly screaming those words over and over. And it was true. A kid called Josh was being put inside a cage that was part of a performance by a group called Arc Attack. Soon, the cage would be bombarded with electricity from two of Arc Attack's signing Tesla coils. No Joshes would be harmed in this experiment. But an awful lot of grinning would be done.

This is Maker Faire. Well, almost. The famous DIY festival begins in earnest tomorrow morning, and over the course of the weekend, in excess of 100,000 people may well get themselves to the San Mateo County Event Center here to see countless examples of do-it-yourself robotics; 3D printing; steampunk kinetic sculptures; and much, much more.

But today was setup day, the day the thousands of so-called "makers" arrive, drop their gear, and start building the projects they'll show the tens of thousands of visitors over the next two days. Being at Maker Faire on setup day is both a treat--it's always great to see the process behind something as cool as Maker Faire, and it's nice not to have to compete with 50,000 people to see something--and a curse: Only about half the projects are finished.

One thing that's definitely cool about being on hand for setup day is that each and every time you return to a specific spot, there's more there than there was the last time you went by. Even if that was just 30 minutes ago. A steady stream of trucks, vans, cars, and other conveyances arrive, and with them, the festival comes to life.

Maker Faire started here in 2006, and is now a worldwide phenomenon. From 20,000 visitors that first year to 80,000-plus last year, attendance figures are now expected to hit six figures. At the same time, the festival has planted its flag in other cities, such as Austin and New York. … Read more

More free Maker Faire tickets from CNET

Update, 3:29 p.m. PDT: All the Maker Faire tickets are gone.

If you missed your chance to win free Maker Faire tickets from CNET the other day, fret not. I have five more pairs just waiting to get you through the gates of the DIY paradise taking place this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.

All you have to do to win them is look at my Twitter account (I'm @greeterdan) and e-mail me the phrase I tweeted Wednesday using the hashtag "#makerfaire." If you're one of the first five people to send me the … Read more

Attention, readers: Send us your DIY goodness!

Here at Crave, we're giant fans of do-it-yourself projects, and we feature them a lot on these pages because we love the smell of solder and the look of grease stains (even if some of our significant others don't). We've seen some pretty awesome stuff made by regular people to fill needs other products don't--or just because making one's own wacky contraptions is plain fun (robot flower girl, we're talking about you).

We've covered DIY creations including a homemade Lamborghini, automated knock-detecting door lock, snow chopper made from junk, mind-controlled spybot, biometric bridal bouquet, … Read more

Does the Internet help aspiring rock stars?

There's an interesting spat going on between Tom Silverman, who founded hip-hop/dance label Tommy Boy Records and runs the New Music Seminar for new artists to learn about the music industry, and Jeff Price, the CEO of TuneCore, a service that helps musicians place their songs on iTunes and other digital-distribution outlets.

In a three-part interview with Musician Coaching, Silverman dismissed the idea that the Internet is helping new musicians break. For purposes of this argument, his definition of "breaking" is selling more than 10,000 copies of an album in the year of its release, … Read more

Crave: Maker Faire 2008

Electric giraffes? Got it! Playing with hot metal? Got that, too! Brian Tong checks out the Maker Faire in San Mateo, California for everything do-it-yourself.

Coghead flips to Adobe Flash and Amazon EC2

Coghead on Monday plans to launch a second version of its hosted application development platform, which the start-up has moved to Adobe Systems' Flex/Flash technology and Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure.

The company is one of several targeting what it calls "do-it-yourself developers" at small and midsize businesses.

Such developers are generally tech-savvy enough to write macros in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software or work with scripting languages, but they don't have the same level of training as a professional C++ programmer, for example. The company estimates that there are between 15 … Read more

The making of Maker Faire

AUSTIN, Texas--The most important thing right now is to make sure no one gets hit by flying watermelons.

Under usual circumstances, this might be an odd concern. But I'm here in the Texas capital for Maker Faire, and the three organizers--Dale Dougherty, Louise Glasgow and Sherry Huss--just want to be sure that there are no safety issues with the fruit-launching trebuchet that has been set up on the west side of the event.

I've been riding around with Glasgow, Maker Faire's event producer, for a little while, hoping to see what she encounters in the course of … Read more

Do-it-yourself flat-screen TV

Looking to impress your BFFs with a ginormous flat-panel TV, but not too keen on shelling out a few thousand bucks for the privilege?

You could go with the 42-inch plasma that Vizio is selling for under $1,000. Or you could take the do-it-yourself approach to a giant CRT, like this guy.

U.K.-based Pocket-lint dubs it the "First Irish Flat Screen TV," though the joke may be slightly lost on a U.S. audience since snarking about the Irish fell out of favor here more than half a century ago. But it seems any country … Read more