Twin Cities Maker invites you to visit our booth at the Red Stag Supper Club Block Party, Saturday, Aug. 21, starting at 3 PM. We’ll have our ever popular life-sized Operation game on hand, and TC Maker members will be available to answer questions and talk shop.

The Red Stag Supper club is located at 509 1st Avenue NE in Minneapolis.

Hope to see you there!

If you have an interest in this (either in making projects, speculating wildly on the future of embedded internet, or just listening to us pontificate), stop by and join in!  We’ll probably be getting started at about the usual meeting time of 7pm.

Adam Wolf will be teaching “Bootstrapping your Arduino Abilities” on Thursday, August 26th, 6pm @ HackFactory. If you want to attend, please register via eventbrite http://tcmaker-arduino1.eventbrite.com/. Preregistration is required so we know the number of parts to order. Registration ends on August 18th, and is limited to 8 students.

An Arduino board/chip, and all materials are part of the class fee. We recommend that you have a computer or laptop that you can bring with to program as well.  If not we may have one to share, but it is recommended that you have your own.

http://tcmaker-welding-aug.eventbrite.com/

This month’s Hack Factory Cabaret will be on Tuesday, July 27th at 7pm. This is a series of quick 5 minute talks on various maker/hacker topics and will be FREE to all and FUN so bring your friends.

If you’d like to present a topic at this month’s talk, mail a brief synopsis to mpm at selenic.com.

Today I bring you a little virtual version of Independence Day!

First, I’ve made a high quality synthetic recording of John Phillips Sousa’s Stars and Strips Forever. This was recorded from a midi file and played back using the excellent midi input plugin in XMPlay. I’ve done a lot of work selecting high quality soundfonts and tweaking the real time DSP for this star quality performance. Click the picture below to access this MP3 file:

I think this sounds pretty realistic, but for comparison you can hear Sousa recordings from the real world at dws.org.

My other virtual goody for the day is to point you to the excellent Skyrocket screensaver from Really Slick Screensavers. This screensaver is simply outstanding, but may require a computer with a bit of graphics oomph to run with high quality settings.

From the website:

“The most full-blown fireworks screensaver ever. It has bright lights, smoke trails, clouds that are illuminated by the explosions, sound effects, and plenty of other eye candy. Keyboard commands allow you to launch various types of rockets, pause the movement of the fireworks, and control the camera with the mouse. OpenGL is used for the graphics and OpenAL is used for the sound.”

Click the image below to visit Really Slick Screensavers and grab the Skyrocket screensaver. The author has created a lot of other fantastic screensavers too, so check them out!

For a real virtual blast, try playing the midi file in a loop and running the screensaver at the same time! It’s an out of this world experience!

Today, Minnesota Public Radio News broadcast a show “DIY for Lifestyle and Livelihood” on their midmorning segment.

Guests were Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make: Magazine and author of “Make by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World,” and Eric Wilhelm, CEO of Instructables.com. The show considered common questions on what the DIY craze is all about.

Mark and Eric emphasized the importance of starting a DIY project without fear of making mistakes, since we tend to learn unexpected things by making mistakes and actually learn better by working through our mistakes.

The guests also discussed the rewards of doing things yourself, the challenges of including DIY activity in daily life, the  meaning of “hacking,” income possibilities, and reasons for the DIY movement.

During the show, TC Maker President Mike H. successfully called in and suggested the Hack Factory and TC Maker as a place where people can take DIY knowledge from the Internet into the community and real world personal experience.

At the time of this writing, the archived show can be accessed and heard on the Minnesota Public Radio website at:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/06/25/midmorning1/

This was a very good show on the topic. There’s no telling how long the show will remain posted, so I’d advise to listen as soon as possible!

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