This Week in Making: Cats, Lasers, and Makers Take Over the White House

Maker News
This Week in Making: Cats, Lasers, and Makers Take Over the White House
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When Nvidia offered to let us tinker with their Jetson TX-1 Board, we were excited for the opportunity. Not every board gives us the power to tinker with AI coding, neural networking, and deep learning. In fact, most boards don’t. So what do we do with this mini supercomputer? We make a cat toy. You’ll thank us when the robots take over and all they want to do is open cat cafes. The future is going to be adorable. Destroy all humans? Pfft.

Last weekend the White House hosted a gathering of makerspace organizers to meet with representatives from different government programs and (of course) to meet with each other. There were a lot of good talks, including the one above from Kari Love, and lots of breakout sessions for people to discuss all things makerspace: From big, hairy issues like creating more inclusivity down to the small brass tacks issues that just come with running any business. Well, Makers aren’t the type to rest on their laurels or the ones to shirk collaboration, so this past week has seen A TON of chatter between these attendees as they attempt to pin down and define the issues their makerspaces face and organize with each other for future collaboration. You can see a good chunk of that chatter on their Facebook group page, but it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by all the different threads emerging from this one event. For a concise rundown of the events at the White House and what the 5 main takeaways were please read Annette Wong’s Medium article on the event.

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Linux has officially existed for 25 years as of this week. Learn a bit more about its history and 25 interesting facts about the language.

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This weekend is Dragon Con. By the time this post is live, there will undoubtedly be a dozen or more galleries and blog posts featuring this year’s most interesting cosplays. However, this was the article that ended up getting shared around the office as we pined about not being able to go.

A jet engine powered merry go round sure seems like an idea.

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In Issue 52 of Make:, we published a Monster-B-Gone project for safely detecting nearby monsters that might be creeping in the shadows. Jonathan Lackman shared his completed project with us (along with some improvements that he and his granddaughter thought up).

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Does the world need more houses encased in pink crochet? Yes. Clearly. That was a rhetorical question.

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Make something you can eat! Our latest issue of Make: is all about hacking your food. Laser cut nori for sushi, homemade cheese, food trucks… okay, you can’t eat a food truck, but you get the idea.

I don’t always follow sign painters on Instagram, but when they do it’s because I’m scheduling a blog post for next week and a link in the article leads me to someone clearly brilliant at it like Greg Gannon. (Consider this a little tease: I bet you can guess what we have lined up…)

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A typical day for Lisa includes: getting up to see the sunrise, bicycling, interning at Make:, reading and writing short stories, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts for hours while working on projects or chores.

View more articles by Lisa Martin

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