Category Archives: Field Trips

Bakery Machinery is Awesome

Le Boulanger

Specialized machinery is fascinating, but you don’t often get to see it. Our local bakery, Le Boulanger (at their headquarters on Mathilda in Sunnyvale) provides windows from their seating area into the production area. It is absolutely wonderful to sit and watch the dough poured out of the giant mixer. It heads into a hopper which cuts it into pieces which get spun into balls, which go through the rising machine and roll out down the conveyor belt. Sourdough rounds are on the way! And that’s just one of the processes you can watch. Sometimes you’ll see bagels, sometimes pastries, sometimes breadsticks… It’s definitely worth a visit, and even more fun than the Krispy Kreme machine which only does one thing. And they have free (albeit slow) wi-fi!

Le Boulanger

Maker Faire Update

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We’re having a great time at Maker Faire! We’ve been pretty darned swamped, but did have a little time to get a few pictures. Some of them are in my flickr set, like the one above from early this morning at our display area. We were lucky to have John Maushammer, the maker of the Pong Watch, hang out with us.

One highlight of the day was when the editor of Make: Japan dropped by and brought us a copy with the CandyFab article in it! We also got copies of the brand new Maker’s notebook to play with. There are lots of Maker Faire pictures up on flickr now– check ’em out!.

Electronics Flea Market 2008 Season Opener

The Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market

Saturday was the first Electronics Flea Market for 2008. We went, a little late as usual, but early for us. When we got our coffee and donuts at 8:30, there were already some vendors packing up; they had been there for hours and sold enough to call it a day. The weather was beautiful, and we all got sunburned, but we also took home a nice haul of goodies.

Above: the pretty stuff put in a cigar box for the benefit of photographers like me.

Continue reading Electronics Flea Market 2008 Season Opener

Sorry, we’re open!

Sorry, We're Open

We used to live in Austin, Texas, and welcomed the Austin Maker Faire this past October as an excuse to go back and visit. We had a great time at the fair, where our high tech pumpkins (especially the snapping pumpkins) garnered several editor’s choice ribbons.

It was really fun to be back in Austin and remember what we loved so much. One of the things we really miss is the food. I took the picture above of the beautiful neon sign at Magnolia, one of the best of restaurants. Not only do they serve really good food, but they’re open 24/8. The distinct lack of independent 24 hour restaurants in silicon valley is somewhat depressing, but we’re glad to see that the culture is still thriving in Austin, where Magnolia has opened a second branch.

Of course, we inevitably also were reminded of what we don’t love so much. You know how they say that everything is bigger in Texas? Well, it’s true about the bugs.

Cars with Chrome

Cars at the holiday parade

Although I do love my Prius, at heart I’m a fan of old cars. Real cars, not the indistinguishable bubbles they make now. I’m not an expert, and I haven’t even learned to drive a stick (yet– that day will come). But I do know what I like, and as far as I’m concerned, the more chrome, the better. Bold grilles. Bright flashy emblems. Lots of curves. Really curvy curves. And hood ornaments. Very elaborate hood ornaments.

After going to a neighborhood holiday parade (with lots of cars!) I realized that my photo collection is getting ridiculously large, so I finally put my pretty car pictures all in one spot. You can check them out in this flickr set. Don’t worry, I’ll still keep the art cars in their own set.

For more vintage car fun, my favorite places to look are the Hemmings blog and its associated flickr group, Hemmings Nation; Telstar’s car photos on flickr; and the Chrome, Smoke and Fire flickr group which has, among others, Coop’s car photos. And Coop really knows how to look at a car. He knows how to look at girls, too, so use caution before clicking over to his photostream (definitely NSFW). I know there’s a group for every possible car specialization out there, which makes me all the more glad for sites like Hemmings and Chrome, Smoke & Fire that are more general and inclusive for folks like me who enjoy whatever shiny things come their way.

The Ducklings go to the Pond

Wake up

While staying in Sydney last month, I spent a lot of time at the botanical gardens, and, since it was spring, there were ducklings. I watched one family go from sleeping under the tree to swimming in the pond one morning, and I took a lot of pictures.

What follows after the jump is an annotated photo essay in which one duckling is forced to answer the question, “If your siblings all jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?”
Continue reading The Ducklings go to the Pond

Just in time for halloween: Bats

bats hanging like fruit

The animals that everyone hears about from Australia are things like koalas, wallabies and platypuses. But the real stars, as far as I’m concerned, are the bats. We saw a few bats in the zoos we went to, including ghost bats and flying foxes. But just walking along in the afternoon in the botanical gardens in Sydney, we looked up and happened to notice that what was hanging from the trees wasn’t leaves or fruit – it was bats. Hundreds of flying foxes. They chattered at each other and flew from one roost to another. While the echidnas were awfully cute bumbling along at the zoo, and the cockatoos were fun to watch at the park, it was the bats in the garden that stole the show.

CandyFab @ Dorkbot: 8/15/07 @ TechShop

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On Wednesday, August 15 we’ll be giving a presentation about CandyFab at a meeting of Dorkbot SF, our local spinoff of
Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot chapters organize monthly talks and events for artists, scientists, and engineers centered around the theme of “the creative use of electricity.”

The meeting will be held at 7:30 PM at TechShop, a San Francisco Bay Area “open-access public workshop,” located just off of 101 in Menlo Park, where you can go use a wide range of tools and machines to make things. We’ll be bringing the CandyFab machine along, and– if everything goes right– demonstrating its use. So if you’re in the SF bay area, this is a great chance to come and take a close look at the CandyFab 4000, smell the caramel, and ask questions. Besides our talk and demo, there will be a couple of shorter presentations on other dorkbot-ish topics, and an introduction to TechShop. (Tours of Techshop will be available at the end of the meeting as well.)

Everyone is welcome to come to the meeting; there is a $5 suggested donation for the venue at the door.

[Link] See you there!

UPDATE: The event was great! (Read more here.)

Webcast links

We got all packed up and headed out to the Exploratorium today for the Maker Webcast about 3D Fabrication in sugar. Thanks to Dale Dougherty from Make Magazine for inviting us – we had a great time! In case you missed it, here are the links to the archived show on the Exploratorium website: mp4, real player, windows media. (If in doubt, try the mp4 version!)