dalepd | Dale Dougherty

Enthusiast

Limor Fried leads off at Open Source Hardware Summit

Limor talks about her own development of electronics projects, starting with MP3 players and a cellphone jammer at MIT. Then she reverse engineered a synthesizer. She wanted to share the work so that "others didn't have to go through the same frustrating process to build something that had already been built."

One reason for doing Open Source Hardware is to share the work you've done with others. Then there are haters, who are frustrating to deal with. Being good at Open Source hardware and being good at business are two different things. Turn your fear of getting ripped off into a sense of pride that your design was chosen to be ripped off. Biggest reason for doing open source software is the awesome community. We are giving to the community. We are letting go of our Art so that it can grow up. What we make will outlast us. She does open source hardware to make herself a better engineer. #openhwsummit

Photo

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Tree Damage at NY Hall of Science

I visited the NY Hall of Science today and saw the damage from last Thursday's freak storm.   I could not believe how many trees were down.   One pine tree, photographed below, was snapped in half.  The storm toppled several trees, and they rested on their sides, roots up.  

(download)

I guess we're lucky that the high winds came through last week, giving crews more time for clean up before World Maker Faire opens.  Workers had already cleaned up quite a bit from the storm so I wasn't seeing all the damage.    

I hope Mother Nature got that bit of nastiness out of her system so we can expect good weather for the big weekend ahead. 

 

NYTimes: Sweating Your Way to Success

From The New York Times:

Sweating Your Way to Success

A new book says that those who excel at anything do so by determined effort rather than innate skill.

http://nyti.ms/a2UoFy

Success in most arenas of life is thus not a reflection of innate skill but rather devoted effort. And Syed demonstrates why it is not just effort, but purposeful effort that is key - if you're going to get better at chunking, you can't just go through the motions and punch time on the clock. 

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