Squid Labs makes cool stuff, including electronic rope with sensors woven into the braid so the tension can be measured; if the rope has gone slack, has been cut or is abrading, it can let you know. [Possible application: Hang-proof nooses. Great for us anti-capital-punishment types.] Also, they’re working on a lens molding process that creates eyeglass lenses in 5-10 minutes from a single mold surface.

Eric Wilhelm talks about zeroprestige.org and thinkcycle.org — the first is for people to post their individual ideas about kitesurfing, the second is for communities to develop ideas.

They show a bolo electricity generator — a weight on a string that you swing around. It’s like one of those hand-cranked radios or flashlights except the motion is much more natural and, they say, you generate about 5x the amount of electricity.

They want to create an open source docmentation system that breaks tasks down into modules. That by itself isn’t new, they say. What’s new is that the threshhold is being lowered for building stuff. E.g., Z corp‘s 3D printer and VersaLaser’s laser cutter. Plus, the Web has made it easy to get whatever parts you need.

Eric’ says: “The lower threshold for documentation and colalboration plus lower threshold for making things yields custom, local solutions.”

So they’ve created Instructables. You upload photos of your project, and then it makes it easy for you annotate them and create a step-by-step guide. It does some very cool stuff like associate multiple photos with each step — take a look.

What are they going to do as people post instructions for pornographic or illegal projects? Right now there’s only a review flag. They’re waiting to see what problems arise first. (Smart move.)

Colin Bulthaup then talks about distributed sensor networks that have an awareness of their location. E.g., Flocks of unmanned aerial vehicles that avoid one another or “reusable fireworks”: a swarm of tiny UAVs with lasers that form formations. Squid has gotten good at building tiny, location-aware sensors, he says.

One app: A tablet knows where you’re looking and can augment reality. E.g., in a car showroom, whatever part of a car you look at shows you more info. Colin shows a demo of a tablet that pretends the Earth is transparent, showing you what city is on the surface in the direction you’re pointing. They want to shrink it and put it into cellphones so as you look around you can see comments people have left “on” those locations. Or, give it to civil engineers so they can see where the pipes are before they start building.

Totally cool. And Squid Labs is only 6 people.

[Technorati tags: foo05 SquidLabs gis]

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Yes, foo is heavily male. On the other hand, the women here are so cool.

FWIW, there is going to be a session on the homogeneity of tech.

Om Malik, reporting on people pissed at not being invited, says that a bar camp is being planned as a more open version. Sounds like fun. (Tim O’Reilly agrees.) But how about a FooHer — or BarHim :) — camp? Now that sounds like fun. [Tags: foo05]

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After the big meeting where we filled up the 8′ x 4′ board with session topics, we got to hang out, talk, drink, play, retreat into the world of email, etc. It’s quite a social group.

I got to spend a long time talking with Paul Graham; we both used to work for Interleaf and have kept in touch intermittently through email, but I think we haven’t actually seen each other in many years — we couldn’t figure it out. Paul in person is as brilliant and eclectic as his essays. This summer he’s brought together and funded young coders who have interesting business ideas. One of the projects, Reddit, is a social news aggregation site — there’s a better explanation here — that helps with the fact (as Paul contended last night) that only maybe 30% of what what we read about what’s new comes from traditional news sources. Reddit is compact and bottom up, two big pluses. Very interesting site.

BTW, Aaron Swartz, who’s here, is another of Paul’s summer fundees. He’s posted a job offering notice on his blog. (He’s also got some great posts up, as usual.)

Also BTW, I drove up with Susan Crawford, another ridiculously multi-talented person for whom I have fathomless respect. We decided to combine our session ideas and lead a discussion on “How Fucked Are We?” about how the battle for Net freedom is going (my view: badly) and what we can do about it (e.g., Susan suggests a World Net Day on the model of Earth Day). (Note: The scatological title is a sign of my despair.)

I wandered around a bit, watching out for errant Segways and home-brew segways, pausing for a bit at a home-made still (no samples were ready yet), and then went into the tech room where people were organizing a game of Werewolf, which I had never played for. Then, at 1am (= 4am east coast time) I crawled into my tent at the edge of the O’Reilly lawn and actually fell asleep. [Technorati tags: foo05]

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Andy Carvin has posted a podcast of the Stones rehearsing before their Boston date, recorded in his living room a mile away:

Technically, you might be able to argue that this is the very first bootleg of the Stones’ 2005 World Tour, but they way I look at it, I see it like this: if I can sit in my apartment and have the Rolling Stones intrude on my personal space, I should be able to record a podcast of it.

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The opening meeting of Foo is the only time we get together in a single room. After going through the rules, Tim has each of the 200+ of us stand up, say our name, our affiliation and three words to describe what we’re doing. Here are just a few of the three-word-phrases that struck me as interesting. (I’ve made no attempt to be representative):

Apple Kool-Aid Drinker
Social event calendaring
My VC’s heartburn
Calendars abusing javascript
Hacking reality
From an old media company person: Old media’s fucked
From a big company: Big companies suck
Making robotic porn
Better futures now
Early-investor VC: Revenue is destruction
Foo groupie. Foopie?
Technologies of cooperation
Avoiding technology policy
Internet crack dealer
Bytes against Bush
Activisim, metadata, diamond-polishing
Writer, coder, lover
Remembering together
Embedding Firefox: Hard
Please hire me
Routing around evil
I hate Javascript
Today’s my birthday
Autonomous electronic musicians
Massively collaborative gameplay
Is college necessary?

Maybe my favorite: Non-scalable introduction ceremonies (Mine: “Writing about taxonomy.”) [Technorati tags: foo05]

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I’m at foo camp, north of SF. It’s O’Reilly’s get together for geeks (and also some people like me). No time to blog…too busy foo-ing…

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Rob de Jonge is blogging about moving to Asia from Amsterdam because he fell in love with Asia. Pretty good reason to move somewhere, if you can.

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Dan Bricklin points out:

With the rush to podcasting by just about every “content” provider, we’re now seeing “journalists” who are “professionals” in one medium (usually print reporters or bloggers) trying to publish in another (audio) and they often sound like total newbies.

He wonders if this will help give them a sense of the difficulties and joys of being an amateur. Lots of interesting reflections… [Tags: podcasting DanBricklin]

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The idea is that on August 31, everyone who signs up will recommend 5 new blogs, preferably from a different culture or at least a different point of view, or at least using different fonts… [Tag: blogday]

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The vigil in Brookline went better than I’d expected. 75-100 people showed up, mailny baby boomers and their parents. We stood at the intersection of two of the major streets, held signs and candles, and chatted with our neighbors. Yeah, I know it was supposed to be a silent vigil, but talking seemed more useful.

One of the protestors said, “It just shows that one person really can make a difference.” Well, yeah. But two can’t: Cindy Sheehan focused our attention, and the second gold star mom who demands an audience with Bush will not have the same effect. So, I think the mathematical formulation is:

One person can make a difference.

Two people can’t.

Twenty million can. [Tags: CindySheehan iraq]

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