If you've never been to Makerfaire, it's a rite of passage for geeks of all kinds. In fact, I'd recommend that everyone attend their nearest Mini-Makerfaire at least once because you'll see all manner of weird, wonderful, and inspiring things on display. I ran a table at the one in Silver Spring, Maryland back in 2013 with HacDC and had a ball. Anyway.
I had a chance to attend the original Makerfaire in the Bay Area a few weekends ago and, though it was a significant journey on BART and on a shuttle bus it was well worth it. There …
Before things get hectic again, here are the photographs I took at the USA Science and Engineering Festival a few weekends ago (which I'm still recovering from, incidentally).
The other day I'd gotten sufficiently comfortable with my cellphone (an HTC Hero) to take the next step and root it (which is to say, I used the z4root exploit to get admin privileges). I mentioned it in passing to Lyssa last night and she made an observation that caught me off guard: "If you had to jailbreak your phone," she said, "how can you call Android 'open'?"
How indeed.
Let's set up an example. The Android OS is based on the open source Linux kernel as well as a suite of applications and systemware different from those of your …
