Kit Rex: a cheap, cardboard dinosaur costume kit

Kids and adults love Kit Rex -- a dinosaur costume made out of cardboard. The makers of the costume say it started as a school project which generated lots of interest.

It was one of the most popular booths in the World Maker Faire and you'll see why in this video (below). Now it's got its own Kickstarter campaign.

‪#‎WMF15‬ ‪#‎makerfaire‬

SeeMore: a kinetic sculpture that's also a cluster computer

SeeMore is more than just a kinetic sculpture. Each "leaf" here is a  Raspberry Pi computer node. A total of 255 computers can perform parallel computations. In this video, SeeMore is doing a map reduce search. 

As work is distributed to a leaf, it folds out. As it completes its computation, it folds back in. The farther away it folds out, the more intense the processing it's doing. The search results are read out of a monitor beside the sculpture (not shown in this video). 

It's mesmerizing to watch and listen to, as the nodes undulate in and out.

What I learned at the World Maker Faire 2015

I went to the World Maker Faire 2015 at the Hall of Science in Queens, New York. For two days, I drank in an intoxicating mix of 3D printers, robots, drones, quirky musical instruments, and other inventions. The Maker Faire brands itself as "The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth" -- a reference to PT Barnum's circus tagline. But beyond all these, one of the most important lessons I picked up was over late lunch in one of the show and tell tents where David Lang, co-inventor of OpenROV, gave a talk about how to start making. The lesson? Don't let your lack of knowledge and skills stop you -- just start making something.

David was promoting his book, Zero to Maker: Learn (Just Enough) to Make (Just About) Anything. The title piqued my curiosity, because I faced the same dilemma as David did -- he jumped into the OpenROV project (mission: build a robotic submarine) without possessing any of the skills needed to build a submarine.

The OpenROV v.2.8: A Thing of Beauty, ain't it?

So I sat at a nearby table and listened to David while devouring my sandwich. As I listened, I found out that David was actually in a worst starting point than me. He talked about having not built anything, not even in school. Compared to him, I had enjoyed my classes in woodworking, where I built a folding chair with the help of my father, created my own step-down transformer by soldering various parts together, and various other crafts whose skills I would sometimes put to use doing household repairs.

Listening to David made me realize that I had no excuse for procrastinating. Here was a man who had zero skills by his own admission, driven only by his desire to learn. And he did learn and even wrote a book about it. I liked the talk so much that I bought his book and asked him to sign it. He asked me whether I had a project in mind and I answered sheepishly that I've only been tinkering with Arduino stuff and vaguely told him about hoping to build a robot and a synthesizer.

Then he asked me if this was my first Faire. I told him, this was my second -- the first having been the Silver Spring Maker Faire, which happened only a week ago at Maryland. He said, that's good, and to keep on going to maker faires, particularly the Bay Area Maker Faire. It's even much bigger than this World Maker Faire, he said. I made a mental note to look it up.

Talking to David and then reading his book Zero to Maker got me excited to start doing things again. It revived my belief in that adage, learning by doing.

It had been years since I'd soldered anything. I would occasionally dust off my Arduino Uno and play around with it using a breadboard. I had a Blinky POV kit my wife gave me for Christmas two and a half years ago that remained unsoldered in its tin can. There was a 3-month old Tiny Tesla kit still in its original box. And I had a couple of unassembled components to build an Arduino robot and audio synthesizer.

That neglected kit, waiting to be soldered.

At the World Maker Faire, I lined up at the Google Learn to Solder booth and confirmed that I was too rusty for this. So I resolved that I would practice again. I bought a cheap soldering iron from eBay, a desolderer from Micro Center, and used both to take apart a discarded mouse which I then reassembled.

The Google solder badge features a blinking RGB LED at the tail of a rocket.

What I found out from desoldering and re-soldering the tiny components of the mouse was that my $10 eBay soldering iron wouldn't do. It's point was too big for small parts. There was obviously a loose contact inside (it took ages before it would melt the solder) and eventually it just broke apart.

I ordered a new soldering iron from Amazon, this time with different points which cost only $17. When it arrived, I started working on the Blinky POV kit and completed it in less than an hour. Most of the soldered points were rough. But I was happy.

Done!

I'm about to finish David's book and I've taken his other important advice -- visit the nearest maker space and learn how to use the machines available in it. It so happens that I found a Fab Lab at a nearby community college, so I signed up for a class ($99) which resulted in a small wooden keychain whose design was engraved by a laser cutter in the shop.

Going through that class has given me access to the Fab Lab ($5 per visit). They have several gadgets that I could use: 3D printers, a couple of laser cutters, a vinyl cutter, and a big shopbot (aka a CNC machine, which will take a separate lessons before I can use it).

So, thanks, David. It was a chance encounter, and you will probably not really remember it, but it's something that's inspired me to start making stuff again.

Convert your scanned documents to text files with free Google Drive OCR

Google Drive offers a free Optical Character Recognition service. If you have scanned documents that you've always wanted to convert into searchable text files, try this.

Here is what Google says in its help page:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) lets you convert images with text into text documents using automated computer algorithms. Images can be processed individually (.jpg, .png, and .gif files) or in multi-page PDF documents (.pdf). These are some of the types of files suitable for OCR:

• Image or PDF files obtained using flatbed scanners
• Photos taken with digital cameras or mobile phones

To access this service, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Google Drive.
2. Upload your scanned image or PDF.
3. When the file is done uploading, right-click on its icon and choose Open with... > Google Docs.
4. Wait a few seconds (longer, if you have a bigger document) as Google Drive processes the file. Your document will open in Google Docs with the converted text inside.

Note: There are limits, so please read the Google Drive OCS help page.

The Hunter and The Outfit (comicbook adaptations of Richard Stark's Parker novels)

This comicbook series is a superb adaptation of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). Tightly written, cleverly plotted, and witty in unexpected places, the novels' protagonist is Robert Parker, a thief with a surprisingly strict and simple sense of moral code.

In The Hunter Parker returns from a long hiatus to go after Resnick, a former heist partner who betrayed Parker and left him for dead. Parker simply wants his money back, but things escalate quickly when Resnick asks for protection from a criminal syndicate known as The Outfit. So Parker shifts his sights to get his money back from The Outfit, who somehow can't believe that Parker is crazy enough to go all the way to the top just just to recover, get this, the exact amount of money that Resnick stole. But Parker is a sociopath, and it is often said that many sociopaths are geniuses.

Parker executes a plan that, in the end, gets him back his money. How he does this is the highlight of the story, so I will not spoil your reading pleasure.

What is interesting about Parker's character is the turmoil of internal conflict operating within his psyche, which he all somehow controls with internal strength. Parker's world is ruled by fairness: you get what you deserve. If you take something from me unfairly, I will take it back from you, no more, no less. Parker will not hesitate to use force on violent adversaries but he will not tolerate harming people not involved in the conflict.

The Hunter inspired three movies Point Blank (starring Lee Marvin), Payback (Mel Gibson), and Parker (Jason Statham). Darwin Cooke's minimalist drawings and sparse coloring evoke the original milieu in which the Parker novels happened.

The benefits of Scrum come naturally

The benefits of Scrum come naturally if you keep the practices and understand the Agile principles behind them. 

The ceremonies and artifacts performed each sprint, combined with regular inspection, adaptation, and transparency, motivate the Team to get into "The Flow". In turn, "The Flow" allows the Team to surmount any obstacle, getting better and better at each iteration.

As long as we learn and grow, the team enjoys what it does. When the team enjoys what it does, it delivers an enjoyable product. The end of each sprint makes the Team look forward to the next sprint. We go home highly satisfied.

See also: Shu ha ri.

How to learn scrum more effectively - shu ha ri

When I was trying to learn tennis, my coach taught me to first focus on my form before even trying to hit the ball. 

"Just go through the motions and don't worry about returning the ball," he would say. 

Then he'd lob a ball at me and I felt silly swinging my racket, missing the ball by a foot or more. I had lots of questions, but it was more important to practice the sidestep and the swing, he said.

Learning Scrum is much the same thing. First you struggle with the rules. You just go through the motions and feel silly. But the books said to do this and not that. Why is that? There is much questioning and helplessness at this stage.

Part of the difficulty of my first Scrum Team's transition was that I was coming from 15 years of project management tradition. We had doubt, lacked confidence, and had questions like:

• On time boxing. What do you mean no deadline extension? What happens if we don't finish things?
• On the Product Owner (PO) making the product decisions and priorities. What happened to the Project Manager (PM)? Don't developers have a say on this? What if the PO is clueless on technology?
• On testing: My goal is to become a programmer so why should I do my own testing? Testing should be done by someone else because I know my program too well.

Many of these questions turned out to be misconceptions carried over from a PMBOK tradition. 

Here are two important lessons I learned during this critical transition.

1. You need a Scrum/Agile coach. Just like a basketball team needs a good coach, your Scrum team needs a good coach to guide you when you're groping blindly in the dark, to cheer you up when your team is feeling helpless, and to challenge you to perform more when you start to get bored.
2. Remember the principle of shu ha ri. 

• Shu - trust and follow the rules. Achieve mastery by focusing on just one way of doing things.
• Ha - break the rules. Branch out and learn from other masters. Experiment.
• Ri - be the rules. Adapt Scrum according to your own needs.

Looking back at my learning process, I realized shu ha ri was happening. 

Chapter Shu. At the start, we were just going through the motions, like renaming our feature list to "product backlog," tracking burndown charts --  without really understanding why. We were trying to approach Scrum from the wrong perspective of PMBOK. 

Lots of questions came out of this plodding along and I felt I needed to understand more. I read up on Scrum. Discussed with the team, felt we grew a little, but it still felt wanting. Which brings me to...

Chapter Ha. Feeling helpless, I enrolled in a Scrum Alliance course conducted by Bas Vodde. I must have had lightbulbs in my head popping every five minutes in that course. Bas's lessons started linked back Scrum and Agile to lean principles and knowledge management -- a domain I knew well as a management practitioner. 

Bas rekindled in me the meaning of the Agile manifesto and the values that drew me to Scrum in the first place. I was reborn and ready to impart what I learned. And I had lots of practice, working with private and government Scrum teams.

Chapter Ri. What I love about teaching is that I get tons of questions that help me sharpen my knowledge. I enjoy answering the usual ones, but I look out for the surprise questions, the challenging ones like: what do we do if we discover a new requirement in the middle of the sprint? Is it possible to do a Scrum with outsourced team members? Do we have to do the scrum on a daily basis? Can we do the daily scrum via Skype?

As I worked with various teams, my understanding and confidence grew deeper. I evolved a style that could switch depending on the team. 

• I could be a hardliner, pulling rank and experience for teams that are just starting up. 
• I could switch to a nurturing coach that allows the team to make its own decisions. My role here is to just give my observations and suggestions and let the team form its own solutions, cautioning them about risks and nudging them towards the right direction when they need it.

"Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." 

-- Ch'uan Teng Lu, The Way of Zen

See also: The benefits of Scrum come naturally