(Reuters / CHINA DAILY)
It’s Chinese New Year! The Spring Festival, it’s the year of the dragon. It starts today, January 23rd and celebrations keep going until the Lantern Festival, 2 weeks from now! Here’s a great gallery of photos and here to check out, we like the glowy dragon, above!

So true.

Power tools to the people.

ONE of the interesting things you’re likely to discover if you visit Australia’s first Mini Maker Faire, a free event that will take place at Swinburne University of Technology’s Hawthorn campus on January 14, is that while most of us haven’t been looking, some highly unusual things have been going on in this city’s kitchens, garages and workshops.

At its most obvious, the event is a showcase for the extraordinary phenomenon of high-tech do-it-yourself/do-it-with-others enthusiasm that was tapped, if not triggered, by the launch of O’Reilly Media’s Make magazine (makezine.com) seven years ago.

For a small but growing number of participants in activities such as Melbourne’s ”hacker space”, it has turned the once-exclusively commercial world of manufacturing into an international democratic movement.

Ten Biggest Positive Africa Stories of 2011 @ The New Yorker via Tim…

African innovation was celebrated for a third year at Maker Faire Africa. Emeka Okafor, a Nigerian, once said that he couldn’t understand why, in the tech realm, so little interesting and creative activity seemed to be coming out of sub-Saharan Africa. Curious about what good ideas from Africa looked like, he helped found Maker Faire Africa, where inventors from across the continent gather to showcase their wares—this October in Cairo, in previous years in Nairobi and Accra. The result has been astounding: mobile apps, seed-planting devices, solar-powered computer kiosks made out of recycled oil drums, paraffin lamps, and other technologies that, importantly, address the immediate needs of Africans.

The maker movement continues to flourish.

ITP Winter Show 2011. If you’re in NYC, be there!

Make Tokyo Meeting 07 @ Dangerous Prototypes. Check out all the photos and posts! Ian writes -

This weekend was Make Tokyo Meeting 07, Tokyo’s Maker Faire. We were guests oftokyohackerspace. Today we’ll post some of our favorite projects from the Make Meeting. The projects were amazing! Later we’ll have a video and pictures of our trip to the Akihibara Electric Town market, and Sjaak’s visit to the weekly Tokyo hackerspace meeting.

28C3: 28th Chaos Communication Congress schedule posted!…

The 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) is a annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

For 28 years, the congress is organized by the community and appreciates all kinds of participation. You are encouraged to contribute by volunteering, setting up and attending hands-on events or presenting your own projects to fellow hackers.

Bay Area Science Festival 2011 | October 29th to November 6th, 2011 | Unleash Your Inner Scientist.

The Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) at the  University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is pleased to lead the inaugural Bay Area Science Festival. The 10 day festival, scheduled October 29th – November 6th, will provide a wide range of science & technology activities – lectures, debates, exhibitions, concerts, plays, workshops, etc. –at a variety of locations throughout the Bay Area.

Young people will understand that science is fun, exciting and important, encouraging them to pursue careers in science; parents will feel more confident about supporting their kids’ interests in science; teachers will have new resources to get students thinking about science outside of the classroom; and, policy-makers and corporate leaders will understand that the public demand for science-related resources is real…and requires investment and support.

This ambitious collaborative public education initiative brings together our leading academic, scientific, corporate, and non-profit institutions to showcase the region as an international leader in innovation. Based on similar festivals throughout the world, the 50+ festival events are expected to attract over 50,000 active participants, many of whom traditionally do not have access to quality scientific resources.

Women Entrepreneurs Festival 2012.

The goal of ITP’s Women Entrepreneurs Festival v.2 is to sow the seeds for a community of women entrepreneurs in NYC, to expose women who have not yet taken the entrepreneurial leap, the pre-entrepreneurs, to the women who have.

Dan writes in…

Hello Adafruit!

I am the founder of the new hackerspace in central New Jersey called IXR – Institute of Exploratory Research (www.ixrnj.org).  I am excited to report that we are having our Grand Opening celebration this Sunday, 10/16 2-6pm.

One thing we’re doing as part of the party is a contest for the best “geek-chic” fashion item.  So I came to Adafruit to order a prize for the contest.

I just ordered your RGB backlight negative LCD – an item that generated lots of ooohs and ahhhs from our group when it was first announced.  I was also considering the “Midnight Hacker” or an Arduino Uno, but I needed to keep the budget low.

We at IXR all love Adafruit and our members have ordered several items. Hopefully soon we will have enough budget to take advantage of the hackerspace discount and order en-masse.

If there is anyone who might be interested in popping in for the party, it is open to the public, and there’s more details here:
http://ixr.weebly.com/1/post/2011/10/grand-opening-1016-press-release.html

Thank you Adafruit for being awesome!

Amin writes in…

The maker movement and open source hardware are also gaining momentum on continental Europe, and this weekend there will be a makerfaire-like event in Berlin with a few Open hardware workshops: there will be the Milkymist + Arduino workshop you already blogged about, but also a Nanode workshop (that I’m taking organizing) and a Drawdio workshop. Would be great if you could help us promote them and spread the word. I pasted the relevant links at the end.

Thanks a lot!

http://makerplatz.net/
http://makerplatz.eventbrite.com/
http://nanode-berlin.eventbrite.com/
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2227293896/eorg

The Sketching in Hardware 2011 presentations are now available. This is one of the events were invited to in the past but scheduling never allowed us to go!

The sixth annual summit on the design and use of physical computing toolkits. Attendance by invitation only. Presentations by every attendee. Sketching is a three-day meeting to discuss tools for physical computing prototyping: how to make them, how to make them better, how to use them, and how to teach with them.

The theme for 2011 is Invention and Improvement. Benjamin Franklin clearly saw that the trajectory of technology was not just toward incremental solutions to known problems, but in creating opportunities that had not been imagined. He saw that inventions build on each other, and work together to spawn new ideas. This years’ meeting will look at how invention and improvement play off each other, where they conflict, and how electronics as a creative medium has progressed since last year.

Although there isn’t video for each talk, there are many presentations worth checking out that will still give you a good idea of what the talk(s) were about. The SparkFun “Where transparency ends” is really interesting and so is the one from Bildr – but they’re all worth downloading and reviewing!