A must watch, inspirational talk Hack Your Life For Fun & Profit Dorkbot-SF At PariSoMa, San Francisco, CA with Mitch Altman – TV-B-Gone: From Thought to (Bizarre and Cool) Reality…

Like all projects, TV-B-Gone universal remote control started off as a thought. More of a fantasy, really. Yet one that Mitch somehow knew he could follow through on. In this talk Mitch will show how the notion of turning off TVs in public places ended up taking over his life, providing he and his friends a living, and creating a new meme around the world. Along the way he points out some of hows and whys, as well as some of the more interesting and stressful aspects of the process. Mitch hopes to show why taking risks can be way worthwhile.

Though most known for inventing the wildly popular TV-B-Gone, a keychain that makes it fun to turn off TVs in public places, Mitch Altman is an inventor with a reputation for creating intriguing devices that amaze and delight, such as the Brain Machine, Trippy RGB Waves, and the Mignonette Game. Mitch co-founded 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), and co-founded Noisebridge (a San Francisco hacker space). Mitch has written for MAKE Magazine and 2600 Journal, and for the last few years has traveled the world teaching people to solder and how to make cool things with microcontrollers. He is currently writing a book to teach total beginners how to make cool things with microcontrollers.

Mitch and Adafruit Industries teamed up and also created an open source hardware version of the TV-B-Gone, available in the Adafruit store.