Make Magazine and Craft Magazine present the 2nd annual Maker Faire Austin which takes place October 18 & 19 at the Travis County Exposition Center in Austin, TX.

Here’s are my photos from Maker Faire Austin 2007.

photos by Scott Beale

Violet Blue shot a great photo of a truck that was literally tagged with a name tag.

photo by Violet Blue

Our friends at breadpig have created an awesome set of LOLmagnetz, which you can use to create your own LOLspeak poetry on a variety of magnetic surfaces.

LOLMagnetz are now available through Think Geek and a portion of each sale is donated to the San Francisco SPCA to save and care for orphaned pets.

Warning, LOLmagnetz are not recommended for use with food.

photos by Scott Beale & Think Geek

Hooters or In-N-Out Burger, seems like it could be the starting point of a bizarre Choose Your Own Adventure game which takes place in Fisherman’s Wharf.

You are standing in front of a Hooters & In-N-Out Burger in Fisherman’s Wharf…

See Previously: In-N-Out Burger, A Fast Food Underdog With a Cult Following

photo by Scott Beale

Tiki Central is hosting Tiki Crawl 8, visiting ten fabulous Tiki Bars around the Bay Area from Thursday, October 9th through Sunday, October 12th.

Come join in the biggest Bay Area Tiki Bar Crawl yet! Four days! Ten Bars! Savor the world of tiki with visits to bars and restaurants both new and legendary all over the Bay Area. Celebrate the rich history of tiki in the Bay Area, and its lasting impact for over 70 years. Make your plans today to join in an exciting four day weekend of good friends, good drinks, and good tiki.

via Tiki Talk

Burning Man Decompression 2008 Heat The Street Faire, the annual post Burning Man celebration, takes place this Sunday, October 12th at Cafe Cocomo and on Indiana Street between Mariposa and 22nd in San Francisco.

guest post by mikl-em

In case you’ve missed it, Tina Fey has been appearing each week on Saturday Night Live as Sarah Palin. The first installment imagined a press conference with Hilary Clinton, the second parodied her funny-to-start-with interview with Katie Couric (including direct quotes better than the SNL writing staff could have created), and this week the VP debates were naturally the topic.

Word is there will be a new Fey-as-Palin sketch to kick off the show each week until the election. This can only get funnier.

Katie Couric interview:

Here’s the Palin-Hilary sketch that kicked this series off:

See Previously:

- Head of Skate, An Alaskan Hockey Mom Becomes Vice President

- Vice Presidential Debate At The Hat Factory

guest post by mikl-em

Deep in Hulu.com’s site, I recently found this pretty amazing retrospective of interviews with David Letterman produced by NBC after he switched networks to CBS. The air date for this special listed on Hulu (May 1978) is wrong because there’s footage of him from much later than that–including a Tom Brokaw interview with him on the occasion of his last week at NBC in 1993. Footage includes interviews prior to him joining NBC when he was doing standup in LA, interviews by Jane Pauley and Tom Snyder, (with Snyder smoking a cigarette, as usual) and even a clip of Dave doing the weather back in Indianapolis.

The special is an hour long, and well worth it, to get a very different perspective on the current grand old man of late night TV.

As a bonus, here’s Dave in a rare TV acting role on Mork & Mindy. With Morgan Fairchild also on as a guest, Dave is doing a thinly veiled parody of Werner Erhard the founder of Scientology-related 70’s self-help seminars EST.

Viewing Note: See Jonathan Davies’ write-up on how to view Hulu videos outside the US using Hotspot Shield.

Improv Everywhere was in town today to conduct their MP3 Experiment San Francisco in Dolores Park. The turn out was great, with a sea of people wearing red, blue, green and yellow shirts, equipped with umbrellas and balloons, all simultaneously following instructions from a MP3 while wearing headphones.

IE founder Charlie Todd invited me to come out as part of his crew to shoot photos and help document the event. He will be posting the video from San Francisco and other cities from their tour within the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

photo gallery: Improv Everywhere MP3 Experiment San Francisco

photos & video by Scott Beale

Here’s clip from the BBC featuring The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performing the Theme From Shaft by Isaac Hayes live at the Cambridge Folk Festival 2007.

via Neatorama

Flickr has upgraded their “Explore” feature with a panda that vomits rainbows.

more info: “Of Pandas and Rainbows” & “The Secrets of Explore”

via Daring Fireball

Dan Aykroyd explains the mystery behind Crystal Head Vodka which is quadruple distilled using Newfoundland water and triple filtered through Herkimer diamonds.

Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today. Their workmanship is perfect: they contain no tool marks and have been cut against the natural axis of the crystal, defying the laws of physics. Some say they are artifacts from the lost civilization of Atlantis, some say they date back to the Mayans, still others say they were created by a higher intelligence.

Brought together, the Crystal Heads are said to contain vast knowledge and enlightenment capable of unlocking our most enigmatic ancient mysteries. Alone, each is believed to house radiant psychic energy, which has magical powers and healing properties

via John Hodgman

Christine Songco, a technical project manager at Google, invited me to visit Google’s San Francisco office today which opened just over year ago and is located on The Embarcadero with a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay. Several people who work out of that office, including some old friends, joined us for lunch, which of course at Google is always a great experience.

Some of the projects that operate out of Google San Francisco are Google Code, Google App Engine and Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company.

As with Google’s main headquarters in Mountain View, photography is restricted for the most part, but I was able to take a few photos in the lobby and of Google’s slide between floors (in fact I came home with a souvenir scraped elbow from the slide).

See Previously: Googleplex, Headquarters of Google

photos by Scott Beale

guest post by Dave Schumaker

This weekend kicks off a rather obscure and esoteric anniversary celebration on the campus of MIT, honoring 50 years of the Smoot. Some of you might ask, what exactly is a Smoot?

On a cold October night in 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity on the campus of MIT decided to welcome their shortest new pledge by using him to measure the entire length of the Harvard Bridge, spanning the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Oliver Smoot was the unfortunate choice for this project.

A few hours later, and after having to get up and lay down 365 times, they finally determined the length of the bridge (and coined a new unit in the process): 364.4 smoots plus or minus an ear. And thus, the smoot was engrained into the lexicon of nerds everywhere. Interestingly enough, Oliver Smoot would eventually go on to become the former chairman of American National Standards Institute and former president of the International Organization for Standardization.

Google’s unit converter even recognizes this non-standard unit (1 smoot = 67 inches). The distance from San Francisco to Boston is over 2.9 million smoots (3,099 miles).

via Physorg and MIT

photo via MIT Museum

PleaseDressMe recently launched a new Shirt of The Day contest where each day they feature a new t-shirt on their website as well as give one away.

Today’s featured shirt is “Self Maintenance” by Glennz.

See Previously: PleaseDressMe, A T-Shirt Search Engine

illustration by Glenn Jones

Tap’dNY takes NYC’s legendary tap water, purifies it and then bottles it for sale.

Tap’dNY is a New York City bottled water company with a local twist and knack for honesty. We don’t travel the world from Fiji to France seeking water or offer the usual bottled water gimmicks. We work with NYC’s public water system to source the world’s best tasting tap water, purify it through reverse osmosis and bottle it locally, leaving out ludicrous transportation miles.

We offer an honest and local alternative to thirsty New Yorkers, giving them a smarter choice: to drink their own (award winning) water.

Thanks to Mara for the tip!

photo by Tap’dNY

Our friends at The Hat Factory invited a bunch of us over to watch the Vice Presidential Debate tonight in a snark infested environment where a few people participated a challenging game of Palin Bingo.

These photos were taken with my new Panasonic DMC-LX3.

photos by Scott Beale

The Lil’ O’Reilly Factor, a brilliant spoof of Bill O’Reilly by very talented little guy.

See Previously: Bill O’Reilly Freaks Out, Stephen Cobert Responds + Dance Remix

via Urlesque

Google brought several actors together to make a public service announcement video encouraging young Americans to register to vote while there’s still time.

John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), lead singer of the Sex Pistols and later on Public Image Ltd. (PIL), has made his first ever television commercial, an ad for Country Life butter, created by Grey London.

See Previously: Hovis Bread, 122 Years In 122 Seconds

via AdFreak