Do Something Constructive Tomorrow

This Saturday is a great day to change the world. It’s Earth Day. There’s a National March for Science where millions will demand evidence-based change. We’re doing our own thing. We’re leading a World Create Day, where hackers gather ’round the soldering iron and find solutions to problems we all face.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting Hackaday readers to organize meetups in their hometowns, encouraging them to get a few people over, and sending them a bit of neat Hackaday swag. We couldn’t do this without the community leaders out there, and we’d just like to take a moment and recognize a few of the fablabs and hackerspaces that are making World Create Day possible.

A keyfob that makes turning a lock easier for those with limited mobility

Up in Vancouver, the folks at the Spinal Cord Injury Forum will be spending their World Create Day building tools that make life easier for people with limited mobility. Already they’re doing some awesome work with 3D printing, and with a few more minds tackling these problems, they’re sure to come up with something good.

This is a worldwide event, and we have hackerspaces from Cairo to Osaka taking part. Do you know where Tenerife is? There’s a World Create Day meetup there, too.

To give you a little more encouragement to attend a World Create Day meetup near you, just remember we’re still at the start of the Hackaday Prize, a competition where we’re giving away a quarter million dollars to build hardware that will change the world. Even if there isn’t a World Create Day meetup near you, you can always start your own meetup for tomorrow, or just go solo. And don’t forget to show off what’s going on using the #WorldCreateDay hashtag.

This isn’t an event to miss. When else will you be able to come up with creative solutions to problems with a worldwide audience? Find a meetup near you and do something constructive tomorrow.

20 thoughts on “Do Something Constructive Tomorrow

  1. I personally can vouch for the utility of a bi headed key for turning locks. I personally shop key blanks explicitly with large heads due to some grip problems.

    luckily I have a locksmith for a brother and he can source me good equipment without having to mod it.

      1. There’s a whole lot of “makers” who don’t do a whole lot more than read stuff and buy gear. Perhaps they’ll get around to a basic power supply project (or a soldering iron one!), a few blinkenlights projects (maybe with two-way mirror!) with dev boards that will soon collect dust, perhaps a nixie clock and that’s about it. Well, no, there’s also buying a whole lot of expensive test gear that will only collect dust. It’s like 95% of the hobbyists who are like that… That’s why I judge people by their results.

        Anyway. I’d love to enter this year’s HAD contest (and it’s very much in line with the whole “to make lives better”) but my project isn’t something simple that can be finished in a few weeks by a single person or even a small team… Maybe next year, if the general theme stays the same…

        1. It’s easy to tinker and make a few prototypes, to play around with ideas and fantasies. It’s a whole different order of magnitude of cost and effort to turn an idea from prototype into a “finished” product. I think that’s what keeps a lot people from actually accomplishing anything; the real cost in time, effort, and money doesn’t balance with the motivation or desire to achieve an end state.

          For my own part, I prototype a lot of things, but rarely do I get around to creating something I’d feel comfortable calling finished. Part of the time I find that the idea works better in theory than practice, other times the cost of a prototype tells me that the cost of a finished project is more than I’m willing to bear for what I’d gain.

          Having done this for a while, I’m starting to get the hang of estimating the cost and complexity of ideas, the difficulty involved in reaching “finished”, and often kill things off during the concept stage. Unless you really enjoy the nitty gritty of taking a project to a completed state, you’re almost doomed to forever prototypes and tinkering.

      1. If you look at the fuel use vs passengers and count in distance, then compare that to the fuel use for traveling the same long distance by car, you would find that a plane is in fact much cleaner, although it seems counter-intuitive.
        But that’s not for private jets though, never looked at those numbers.

        Also: Al Gore? is this 1995?

        And even then, 1 guy vs pollution of 7+ billion people, not quite a balanced calculation.

        And apart from all that, TM is just being a pitiful small prick. But that’s why he needs that large car I guess ;)

        1. Though I only need to load 4 or or more people in my minivan to beat the top commercial aircraft passenger mpg figures, and 3 to beat the average. 7 and a long flat good weather highway run and I can just about double top figure. It’s probably faster door to door than aircraft under 4 or 500 miles too, due to airport rigamarole.

          What skews the average high are the sardine packed short haul routes, less densely packed mid/long haul routes will be down in the 60 pmpg range… So, with a light foot and high effeciency vehicle, Prius or something, you could manage that if you tried, even the more efficient non-hybrids can get pretty close, and half of them all you need to do is set the cruise a couple below the limit and steer.

  2. That key thing seems odd, not only would it make it seem to make turning it harder to me, but if you are handicapped like that how did you get it in the keyhole in the first place? Perhaps a more suitable lock would fit better to such circumstances.

    1. It provides two things to your average aging person: increased leverage and a way to apply sufficient grip strength. For most normally aging people who do not work out regularly, or suffer from neural muscular diseases, this is very helpful with minimal mods to their environment.

Leave a Reply to WhoknowsCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.