My Kind of Town

• Chris has moved to Chicago, among other life changes.
• The Steam Controller Video shows the device was manufactured in the suburbs of Chicago.
• Sadly, we didn't talk about it much, but Dave got to see The Woz speak!
• Chris had to leave his bench behind, but that leaves the opportunity to build a new bench!
• The Chicago hackerspace is Pumping Station: One, where Chris got to meet other technology folks.
• On demand making services
  • Shapeways
  • Ponoko
  • Plethora
  • MakeXYZ
• You can get rental test equipment, it's just expensive and only really targeted at high end stuff.
• There is a manufacturing/hwstartup space launching in Chicago called mHub
• Dave got a 50 year old watch with early transistors
  • Here are some pictures
  • Here is how it works!
• The machining required for clocks is amazing. Check out Clickspring's channel for amazing videos on the topic.
• The planar process for ICs was not invented until 1959 (found here), so Dave's (1963) watch has a single transistor
• More mergers
  • Renesas is buying Intersil
  • On Semi is buying Fairchild
  • Check out this yet-to-be-updated map of semi mergers.
• The Ampere will soon be redefined in how it's defined. We talked about standard measures with Jon (Prof Gears) a few months back.
• Using Amazon prime, Chris got the "Learning the Art of Electronics" book same day. Dave is beginning to use the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) service for his multimeters.
• The LTAOE book is amazing! It's written a different style than AoE, even more conversational.
• The White House invited 400+ hacker/maker spaces to a one day conference; they called the spaces "A National Treasure" which was awesome!

If you didn't notice, we skipped last week. Sorry about that! See the first half hour of the show to explain why ;-)

Thanks to Roman Boed for the picture of Chicago