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“Making is where my success came from.” —Woz
Woz is coming to Maker Faire Bay Area to talk about the 50th anniversary of the Apple I
Dale Dougherty
August 29, 2025
Golconda by Magritte remixed with Makeys by Brian Jepson
Table of Contents
Wow! Woz is coming to Maker Faire Bay Area
Some great news and you’re the first to know: Steve Wozniak is coming to Maker Faire Bay Area (September 26–28, 2025). The legendary co-founder of Apple Computer will talk about his life as a maker and the machine he built that started it all, the Apple I.
This week, I saw this MacWorld article on the 50th anniversary of the Apple I, made by Steve Wozniak in 1975 who famously teamed up with Steve Jobs and sold the first Apple I’s for $666.66.
The article said that Woz was the first to connect a keyboard as an input device for a computer.
“I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen,” Wozniak explained. “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
Excited by this article, I wrote Woz and invited him to Maker Faire Bay Area and to talk about the Apple I. He responded right away with:
“I would love to do this very much . . . Making is where my success came from.”
I’m so happy that Woz agreed to come and share his story with all of us. Woz will be at Maker Faire Bay Area on Sunday, September 28th and will give a talk at noon on the Foundry stage.
Maker Faire Providence
I caught up with Brian Jepson this week, who is the publisher at Raspberry Pi Press and the organizer of Maker Faire Providence, which is coming up on Saturday, September 6. Brian wrote about Providence’s connection to the Industrial Revolution in America.
Maker Faire Providence is once again returning to Rhode Island. Rhode Island really is the perfect place for a Maker Faire. It’s where the American Industrial Revolution began, when Samuel Slater snuck out of Great Britain disguised as a farmer in 1789.
As an apprentice in Jedediah Strutt’s cotton mill in Belper, Slater had knowledge that America was desperate to have. Simply put, if you knew how to spark an industrial revolution, you probably weren’t leaving Great Britain England without an effective disguise.
After trying to make a go of it in New York, he teamed up with Moses Brown. Brown had acquired a spindle frame designed after the very type of machine Slater had mastered, but Brown could not get it to work. Working with Brown, Slater had the resources needed to replicate a British mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Although this stunt made him a bit unpopular back home, all appears to be forgiven, at least to some extent: the city of Pawtucket and the town of Belper are now twinned.
One of the earliest independently produced Maker Faires, Maker Faire Providence was launched as Rhode Island Maker Faire in 2009. Now, less than two weeks before the Faire, we’re putting the finishing touches on everything.
Ceci n’est pas un robot (the making of a hero image)
By Brian Jepson, Aug 24, 2025
When I started preparing for Maker Faire Providence 2025, I decided it was time for some fresh design work. In years past, I’d usually pick a photo from a prior year for the hero image. This time, I decided to put a little more design effort into our hero image. My parents had a book of René Magritte’s work that I always enjoyed flipping through as a child, so I thought I’d attempt a tribute to one of Magritte’s paintings. I wanted to incorporate something suggestive of Providence, and I also wanted to include the Maker Faire robot, Makey.
Choosing the Design Elements
I have a photo of the Providence skyline as viewed from the Maker Faire Providence location (195 District Park), and was drawn to Magritte’s Golconda painting: against a background of buildings, dozens of men are depicted falling from (or perhaps rising into) the sky. They are not all identical, but similar enough that I could get away with using Makey. The men all face slightly different directions, so I needed to pose Makey, and decided I’d use three poses (facing front, and turned slightly left and right).
Rendering an STL
I thought about using a CAD tool to pose Makey and rendering to a PNG, but I wanted to do it in code. It looked like I could use Mayavi with Python to load the STL and render it. I’d been fiddling around with GitHub CoPilot, and decided to use it for this project; I tried crude prompts like “mayavi render stl” and “render stl in python”, which got me to a decent starting point. It helped me figure out how to apply the official Maker Faire red color to the STL, and export it to an image.
CoPilot’s suggestion for removing the background wasn’t great; it suggested I use Pillow to open the image, convert it to RGBA, examine all its pixels, and set anything close to white to white (#FFFFFF). Although I used a different approach in the end, CoPilot was still helpful when I needed to figure out how to set the camera position.
You can find my code on GitHub. I had difficulties installing the Mayavi dependency with pip under my environment (Ubuntu under WSL on Windows ARM), so I installed it with sudo apt-get install mayavi2 and when I created a virtual environment, I added the --system-site-packages argument to mkvirtualenv.
To run this program, you’ll need to tell it which STL to render and what color to use. I downloaded the Maker Faire robot STL, and ran my script, which gave me the three images I needed:
./render_stl.py --stl MAKE_Robot_V6.stl --color 237 28 36
The Final Artwork
With that done, I loaded my background image into Affinity Photo, placed my Makey images where I needed them, creating three layers of falling (or rising) robots. I added a few minor touches: copying tree branches into the foreground so the Makeys were behind it, and adding some Makey shadows on one of the buildings. Next year, I’ll have to challenge myself to create a design based on a different painting!
I hope you can join us at Maker Faire Providence on September 6. Check out our list of makers here, and learn more about attending here.
It’s raining Makeys
Can the Flipper Zero be used to break into cars?
Last week, Joseph Cox published “Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars” on 404 Media. The article said that Flipper Devices’ Flipper Zero, a portable muli-tool device for geeks and hackers, is capable of unlocking all types of cars through third-party software patches. The software was sold for a fee, limiting its distribution, but it has been hacked and is now available in many places. The article said that “it threatens to supercharge car thefts across the country.”
I’m not going to get into the details. What was interesting is the response from Flipper Devices CEO Pavel Zhovner, “Can the Flipper Zero really steal your car? (Spoiler: no)”, where he explained the KeeLoq protocol and how car thieves actually break into a car.
KeeLoq was developed in the 1980s and used in older access systems like garage doors and early car alarms. It’s what’s called a rolling code or hopping code system. The idea is that every transmission uses a new unique signal, encrypted with a 64-bit manufacturer key. This manufacturer key is the weak spot of KeeLoq. The problem was that carmakers often used the same key across an entire model line. If that key leaked, an attacker could intercept signals from any remote of that brand.
The authors of these “hacker” firmwares are just redistributing old leaked manufacturer keys from various automakers. None of this is new — these vulnerabilities were thoroughly documented back in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20221206050746/https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/keeloq/
Since then, car manufacturers have moved on to more modern radio protocols with two-way authentication, where the car and the key exchange messages to verify authenticity….
All you need for an “attack” is to record the remote’s radio signal. You don’t need Flipper Zero — even a piece of wire connected to an audio jack would do.
…
Intercepting a remote signal is not enough to start a car. That’s why these KeeLoq attacks have nothing to do with real-world car theft.
That you actually can’t start the car using a KeeLoq attack is pretty important.
However, car thieves don’t use Flipper Zero, wrote Zhovner. They “target keyless entry/start systems by attacking the key fob directly. They use a combination of relays and transmitters that proxy the signal from the real car key, tricking the car into thinking the key is nearby.” The article shows a few videos of car thieves working in pairs to capture the signal of a key from inside a home and then relaying it open the car.
Remote robot pilots at Avatar Robot Café DAWN
by Kevin Toyama
Robot cafes are nothing new—even my neighborhood restaurant uses a gimmicky robot server, traversing a programmed path from the kitchen to tables. But Avatar Robot Café DAWN ver.β in Tokyo, as described in this this SoraNews24 article, is something completely different: It uses robots to enable people with physical or mental challenges to be a contributing part of the public workforce.
Help others who want to help others at the most feel-good cafe in Japan.
— SoraNews24 (@RocketNews24En)
5:03 AM • Aug 25, 2025
Like the Jaegers in Pacific Rim, robots in the café are “piloted” by humans. One pilot shares how he was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident, but interacts with customers from home through a robot. Other pilots work as drink servers, controlling their robot as it moves around the café, while others operate as a coffee barista.
The company behind all this is Ory Laboratory, which “solves human loneliness through communication technology.” Ory makes stationary OriHime robotic avatars for communication beyond video calls—augmenting the experience through robotic gestures—as well as the OriHime-D robot servers and the OriHime Eye controller interface that uses eye movements.
Check out this inspiring video explaining how these robots are not replacing human jobs, but increasing the available workforce!
Teach your children: AI is not your friend
On his Substack, Nate B. Jones, an expert on AI, has published “Raising Humans in the Age of AI: A Practical Guide for Parents”.
Right now, as you read this, kids are outsourcing decision-making to pattern-matching systems. They're seeking emotional validation from algorithms designed for engagement, not growth. They're learning that thinking is optional when machines can do it for them.
You have a narrow window to shape how your child relates to artificial intelligence before those patterns harden into permanent assumptions about how the world works. The decisions you make this year about AI literacy will influence how they navigate every aspect of adult life in an AI-saturated world.
Most parents respond to AI with either panic or paralysis. They ban it completely or let it run wild because they don't understand what they're doing. The tech companies offer safety theater—content filters and usage controls that kids work around easily. The schools alternate between prohibition and blind adoption. Everyone's making decisions based on fear or hype rather than understanding.
Jones makes an important point that children may think that AI “knows who they are” because of the way it mimics human interaction. But, as I put in the headline, AI is not your friend. That is, don’t mistake AI for real human interaction. It doesn’t know and doesn’t care who you are.
Now put that pattern-seeking teenage brain in conversation with a pattern-matching machine. The AI learns your kid's communication style and mirrors it back perfectly. It never disagrees, never judges, never has a bad day. Every interaction reinforces whatever patterns your kid brings to it.
…
AI provides zero frustration. It's the conversational equivalent of eating sugar for every meal—it feels satisfying in the moment but provides no nutritional value for emotional or intellectual growth.
Jones goes on to provide many practical ways that AI can be productively used by children and adults. It’s a long article but well-worth reading and passing around to parents and teachers.
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