MAKE senior editor Goli Mohammadi interviewed Jim Burke, organizer of the Power Racing Series, an event where adults soup-up battery-operated Power Wheels cars and race them on a track, often wearing costumes. If you are coming to Maker Faire New York later this month, you can see these wacky races first-hand.

Power Racing Series Coming to Maker Faire New York

[Video Link] MAKE founder Dale Dougherty was profiled on a recent episode of CNN's The Next List, hosted by Sanjay Gupta.

Dale Dougherty is the founder of MAKE Magazine and Maker Faire. He believes in a simple idea: that we all have potential to be makers. He is passionate about creating a generation who are creative, innovative, curious, and making things to improve our world.

[Video Link] It was so great to see Adam Savage at Maker Faire again this year. Thousands of people crammed into the the giant Fiesta Hall for Adam's presentation.

Adam started by talking about his fedora, which is a replica of the one Harrison Ford wore in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. He explained that the hat was made by a guy named Marc Kitter. Unable to find an accurate Indiana Jones fedora, Kitter taught himself millenary, so he could make one for himself.

After Kitter got good at hat making, he started his own company, the Adventurebilt Hat Company, which makes 40 to 50 pure beaver felt fedoras per year for $650 each. They are so good that Harrison Ford wears an Adventurebilt in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I wonder how many extra orders Kitter got as a result of Adam's talk?

One the highlights of Maker Faire for me was meeting Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of the Arduino project. He's very friendly and we had a nice time talking about design. I also enjoyed meeting Luisa Castiglioni, his girlfriend. She's a writer for a number of design magazines, including Domus. (Here's an article she wrote for Domus about makers in the Italian design world.)

Massimo brought with him to Maker Faire samples of the new packaging for Arduino's line of products, and they are beautiful. There were designed by Todo studio, which is run by Giorgio Olivero. Massimo was Giorgio's professor at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Take a look at Todo's photo gallery of Arduino packaging.

We at macetech LLC are proud of our existence as an intra-spacetime provider of technology. Our goal is to insert technological developments into the time periods where they should exist, rather than where they were initially developed. The LED matrix shades project was successfully inserted into 1981 at considerable risk.

It was fun to see people expressing themselves at Maker Faire with colorful clothes and accessories. (See Part 1)

Cool Clothes and Styles of Maker Faire Attendees (Part 2)