Open Sauce is a confoundingly brilliant Bay Area event

Summary

This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering) to Open Sauce, a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube solvers: Sprawling over the grounds of the San Mateo County Event Center, I met people of all ages who were building all sorts of zany contraptions. Sometimes practical, sometimes wildly impractical (like a hot dog race track that tazes the winning weiner). A different aspect to this event from other maker conventions is the presence of many makers and hobbyists from YouTube. I have been watching CuriousMarc's series on restoring old HP Cesium atomic clocks, and I got to meet him in person... as he was restoring more vintage test equipment, like this HP 182C Oscilloscope: He was even recording portions of his day at Open Sauce, and managed to find a fault in one of the two scopes he had on hand, while talking to hundreds of fans on the show floor! Not only that, TubeTime and Ken Sheriff were there next to him, messing with old Apollo-era hardware among other things! (And others were popping by that booth throughout the days. Daily Open Sauce Vlogs I did not cover everything—nor could I—but I did record a bunch of snapshots of the kinds of booths and people you'd meet at Open Sauce. I published three vlogs, one from the preview night for exhibitors, content creators, and industry folks, and two from the days open to the general public: A highlight from Day 0 was a coffee table which could walk around smoothly enough to hold a drink on top—and with a cooler hidden inside! The current iteration can't hold more than a hundred or so pounds reliably, but the concept has been proven, and material strength can be improved. Day 1 (the first day Open Sauce was open to the general public), I was happy to meet with so many people who I've only interacted with onlin...