Update: Sorry, we will indeed not have any sewing machines. We'll be cutting and tying but not sewing. (Still feel free to stop by, say hi, and get a tutu!)

Hello! I'm with Tutu Camp (inventory sent me!) I don't actually know whether we're going to have any sewing machines on playa -- we may in fact be pre-sewing things and just using safety pins for assembly. (Nobody wanted to volunteer their machine to get gunked up full of dust...) Also, if we do hav...

An update and a bump: I've gotten three of these so far, two in the same village. It would be awesome to get several more. Any takers? All I need is a place to put a laminated poster / a basket of laminated papers / some other form of durable puzzle for people to solve. PM me to volunteer, or reply ...

As an update, this is now off the table, because we gained a campmate who has a friend he can borrow a solar-panel system from. Free solar is a clearly an improvement on what I had in mind.

Cydonia in Alternative Energy Zone is looking for theme camps, anywhere on the playa, to be clue sites in our playa puzzlehunt. What's a clue site? You will host some form of puzzle for other Burners to find and solve, whose answer will tell them the next site. There will probably be somewhere betwe...

You're right, it would be. Don't mind me.

One of the bike systems I was looking at claims 3-400 watts; at that rate, it wouldn't be too bad. In this thread someone claims 50 watts, which would be less good.

It doesn't seem like that much power? Note that I'm quoting Wh, not Ah; at 12V, it's about 15-30 Ah per day. Definitely the goal would be to run DC lighting if possible. Sound would probably be AC, but small cheapo speakers draw 5-10 watts, so not a major drain. The video FIGJAM posted looks really ...

I am trying to gain 1) personal amusement, and 2) something like 200-400 Wh of juice per day, to run basic lighting in the evening and maybe some low-key sound. But if I don't get it, we'll Burn in the dark; we've done it before.

That's cool, but the pedal-powered one doesn't exist yet, and the hand-powered one only produces 10 watts. Can't run much on that.

... Iiiiinteresting. I don't know why it didn't even occur to me that the bike dynamo would be putting out much more than the desired voltage. Looking back, I see that the dynamo I inspected on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Generator-Power-Pulley-Dynamo/dp/B001WB3TZ4) is described as "12-24V...

Does anybody have experience with building or buying a system for generating (and storing) power with a bike? I see a couple of pre-made ones for sale: http://pedalpowergenerator.com/ http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm I don't think I can beat the second one for the price of the bike stand plus...

Aha! Thanks for the nudge. Indeed, we're considering our options for van and truck rentals, too.

Oh dear, I left off the largest item: One hexayurt! (~4'x8'x1', i.e. 32 cubic feet) It is, of course, separable from the rest of the crap. I don't know how I could forget, I'm pretty excited about it -- this will be my first time staying in a yurt.

Does anything like NYC Container go from SF, or is it so close that nobody bothers? My camp (Cydonia) is considering our options for getting some of our gear from the SF Bay area to the playa. We're down a couple of drivers from past years (because of the ticket situation), and we anticipate we may ...

Last year I bought a bike at Target for $100. More expensive than Walmart, for probably the same crappy bike, but it came preassembled -- just roll it out of the store. (I'm also local, though, so I can amortize the cost by storing the bike through the offseason and using it again.)