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'Make' Premier Issue
But enough with the links. On the front page the magazine features 181 pages for DIY technology, promising stories on aerial photography, backyard monorails, XM radio hacks, iPod tricks, DIY magnetic card reader and blogging made simple. Make is roughly half the size of a normal full-page magazine (like PC Mag or InfoWorld) and generally feels like a paperback book more than a magazine. The paper is also not the glossy print you'd see in normal magazines, it says on page 8 that they used New Leaf Paper, made 100% from post-consumer waste. Make generally uses normal-type font, which should be readable by anyone, except for some pages where they switch to really large fonts.
The magazine is broken down into several logical categories. It starts with editors' welcome letters and short features of some DIY projects people have done on their own (this guy's backyard monorail stands out). The Maker pages in this premiere issue contain an interview with Neil Gershenfeld from MIT, an article on heirloom technology, possibility of building an open-source car and an expose of Bay Area Dorkbot group.
The Projects category (starting at p. 49) is where the real fun starts. The projects take up majority of the pages, and it makes sense - looks like the authors put their best into providing excruciating details, pieces of advice and general information, so that anyone can follow their work. The projects are well-illustrated, some contain necessary diagrams and cartoon-like explanations of what needs to be done to assemble the proper devices, the step-by-step pages contain both pictures and text. Each project is sub-divided into several parts - Set up (list of everything needed before you start), Make it (the actual step-by-step instructions and discussion of the projects), Use it (reasons for tinkering with the project in the first place). The setup list is also provided on Make Web site, like here's the list of components for magnetic stripe reader.
The projects for the issue include adding a disposable camera to the kite for aerial photography, a $14 video camera stabilizer, 5-in-1 network cable (the combination of RJ45 and DB9 inputs) and the magnetic stripe reader.
The major projects are followed by the projects consuming less time and efforts. This is mainly for people who would rather spend more money at the spot, buy some cool accessory to complement their electronic device, and do minimal engineering on their own, as far as I understand. The categories include Home Entertainment, Mobile, Cars, Online, Computers and some additional projects that did not fit anywhere above. The table of contents contains the complete list of projects.
It looks like the magazine that is needed in the market. At some point playing with technology became synonymous with running to the nearest mall and getting the latest electronic gadget, and even RadioShack nowadays mostly looks like a flashy storefront for selling cell service plans and new PDAs. Make is the magazine for people who like to look under the hood, who like to work on do-it-yourself projects and who feel great accomplishment when a project is over, even though its practical usability might be questioned. Of course, the amount of projects in the magazine is a bit overwhelming, but my guess is they figure you'll find some extremely interesting and some are just not interesting at all.
Since I grew up in the Soviet Union, Make magazine reminds me of Young Technician (when technician meant someone involved with technology), a Russian must-subscribe boy magazine that would pull the latest science and technology news together, and also dedicate large portion of its pages to readers' projects. Of course, nowadays, in the age of Hack A Day, Lifehacker and numerous HOW-TOs such magazine might not exactly have the exclusive coverage of the DIY projects. Google might turn out more results, but for some of the projects it also looks like the authors were either pioneers or authorities in their field since googling for DIY aerial photography provides just Make article and a bunch of links to it.
Make is a quarterly publication, so $35 subscription fee covers only 4 issues per year. A bit expensive, but if you plan to enrich yourself and spend free time more productively, I think Make has lots of content to entice the reader and keep him busy for 3 months. First impression might not mean a whole lot, but Make was one of few magazines that I enjoyed reading from page 1 to page 192.
I think I'll wait for its successor, CMake magazine. I've heard that it's a lot easier to understand.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Yeah but, will it ever replace Slashdot?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
192: My First Computer
Remembering how my dad built an Apple II from scratch.
170: MakeShift
Imagine this: Your car battery is dead, and you're stuck in the woods. Your mission: Get home before you freeze to death.
84: $14 Video Camera Stabilizer
You don't have $10,000 to spend on a Steadicam? Make this ultra-low-cost video camera stabilizer and see how much better your video shots turn out.
I think I'll pass on this one. Maybe when they get to 12 issues for $12.95 I'll think about it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
We have to go...outside to do these projects?
I heard about this on the previous /. article, It sounded like a cool mag, but you can never be too sure. now that a real human has read it and told me about it, i am much more comfortable about shelling out my hard earned bux.
of course, now i'll have to suffer with h4x0r inferiority complex, but thats the price i'll pay....
Wow.
In the day of paper thin magizines (anyone read 'Time' lately?), that's pretty hefty. Even if it is 1/2 size.
What I didn't see was any mention of how much advertising there was (or will be).
You got yours before I got mine. I think our mailman's on a bender, again.
(Still waiting)
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
It's about time there is a magazine out there that's more than just pages of video game ads and reviews. If only tomshardware had a featured spot in this magazine....Hopefully the magazine won't end up too technical and not have enough subscribers
The first issue arrived yesterday, and I really enjoyed reading it. It is different in scope than the likes of Nuts and Volts or Servo; but the magazine (or Mook as they are calling it: magazine + book) was well put together. They have a discussion group off their main website also, where it appears people are already discussing the building of the projects (read: tech support ;) Not that you'd need it, the articles are pretty clear....
LosT
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
No link to Popular Mechanics? They've had a web presence since '96 or so. Give them some love, editors.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I must buy this... even if I don't have so much time to do projects, at least I can see how folks are doing it nowadays...
Yes, you can Google stuff, but nothing compares to the portability of dead trees.
I can wallow in the memories of the projects (some now illegal, alas, if done today) I did as a young nerd (1964-1984).
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
The lead time for publishing a paper magazine is atrocious when compared to webtime. Many web sites for regular print magazines will only run the articles after the print has gone out. What's the deal going to be with Make, do we know? By the time it shows up in my mailbox will I already have read the articles?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Future editions are expected to feature many such real life pictures of geeks in action, potentially attracting thousands of subscribers.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
These guys were at linuxworld Boston yesterday. Pretty cool stuff, I was holding this in my hand yesterday. Kinda looked like an Ikea catalogue.
One more link from their company was http://www.makingthings.com/
yeah!
i've been waiting for this badboy for a while now. not that i'm actually adept at tinkering, but that's the whole idea, i guess, right?
for the meantime, i've been reading nuts and volts magazine while running the elliptical thing at the gym. its so funny, because everyone else is reading fitness magazines, and i'm lookin at inductor related schematics. wtf?
yeah i went to RPI.
"when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold"
So the subscribe page has a section for promotional codes. Which makes me wonder if people have seen them. For $35, it's probably worth it, but if there are promotional codes... why not use them.
is a 1968 Popular Mechanics DIY encyclopedia. Me mum bought it for me when I were a wee lad. I got lucky on mums. When I started taking everything in the house apart to see how it worked; and if I could put it together again, better, she not only encouraged me, but went so far as convert the living room of our home into a workshop (American urban colonial neighborhood. No garage. I can, literally, shake hands with my neighbor without either one of us leaving our bedrooms).
.only coming out quarterly.
She didn't even blink when she came home one day to find I had built a formula car in the dining room because there wasn't room for it in the living room workshop. We all just lived in the kitchen for awhile, which is where we spent most of our family time anyway.
More recently she's actually the one who clued me in to the whole dorkbot thingy (I'm a fairly solitary tinkerer, although testing new vehicles does seem to draw something of a crowd at times).
So what the hell happened to PM anyway?
Sounds like I'll have to at least check out Make, but I fear I'll be disappointed in it. .
KFG
Does anyone know what brick and mortar retailers will be carrying Make? The local Barnes and Noble hasn't even heard of it.
tar xzvf make-magazine-1.1.tar.gz
./configure --pages=192
cd make-magazine-1.1
make articles
make magazine
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Are these the same as http://www.howtoons.org/?
Nothing really too complicated in there, and it looks like you can build most of the stuff they present with just a few hours of work. The DIY stuff is pretty darn simple, actually.
When I was lookin' through my issue last night I kind of skimmed by the stuff they showed OS X doing - but when I went back and read it this morning, it actually looked like some cool stuff.
I do hope that in the future they have some actual electronics projects in there of some sort. I am sure they will. This time around it looked to be mainly taking what is already out there and showing different ways of putting said gizmo to use, or fixing it.
Overall though, I have to give Make a big thumbs up. It looks nice, is fun to read, and is gonna be really useful.
BTW, as I was typing this, I kept trying to come up with what Make reminds me of. I think I got it.... a paper version of The Screen Savers when the show did not suck.
For the pictures. Not like Playboy, for the articals
But seriously, those things were huge. It was a giddy era. Negroponte was waxing philosophical about digital this and digital that. Articles about crazy new technology abounded. Everyone walked around wearing shades because the future was so damned bright.
The future just ain't what it used to be, eh?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You're probably going to be modded troll or flamebait, but for what it's worth I agree and remember exactly the kind of thing you're talking about.
There was a review of 'Warcraft 2', back when it was first released, in one of those 6" thick English PC mags. It was hyserically funny, and I bought the game on the strength of it, so I guess it did the job intended. But I had to wade through more than 100 pages of ads just to get to the contents page, letalone the review!
And then there was a story from a 'Byte' columnist (I think it was) about the time he and his college roomie built a poor-man's cleanroom in his mom's bathroom and salvaged junked HDDs for fun and profit.
I always got the impression that the English writers were a little bit out of their depth once the task at hand was anything more than, say, tweaking their autoexec.bat and congig.sys files to free up some extra memory for their games, whereas the American magazine writers were usually grizzled old greybeards, who cut their teeth designing ICs at Motorola, or laying out PCBs at TI.
Not a trolll, not a dig at British technical know-how! Just my own memories anyway.
Honestly, did you read how to take pictures from a kite before, or AFTER you read about Make reporting on the same thing?
Sure you could probably get similar info on most of the projects anywhere. But will you? The answer is probably no. Doallars to donuts that by the time the next Make rolls around you will have read nothing of any of the projects they feature, even though you could look them up. I know because I am the same way!
The purpose of the magazine is partly an aggregator of interesting projects, but also partly a motivator to try and be more than just a consumer again and start exploring the possibility of creation that so many of us enjoyed when we were kids. I mean, one of the projects is a home-built mag-stripe reader, how cool is that? Well I think it's cool.
Also I would say that the general level of presentaiton is very good and possibly more clear than a lot of articles you are going to find online. They really did go to a lot of work to make sure than even someone with trepidations can do a lot of the projects, they are so clear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually #2 is an assignment - they don't give you the answer, just ask for people to submit solutions.
What's arong with a cheap stabilizer? Let's you run along with video cameras just about as well as pro stabilizers, and is dead-simmple to build.
But they have lots, and lots of other stuff as well. Other more interesting projetcs like a home-made mag-stripe reader to see what is on your cards. Or tips on proper soldiering/desoldiering (to prepare you for future projects no doubt). Or even the kite thing which was interesting.
They also do a very good job with project descriptions, to the point where probably almost anyone could do any of the projects.
It is 195 pages after all, and has a wide range of material. At only $8.75 and issue I think it's a pretty good deal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Another project tucked away somewhere in there is a super-simple railgun involving just a handful of steel balls, a few magnets, and a wodden ruler.
A cheap way to arm your home-built patrol Death-Bot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From the FAQ:
When will it be out?
The premier issue of Make should ship to subscribers and single-issue purchasers in mid-February and hit bookstores and newsstands at the end of February.
Those are all things I did, but a lot of times I feel like I'm one of the only ones here who ever did this kind of thing.
Sorry, I was busy getting laid....
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
* Grass-trimming Hybrid from Hell: Hacking together your Roomba and a riding mower.
* SpaceShip Two plans.
* Wood: Where does it come from?
* Trap Doors 101
* The wacky world of George Foreman Grill hacking.
* The first article of a five part series on DIY genetic engineering, describing how to modify your colonic bacteria so that your farts smell like orange potpourri. (The issue with part five, "Catgirls," is predicted to be best-seller.)
I had purchased a subscription to the new Tux Magazine (first issue was supposed to come out this month) and got a letter in the mail last week saying they had not gotten enough subscriptions to make it viable, so it would be pdf only. Anyway, they refunded my money. But really, I don't care about reading pdf versions of magazines... there is a reason I like the dead-tree kind, you can lie back in bed while you read them.
Meh.