Make: Tech on Your Time, Volume 3
Next thing I know my husband has told a young friend in college about the magazine and the online site, and now it sounds like maybe this guy is getting an entire engineering club immersed in it. And... Well, to make a long story short, some sort of "Make" fever seems to be spreading around here. I don't know whether to applaud or go for cover, to be honest with you. Interspersed with perfectly civilized projects are some that look like they could, ummm, get out of hand, I guess you could say.
I have Volume 3 on hand as I type. It's just short of nine and a half inches tall, by just over six and a half inches wide. It's 194 pages, perfect bound (like a trade paperback), and the paper and the cover stock both feel good; not flimsy. It's definitely aimed at the sorts of folks who appreciate ingenuity and like to tinker with things. Have a VCR on hand? It can be used to make a cat feeder that delivers a set amount of food at specific times. For the, ummm, more active invention geek, there's a potato cannon. (I can see why this might appeal to college guys...). There's a primer on using a portable wire-feed welder. There's an article on an alarm clock that moves so you have to get out of bed to turn it off. (The link provided is www.clocky.net.) In another article, a fellow issues a challenge to people to develop an inexpensive computer for blind kids. There's also an article for hobbyists who like to build replicas of "classic microcomputers from the 70s and early 80s" as they put it. There are instructions for turning a $10 single-use camera into a reusable digital camera... There are tools to drool over, if you're the sort to drool over new tools... There's an article called "A Fusion Reactor for the Rest of Us"... And there's lots more.
Please don't show this to anybody who reminds you of Tim "the Toolman" Taylor on the television show Home Improvement - or to anybody else with a badly skewed enthusiasm-versus-common-sense ratio. Otherwise, have fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment