New From The Geek Front
The inaugural issue of Make Magazine seems more like a mini-book. Volume 1 weighs in at 181 color-photo packed pages of news and instructions for completing your own hacking projects.The beginning contains a lot of newsy sort of tid bits that describe various hacking projects or hacker tales, but don't include the complete details. For example, there are a few photos and a brief rundown of the home monorail system Kim Pederson built in his backyard. Five years, $4,000 (USD), and 300 feet of track later his monorail glides around his backyard with ease.
There are also other innovative creations such as the refrigeration blanket devised by Adam Hunnell to keep his beer keg cold, or the Sketch-a-Move prototype that lets you program a toy car by drawing on the top of it, or The Feral Robotics revolution that is focused on taking the annoying, cheap toy dogs that bark incessantly and reprogramming them to do more fun, albeit not necessarily more functional, tasks.
Projects For Uber Hackers (and Hacker Wannabe's)
The middle section provides a handful of full-fledged projects, complete with an inventory of the materials and tools necessary, full details for how to construct it and illustrations to guide you.The first project in the inaugural issue was for building your own camera rig to attach to a kite to allow you to take your own aerial photographs. Not only does the project walk you through every step of building the rig, but it comes complete with a list of tips and safety precautions and an entire section on selecting the right kite and getting the camera rig airborne.
The second project explains in detail how to create a video camera stabilizing arm to allow filming without all the bumps and jiggles. Professional grade stabilizing arms can cost near $10,000, but this project shows you how to build something comparable for only $14.
There is also a project to build a 5-in-1 computer cable and for constructing your own magnetic stripe reader so you can scan your own credit cards and extract the data to see just how much of your personal information is contained in that little black stripe.
Hacking In The Very Best Sense Of The Word
O'Reilly Publishing has been on an almost solo crusade it seems to elevate the word "hacker" to its former dignity and nobility.The media has co-opted the term and used it for any variety of malicious computer programmer or Internet malcontent. I myself am guilty of "mis-using" the term and have even written that the hacker purists should just get used to it (see What Is In A Name?.
But, the roots of hacking are more benign. Hacking is about being clever, not malicious. Pure hackers set out to be ingenious, not notorious. The O'Reilly Hacks series of books is devoted to this interpretation of hacking and now true hackers who just want to know how things work under the hood and tinker with them to create new inventions of their own have a magazine to help them.
If you are interested in hacking and learning how to convert and modify gadgets and gizmos to do your bidding, check out this magazine. If you have done some of your own hacking projects already, contact the editor to see about publishing it in an upcoming edition of Make.