Month: October 2007

MAKE contributing editor and my Make: Books cohort Brian Jepson has a nice report today on the MAKE: blog about the Maker Store at the Austin Maker Faire. The store was by far my favorite part of the fair. It was a brilliant combination of a killer book store, a hands-on electronics lab, and a demonstration/presentation stage; a three-ring circus that any geek would love. I heard so many people raving about it and all the cool stuff to see, play with, and buy. We also had on-hand Lady Ada, Dave and Cheryl from Solarbotics, Raphael Abrams (Daisy MP3), and other indie kit makers whose wares the Make Store sells. Dan, Rob, Heather, Brian and everyone else involved did an amazing job.

I’m at Maker Faire Austin. Woo-Hoo. I made it, and with my nether regions unexplored by over-eager TSA officials. Of course, I shipped my IEDs (Improvised ELECTRONICS Devices) ahead of time.

It’s great to be here and I’m excited about the Faire. I’m currently at a Personal Fabrication Summit, a working session/meet n’ greet of folks involved in personal fabbing/3D printing, CNC machining, etc.

Speaking of IEDs, I’ll be doing Mousey the Junkbot workshops on Saturday and Sunday. I’ll be in the Maker Store building. If you’re coming to the Faire, stop by and say hi.

If you want to participate in the workshops, you may want to check out the materials I put together before the Bay Area Faire. They’re available at here. Hope t o see you there… er here.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have a new gig as an editor at MAKE: Books, the book imprint for MAKE magazine. The latest book to come out of MAKE (done before I came on-board) is Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk. Man am I excited about it. It looks great, it’s written in a very clear and approachable voice, and it’s loaded with cool, quirky projects for using Arduino/Wiring microcontrollers to create networked objects, embedded devices that can talk to each other and connect to the world via the Web.

Like Dorkbot, one of the things I love about MAKE is how it isn’t just for the geekiest among us — both orgs appeal to creative types/artists, too. Making Things Talk is also geared that way. Throughout its pages, and for each chapter opener, there’s an example shown of projects created by artists, art or engineering students, or others who are using Arduino/Wiring hardware and the Processing software language to create cutting edge techno-art. And also like MAKE proper, there’s a real “I can do this” energy behind the book. I’m not much of an MCU/programming kind o’ geek, but looking through this, I’m inspired to try some of the projects. And with the cost of Arduino hardware so low, there’s not a big investment in giving it a try. Like with LEGO Mindstorms, the Arduino LilyPads, and other seriously-cool embedded tech that’s coming to market these days, I can’t help but wonder what today’s generation of hardware hackers will do when this is what they have to cut their teeth on.

Making Things Talk is available in the Maker Store. I have to admit, I find it a tad intimidating that the bar has been set this high at MAKE: Books. According to the intro, the amazing Brian Jepson of Hackszine (who was the editor for this title) actually did all of the projects himself during the editing process. Jeez Brian, way to make the rest of us look like slackers. Don’t we have tech editors for this sort of thing? But then, Tom Igoe has created such a juicy book I bet few real geeks could read it and NOT want to do the projects.

I’m doing a weekly column, called “Provisions DIY” (every Wednesday), for Provisions Learning Center’s blog. This week, I talk about printing your own books via Apple’s iPhoto Books and Lulu. I use the example of BCP! Bitmaps, a two-off book that Peter Sugarman made, one for me, one for him. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

A few weeks ago, a package arrived in the mail. It was from my friend and long-time collaborator Peter Sugarman. Inside the mailer was a handsome gray and white portfolio box with an Apple logo on it. Inside of that was a gorgeous hardbound black book called BCP! Bitmaps. BCP!, or Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-It-Yourself Guide to the Future was an electronic book (done in Apple’s HyperCard program) that Peter and I (along with Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing, Jim Leftwich, and others) did in the early ’90s. Peter had gone through the entire e-book (called a “Stack” in HyperCard parlance) and extracted all of the B&W 72dpi bitmapped images, along with some evocative cyber-dada statements we’d peppered throughout the stack (e.g. “Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer,” “You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard,” “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?”).

With these images and text, he made this amazing coffee table art book using Apple’s iPhoto Prints service. I’d heard friends (including Peter) raving about this service in the past, about how easy it was to use and how amazing the finished products were. It may take holding one to appreciate just how tasty it really is. The materials are first rate. On this book, the matte black cloth cover, the thick woven silver end papers, the glossy black internal pages, the print quality — it’s all top notch. Everything about it feels like it’s a high-end commercial product, not a two-off (as is the case here).

But like everything else with Apple, this level of quality and style doesn’t come cheap. The books are US$30 for the cover and the first ten pages, and $1 for every page after that. This book cost about $50 to produce. There are cheaper paperback and wire-bound versions available. And when you think about, the price of commercial hardbound books these days, this really isn’t that expensive. If you’re an artist who wants to do a small-run special edition book of your work for a show or similar situ, you could easily sell a volume like this for $60 or $70 (or more) and it wouldn’t be overpriced (by current market standards).

Read the rest here…