Tinkerers, start your iPods
D.I.Y.
Do it yourself. The letters, the words jangle and vibrate like the guitar strings of a fight-the-establishment punk band.
A new technology magazine, Make, is taking the D.I.Y. attitude, smoothing the edges and serving up a quiet riot against the passivity of consumer technology: Don’t just use technology; make something with it.
The premiere issue of the magazine hit newsstands a couple of weeks ago, more than 190 pages of “hack your XM Radio” and “tweak your iPod” aimed at people who’ve never hacked or tweaked anything in their lives.
Most people are content with using their devices in the way the manufacturer intended. As long as it works, fine. Besides, the idea of opening a computer or digital camera to see how it works -- or to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do -- might scare them.
“There’s a culture of ‘Don’t void the warranty’ out there,” says editor and publisher Dale Dougherty. “We’ve been trained not to take it into our own hands. We need to accept responsibility when we take it into our own hands and screw it up.”
That thinking “is not a conspiracy” perpetuated by the consumer electronics industry, Dougherty is careful to say: “It’s the environment we live in. Most people haven’t thought of digital technology as something they can make and break.”
That said, Make includes these words on Page 8:
“Technology, the laws, and limitations imposed by manufacturers and content owners, are constantly changing. Thus, some of the projects described may not work, may be inconsistent with current laws or user agreements or may damage or adversely affect some equipment.... Your safety is your own responsibility.... Use of the instructions and suggestions in Make is at your own risk.”
That warning will send some people running, but they’ll never run the risk of learning some cool stuff inside Make: What’s in that magnetic stripe on your credit card? If you could float like a kite, what would you see? Can you really build a tabletop model of a linear accelerator?
A friendly magazine, Make includes instructions on building a magnetic-stripe reader, a clamp that attaches your digital camera to a kite for bird’s-eye photos, and a wood-and-steel-marbles project that demonstrates the transfer of kinetic energy when steel marbles collide.
“We’ve always had hackers and makers,” says Dougherty, who also is the publisher of O’Reilly Network, which publishes technical books for hard-core digital tinkerers. “Martha Stewart recovered arts and crafts from our grandmother’s generation. We’re recovering mechanical skills and adding in digital sensibilities. Our grandfather’s generation had shops and tools and knew how to use them. We’ve been taught not to open the box and not look inside. People are finding there are interesting things they can accomplish.”
Most of those people are males ages 30 to 55, according to Make’s research, but the magazine hopes to spread the D.I.Y. revolution to kids and women too.
“We think there’s a high level of aspirational value for women as well as people in different age groups,” says Dan Woods, associate publisher. “They may buy it for their husbands or dads, but they’ll find it interesting as well.”
It’s not cheap, though. The 45,000 magazines now at bookstores and magazine stores sell for $14.99 an issue. Make is projected as a quarterly.
