Cover story: Awake, inner hacker -- A Menlo Park native invites hackers and garage inventors to kick off the shackles of a prepackaged manufactured world Cover story: Awake, inner hacker -- A Menlo Park native invites hackers and garage inventors to kick off the shackles of a prepackaged manufactured world (July 27, 2005)

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

With sophisticated machines to help us translate language, diagnose car troubles, give neck massages, serve up fastballs, and pinpoint one's precise latitude and longitude on the planet, to name just a few -- and with our habit of replacing broken things rather than repairing them -- a person might wonder if the long and rebellious tradition of making and repairing things yourself is in trouble.

But writing the obituary for do-it-yourselfers would be premature. There are still people out there who extend their imaginations into and beyond what manufacturers create, people who routinely void their product warranties. They tend to be young, imaginative and ambitious, and now there's a new forum that supports and encourages that community, helped along by a man with local roots.

Dan Woods, who grew up and went to school in Menlo Park, is the associate publisher of Make, a new quarterly magazine. Volume 3 was recently mailed to subscribers and will be on newsstands in coming weeks.

Published by Sebastopol-based O'Reilly Media and aimed at the technologically savvy reader with an interest in exploring and exploiting consumer products old and new, Make magazine is a sort of Popular Mechanics with an edge.

The magazine and its online forum makezine.com seek a do-it-yourself audience that isn't afraid to break something in pursuit of more capabilities, says Mr. Woods, who stopped by the Almanac on a hometown visit recently.

"Do we push the limits and maybe coach people on how to void the warranty? Absolutely," he says. "Most of the people who get into this realize that the upside is greater."

Make magazine is really about "the inventive spirit that people have," he says. "Live free. ... It's the joy of making something in a resourceful way that really is the unexpected. That is the spirit of Make."

Take the MP3 player, originally marketed to play music downloaded from Internet sites. The magazine describes ways to install a version of the Linux operating system, or an ordinary and inexpensive battery instead of the original expensive one, or an audio-recording function.

Among many other topics covered in the first two issues:

** How to make a portable video-camera stabilizer, normally a $10,000 piece of equipment, from parts available in a hardware store.

** How to make a magnetic stripe reader.

** How to bring high-definition TV to a Macintosh computer.

** How to make a working desktop linear accelerator using magnets, a 12-inch ruler and some small steel balls.

For a do-it-yourselfer, this magazine and its online forum can offer ideas that can be entertaining, educational, practical and sometimes a bit edgy.
Do-it-yourself revisited

Publishing a technical do-it-yourself magazine is hardly new, Mr. Woods admits, noting Make's echo of the magazines Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Indeed, the small, book-like dimensions of Make are intentionally the same size as mid-20th-century issues of Popular Science. The big difference is in the target audience.

The composite Make reader, says Mr. Woods, is a man in his 20s or 30s with income and education that are "way above average," no children, and a sense of wonder about the "cool things" he can fabricate in his garage, things his neighbors aren't doing. "It's Martha Stewart for geeks," he says.

Mr. Woods, 50, says his involvement began while waiting for a cab with O'Reilly Media publisher Dale Dougherty, who was musing about a magazine on technology projects similar to Martha Stewart's take on domestic projects.

"It was just enough off dead center (to make it) really interesting," says Mr. Woods, who was the head of O'Reilly's marketing at the time. It was one of several projects at O'Reilly, but they soon found that they had hit a nerve with Make, he says.

The first run of 45,000 in February 2005 sold out seven weeks later. They printed 25,000 more and at least some are now selling as used books at Amazon.com. As of July, Make's paid subscription was 30,000, with about 1,000 new subscribers each week, says Mr. Woods. Volume 3 was just published.

Make has readers in 42 countries and on every continent except Antarctica, says Mr. Woods. While the magazine's focus is high technology, it explores other areas, too. Volume 2 included a feature on homemade devices in Nicaragua, including a rickshaw, a wheelbarrow and a blender made of wood.

"We think there's a lot we can learn from Third World nations. What do they know that we don't? Americans sometimes go too far in thinking of Third World villages as (using) mud-hut technologies," says Mr. Woods. "You benefit from more dialogue, not less. We don't just broadcast information and pour it over people's heads. It's a forum. It's an exchange of information and ideas."

Volume 2 walked that talk by challenging readers to help increase the world's supply of clean drinking water. Using a couple of barrels, bamboo tubing, a car battery, hand tools and other everyday objects, Make asks readers to give themselves 48 hours to design a water filtration system that would serve the needs of 20 to 30 people. The winner receives a T-shirt.

Make magazine would also like kids and their parents to use the online forum and create a science-fair like atmosphere, says Mr. Woods.

He cites as a relevant example his teenage daughter, who may not have confronted principles of chemistry and electricity in the same way had she not been intrigued by the homemade potato gun featured in the first issue.

The gun, essentially a series of pipes with airtight chambers, uses an electric spark to ignite hydrocarbons present in a spray of deodorant to launch a raw potato some 200 yards. When fired at night, the gun produces a spectacular light show.

A pyrotechnic-free alternative published in Volume 2 involves a few dollars worth of small-diameter PVC pipe fashioned into a "gun" that kids can blow into to shoot miniature marshmallows across a room.
Who defines products?

Exploiting weaknesses in technology has had a colorful history in recent decades. Hackers with a range of intentions have complicated life for many, particularly corporations that manufacture digital copies of music and movies and try to protect their copyrights.

With a substantial part of Make dedicated to taking things apart so as to change their behavior, the word "hack" is easy to find in its pages, but you won't find the negative connotations that often accompany it.

Most hackers are people with "really great ability and skill and solid ethics," says Mr. Woods. "Most of the people we deal with are just flat-out adventurous, spirited people who do things in very fun, interesting and clever ways and we like to write about them."

What may drive some hackers to dismantle a product are its built-in limitations and the possibility of overcoming them. It's a rare consumer product that allows hackers the freedom they want, says Mr. Woods, who sums up the hacker credo in one sentence: "Don't try to anticipate my every need."

If corporations stopped trying to control people's expectations and accepted that some individuals want to add capabilities to the things they buy, more innovation would result, says Mr. Woods.

Make magazine tries to tap into the consumers' collective imagination, which, he says, is broader and deeper than the typical corporate imagination.

A company headed in the right direction, Mr. Woods notes, is Scion cars, a division of Toyota. At its Web site, Scion customers can mix and match from long and imaginative lists of interior, exterior and performance add-ons for the cars. "We relinquish all power to you," is the company's slogan.

"There's always a customer you don't know with needs that you don't know about," says Mr. Woods.

Make a simple desktop linear accelerator

For less than $30, it's easy to construct a desktop linear accelerator (also called a gauss rifle) that demonstrates the power of a magnetic chain reaction.

This project, from the pages of Volume 1 of Make magazine, shows how energy accumulates as it is transferred from one object to another until a projectile is released at several times the force originally applied.
Parts list:

** A 12" wooden ruler with a center groove along the length.

** Four gold-plated neodymium-iron-boron magnets (available online from scitoys.com).

** Nine 5/8-inch diameter nickel-plated steel balls.

** Scotch tape and an X-Acto knife.
Procedure:

(1) Tape the ruler to a table or floor, then tape the first magnet 2-1/2 inches from the near end. Tape the other three magnets 2-1/2 inches apart from each other. (Take care to keep the magnets separate. If they bang into each other, they may shatter.) (2) Trim the excess tape from each magnet with the knife. Put two steel balls against the far side each of the four magnets. Put a target object (such as a plastic cup) at the far end of the ruler. (3) Place the remaining ball on the groove at the near end. You might have to nudge it but once it hits the first magnet, a chain reaction begins that sends the last ball into the cup.

A longer ruler with more magnets and more balls results in a more powerful transfer of energy, but there are limits. Eventually a ball will acquire enough energy to shatter one of the magnets, which will bring the reaction to an abrupt end. Source: Make Magazine, Vol. 1; published by O'Reilly Media Inc.

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