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Tags > diy
Four short links: 27 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 27, 2009
Field -- a development environment for "experimental code" and digital art. We think that, for many uses, Field is a better Processing than Processing. Includes Python and Java bridges, goal is to connect to as many different programming systems as possible. OS X only at the moment. Contraptor -- a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication,...
Four short links: 21 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 21, 2009
Raytheon Sends Android to Battlefield -- Google's OS sees deployment. Using Android software tools, Raytheon ( RTN - news - people ) engineers built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. [...] Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an unmanned plane a "buddy," for...
Four short links: 8 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 8, 2009
Linux Baby Rocker -- inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command ... (via Hacker News) I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix -- forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it...
Four short links: 1 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 1, 2009
The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh) Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of...
Four short links: 22 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 22, 2009
The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (IO9) -- a great essay by Matt Jones, based on his talk at Webstock this year. Urban design is how we created alternate realities before we had iPhones, and the new technology lets us choose which science fiction future we want to inhabit. We are now a predominantly urban species,...
Four short links: 18 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 18, 2009
Echofon -- novel take on Twitter apps: sync your unread list between phone, browser, and (ultimately, they promise) desktop Twitter app. (via auchmill on Twitter) GLAM Tech (MP3) -- Radio New Zealand new technology slot about the use of technology in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. For links, see the programme page. Man With Miniature Radio...
Four short links: 16 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 16, 2009
Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?" San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a one-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members...
Four short links: 20 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 19, 2009
DIY SPY - a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer -- As proof of concept (and a cool toy for anyone who has one of these lying around), I have implemented a working Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer on TI’s ez430-RF2500 development kit ($50), a 2-part USB dongle which consists essentially of a CC2500 radio strapped to an MSP430 low-power microcontroller (detachable...
Four short links: 19 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 19, 2009
Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can...
Four short links: 22 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 22, 2009
ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson) How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via...
Four short links: 6 July 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 3, 2009
Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth) My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future! New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how...
Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Commons
By Mark SigalJune 16, 2009
Finally, having a chance to decompress following his Maker Faire visit, Mark Sigal ruminates on what Maker Faire's 78K attendees means, concluding that it's all about creative destruction, mass customization and the rise of DIY (do it yourself) class.
Four short links: 12 May 2009
By Nat TorkingtonMay 12, 2009
Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap...
What I Did Over My Winter Vacation
By James TurnerMay 2, 2009
Occasionally, I get asked to do interesting projects for various publications. Recently, I've been doing some DIY endeavors for IEEE Spectrum, the monthly magazine of (yes, you guessed it) the IEEE. My most recent project (where recent means I finished...
Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime
By John GeraciApril 27, 2009
John Geraci is a guest blogger and heads up the DIY City movement. He will be speaking about DIY City at Where 2.0 in San Jose on 5/20. Since early last friday, when I got a tip about swine flu in Mexico City from a health researcher, the team that does SickCity has been working to make the system something...
Four short links: 9 Jan 2009
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 9, 2009
Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark? End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism. The...
Maker Faire Austin is Coming this Fall
By O'Reilly MediaSeptember 12, 2008
Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It's for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. Happening October 18th and 19th at the Travis County Event Center and Fairground. Tickets for sale now at: makerfairetickets.com
Auckland University Bioengineering Institute
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 11, 2008
I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology. I've...
Why We're Failing in Math and Science
By Tim O'ReillyAugust 15, 2008
Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone. In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and...
Radar Theme: Art and Technology
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 14, 2008
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking. Watchlist: Natalie...
Radar Theme: Materials Science
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 14, 2008
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve....
Radar Theme: Make
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 5, 2008
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends were currently tracking here at O'Reilly: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.] DIY culture is back, from rocket cars to simply tweaking things you already own to make them better. People want control over their devices again, whether access to the internal computer systems of their car or...
The Last HOPE
By Jim StogdillJuly 21, 2008
The Last HOPE conference in NYC was a great mix of hardware hacking, open source, phone phreaking, lock picking, sleeping on the floor, and good old fashioned paranoia mongering.
Segway CTO Leaves for Apple as Product Design VP
By Tim O'ReillyJuly 6, 2008
Phil Torrone noticed today on the Segway Chat forums that "Doug Field, the chief technology officer at Segway who heads their entire engineering team (and has since Day 1), is leaving Segway to become a VP of product design at Apple." The announcement continues: Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will...
Exploring DIY E-Reader Platforms
By Liza DalyJune 23, 2008
Don't like any of the e-readers currently available? Here are some ideas on building your own.
O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp
By Tim O'ReillyMay 21, 2008
The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year's Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each...
Gandhi on Ubicomp
By Nat TorkingtonMay 13, 2008
Remember Gandhi's steps of a revolution? "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." For as long as I've known the term, ubiquitous computing has been largely ignored, written off as a scifi pipedream from the people who promised you AI and cars that would run on water. That's beginning to change,...
Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers
By Jesse RobbinsMay 8, 2008
There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF. There has been some incredible discussion on...
Maker Faire mimesis and open speculation
By Andy OramMay 4, 2008
Maker Faire is a string-and-duct-tape combination of O'Reilly's, Emerging Technology, Open Source, and Money:Tech conferences. The ultimate impact, like the free software movement, is to enhance everyone's mastery of their environments and both the tools and the confidence for solve one's own problems. This process--which reflects the way most of the great scientists became their mature selves--can not only increase the number of scientists and engineers, but alter the kinds of scientists and engineers they are. To anyone who's attended Maker Faire, seen what it does for children, and felt its effects on oneself, there's really nothing more to say.
Hurrah for Home Chemistry
By Dale DoughertyApril 28, 2008
Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and experimentation. Nothing quite embodies the practice of science like a...
Radar Roundup: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)
By Nat TorkingtonApril 8, 2008
The Street as Platform (Dan Hill): amazing essay by Dan Hill (yet another genius formerly at the BBC) about the invisible cloud of data in a city street. "We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. [...] This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and...
Good Devices Gone Bad
By Dale DoughertyApril 1, 2008
(This entry itself had problems after posting and it took a day to fix. A good entry gone bad.) My sister, Doreen, who is seldom on the bleeding edge of technology, bought a Kindle in January and by March she was sending it back. My Kindle was a clunker. I LOVED it and had about 15 books on it when...
I Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4)
By Dale DoughertyMarch 15, 2008
If you wonder what Maker Faire is all about, check out this video, created by eric michael berg, a video intern working with us out of New York. He came to Maker Faire Austin and put together this simple but...
The Shipyard Returns
By Dale DoughertyFebruary 23, 2008
Last May, I wrote about the City of Berkeley closing down The Shipyard. A communal workspace for artists and alternative techies, The Shipyard was organized by Jim Mason; it was built as stacks of shipping containers. After the shutdown notice...
The NYC Toy Fair for geeks, scientists and engineers
By Brady ForrestFebruary 22, 2008
MAKE Magazine spent the week at the New York City Toy Fair looking for the latest DIY, science and engineering toys. While there was a lot of awful mind-numbing toys amongst the thousands of companies MAKE found some real...
Thomas Jefferson as Inventor and Maker
By Tim O'ReillyFebruary 20, 2008
Makezine has a nice Presidents' Day entry celebrating Thomas Jefferson as an inventor and maker. Among the inventions called out: "Moldboard of least resistance" - using math, Jefferson designed a better plow to lift and turn over sod more effectively...
Slow Down and Read Make
By Dale DoughertyJanuary 22, 2008
The comic "Over the Hedge" featured Make in its January 21st strip. Thanks to Poncho Alarcon of Monterrey, Mexico who spotted the turtle named Verne reading Make. I'm working on a piece for the next issue of Make called "Slow...
Maker Movement Gaining Recognition
By Tim O'ReillyJanuary 11, 2008
There have been a number of stories in mainstream media recently recognizing the "Maker movement" exemplified by our own magazines Make: and Craft: and online sites like Etsy and Instructables. (Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Instructables.)...
A Passion for Reading
By Dale DoughertyDecember 10, 2007
Several items about books: Stephen Levy writes in his Newsweek cover story on the Kindle and Jeff Bezos: "When making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, [...] we may overlook an object that is superbly...
Advertising Homage to the DIY Spirit
By Tim O'ReillyDecember 6, 2007
Nick Dragotta, the illustrator of Howtoons, just sent a pointer to an absolutely lovely advertising video about a little nerd girl who builds a rocket to go visit Santa. It's a lovely homage to the DIY spirit celebrated in Howtoons,...
Fortune interview with Saul Griffith
By Tim O'ReillyNovember 18, 2007
Fortune has a very nice interview with Saul Griffith (see previous Radar profile), which, for the first time, discloses a bit about what his company Makani Power, is up to: "Its plans are closely held, but anyone looking for...
Maker Faire Austin in Full Swing
By Tim O'ReillyOctober 20, 2007
Maker Faire Austin is in full swing. I'm not there, having just finished up the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, recuperating at home before heading out Monday for a MySQL board meeting in London, but I'm watching the goings-on...
Maker Faire Austin this weekend
By Tim O'ReillyOctober 11, 2007
Maker Faire this spring in San Mateo drew 40,000 people and blew a lot of minds. This weekend, the Faire is coming to Austin, Texas, with highlights from San Mateo but also an amazing cast of local makers. It's...
Bill Gross is into Atoms
By Tim O'ReillyOctober 8, 2007
I was interested to get my latest copy of Business 2.0 magazine (apparently the final) and see an article about long-time internet entrepreneur Bill Gross's new focus: "moneymaking opportunities in the physical world." Erick Schonfeld, who did the interview with...
Local Recycle & Reuse Hits A Bureaucratic Roadblock
By Dale DoughertySeptember 14, 2007
Let's imagine that you set up a non-profit to recycle electronics and divert computers from going directly into landfills or otherwise being destroyed by a grinder. You look for ways to refurbish these components and possibly recombine them into functional...
Report on Barcamp Cambridge (UK)
By Tim O'ReillySeptember 12, 2007
In response to a query from foo camper Stephen Hsu about interesting people to meet with in Cambridge UK on an upcoming visit, I passed on the query in turn to UK foo Timo Hannay of Nature, who pointed me...
Revenge by Gadget
By Tim O'ReillyAugust 18, 2007
It was interesting to see the Wall Street Journal picking up on a trend we've been watching at Make: magazine, namely the emergence of devices that let people interfere with other people's devices. In an article entitled Revenge by Gadget,...
The Virtues of Print in a Web 2.0 World
By Tim O'ReillyAugust 14, 2007
Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make: Magazine did a brief interview with Publishing Executive Magazine, which included some great thoughts on how print publishers can harness the power of Web 2.0 while also playing to their own strengths. INBOX: How...
New Era of DIY
By Dale DoughertyAugust 14, 2007
Giving a talk at NI Week organized by National Instruments in Austin, TX, Chris Anderson of Wired and author of "The Long Tail" spoke about DIY and open source hardware, according to an EETimes story. I think he's pointing at...
iPhoneDevCamp
By Artur BergmanJuly 11, 2007
What was evident at this past weekend's iPhoneDevCamp, was the sheer energy displayed by the close to 400 attendees. Organised by Raven Zachary -- one of the authors of O'Reilly's iPhone hacks -- and Chris Messina, it was hosted in...
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