Around the offices at Make:, you’ll often hear editors tossing around ideas that we would love to bring to life. Donald Bell, who was one of our Projects Editors throughout most of last year was often talking about how great it would be to have a weekly maker news show. We all vehemently agreed, but never managed to get that particular idea into motion. Now that Donald is on his own, he’s decided to tackle this concept and I think he’s doing amazingly well.
He’s just beginning, and already I’m loving it.
Now watch #2 and see how he’s already improved! I feel like this is an absolute must-subscribe channel for anyone who wants a quick fix, straight to the point, run down of cool things from the maker world.
Where are you finding your news?
I used to be more of a news junkie, staying on top of things with RSS and Reddit threads. But for the purpose of this show and being able to crank it out on a predictable basis, I really have to limit the amount of time I spend going down the rabbit hole. I have a folder of bookmarks in Chrome that includes Makezine, Hackaday, Adafruit, Thingiverse, and a few out of the way places, like Atmel’s twitter feed. The formula so far, is that I’ll open up that folder as a new window full of tabs on Monday, scrape it for the best stuff, and start working on a script. I shoot the script Tuesday and post everything on Wednesday.
Can people notify you of cool things?
Absolutely. YouTube comments are a great way to give me feedback or tip me off to things. I’m also looking for great project ideas to build and review, which is how I’m spending the rest of my week. I’m also @donald on Twitter, which is mostly a place where I receive mistaken Trump tweets, but a good place for people to get in touch too.
What is the next feature you plan to add to the weekly show?
Honestly, I may subtract things. Right now I’m throwing a little bit of everything out there, including Instructable contest dates, Maker Faire dates, news, projects, tips. It may be that people only care about 3 of those things and I focus on that.
Do you plan on having guests? If so, who would you like to have on?
I think it’s just going to be a one-man show for the sake of simplicity. That said, I’m interested in eventually getting a maker interview podcast going to compliment the show and my project builds. Hopefully I can get that going before the end of the year. I just don’t want to bite off more than I can chew right now.
Donald isn’t only doing the news. As he mentioned, he’s also building projects. In this example below, he builds a TV-B-Gone kit and offers up some great insight and even good criticism.
Be sure to follow Donald on his new blog, Maker Project Lab, and subscribe to his youtube channel.
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