gift guides

Secret Santa: Becky Stern – Books from Princeton Architectural Press

My recent favorite PAP title is Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (Manuel Lima). I can’t get enough of this book and immediately thought of Becky when I drew her name from the Secret Santa hat. I’ve been wanting to turn everybody onto this title. While this book is wonderful and a worthy gift all by itself, I thought I’d sweeten the pot by including another cool, more hands-on PAP title, Pinhole Cameras: DIY Guide (Chris Keeny).

Continue Reading November 23rd, 2011 Gareth Branwyn4

Gift Singularity: Steam-Powered BoilerBot

Steam. Fire. High RPM flywheel. Steel wire treads. This is not your kid brother’s vibrabot. For my Gift Singularity project, I decided to build a bristlebot like no other. I wanted to make one on a larger, more dangerous scale. And so, I present to you the Steam-Powered BoilerBot! The basic principle here is the […]

Continue Reading November 22nd, 2011 John Edgar Park6

Secret Santa: Nick Normal – 3D Scanner

When I reached my hand into the virtual MAKE Secret Santa hat and drew the name Nick Normal, I knew I needed to pick something special, thoughtful, and creative, because Nick is all of those things. I also knew that it should complement his very own Normalmeme: the (sometimes) recursive 3D printed Nick Normal bust that is all the rage.

Continue Reading November 21st, 2011 John Edgar Park8

Secret Santa: Adam Flaherty – Photo Lights

I drew Adam Flaherty for my MAKE Secret Santa. Here he is pictured toasting with Marc de Vinck at FOO camp. He’s a gadget enthusiast, and when I ran into him in the O’Reilly parking lot in Sebastopol, CA last week, he was holding a 2-liter bottle solar lantern – it looked like a bottle of light, and I’m excited to see him document his build based on this previous post.

Continue Reading November 18th, 2011 Becky Stern

Secret Santa: John Edgar Park – All-Glass Steam Still

Back in 2009, my colleague John Park published his Florence Siphon coffee brewing apparatus in MAKE Volume 17. That’s him, above, goggling up before disengaging the safety interlocks on his infernal machine. I have had the pleasure of meeting John Park on several occassions, but even if I only knew him through his hyped-up internet rockstar persona, a few things would still be obvious. For instance, he is irritatingly good-looking. Also, he takes his beverages pretty damn seriously.

Continue Reading November 17th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan16

Secret Santa Slinks Down MAKE’s Chimney

This year, along with the gift of spacetime simultaneity, we decide to give the gift of virtuality. (It’s high-concept holidays here at MAKE!) We’re playing Secret Santa amongst the Makezine staff, but we’re not actually giving each other presents. The idea is to pick a staffmember’s name from a hat, think about something you think […]

Continue Reading November 17th, 2011 Gareth Branwyn12

Gift Singularity: Give the Gift of a Strandbeest

I’m excited to be kicking off our Gift Guide Singularity series with a project I’ve wanted to do for years — build a motorized, microcontrolled Strandbeest walker. I plan to give it to a close friend who’s also a robot enthusiast. I’ll run through how I’m planning to approach the build and will follow up with some posts on my progress.

Continue Reading November 17th, 2011 Gareth Branwyn2