The 555 Man By Charles Platt While fact-checking Make: Electronics, I realized I didn’t have permission to publish a photograph that I’d found of Hans Camenzind, designer of the 555 chip. This led me to a telephone conversation that was a true delight, leaving me smiling foolishly for hours afterward. I included a brief history […]
StairSteady invented by a 16 year old maker… When not in use, the handle goes from the square section to a round at either the top or bottom of the stairs and so the handle folds away parallel with the wall and is unobtrusive. This allows the stairs to be used by both those with […]
Tim Saylor recently wrote in to me about the Gingery-style charcoal foundry he built for Chicago’s hackerspace Pumping Station: One. There’s a write-up here and a good Flickr set showing construction and use of the furnace to melt aluminum here, including some really pretty shots of the fire and sparks at night. [Thanks, Tim!]
In brewing, wort is “the liquid extracted from the mashing process during the brewing of beer or whisky. Wort contains the sugars that will be fermented by the brewing yeast to produce alcohol” [Wikipedia]. At a certain point in the brewing process, you need to cool down your wort. This ambitious homebrewmaster made a huge […]
Russia’s Conquering Zeros, The strength of post-Soviet math stems from decades of lonely productivity @ the WSJ… It may be no accident that, while some of the best American mathematical minds worked to solve one of the century’s hardest problems—the Poincaré Conjecture—it was a Russian mathematician working in Russia who, early in this decade, finally […]
Yesterday we sent out our second issue of the new Make: Newsletter. It contains news of goings on at Maker Media, several original columns (including the second installment of my Maker’s Dictionary column), and special Shed and magazine deals for newsletter subscribers only. Next month, we’re even going to launch a mini-projects column. You can […]
Mark Frauenfelder and Dan Woods got sent this letter about the latest issue of MAKE, Volume 20. We got the sender’s permission to post it here: Mark and Dan, This is Jim Kelly, the freelance tech writer in Atlanta. Hope you guys are doing well. Just wanted to write and tell you how impressed and […]
