This is the work of Szymon Klimek, who has been honored by the Internet Craftsmanship Museum. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

We're ecstatic about the fact that we now have Maker Shed kiosks, with magazines, books, and electronics kits, in several California Fry's stores. We think this is big news, not only for Maker Media, but for all indie makers -- a major retail chain is now giving small kit-makers this level of exposure. And, we think it's particularly cool that we designed and built these kiosks in-house, and even personally delivered them to the stores! What other publisher could claim that?

Here, Assoc. Publisher and General Manager of Maker retail, Dan Woods explains more:

Maker Shed kiosks are now installed in four of Fry's largest superstores. Each kiosk merchandises current and back issues of MAKE, Make: Project books, and kits, with an emphasis on maker-made kits produced by indie makers like Limor Fried's MintyBoost, Mitch Altman's Brain Machine, Ken Murphy's Blinky Bugs, Dale Wheat's Tiny Cylon and Wee Blinky kits, and Amy Parness and Ariel Churi's DIY Design Electronics kits. This indie maker angle was a really important selling point to Fry's. The kiosk's themselves are all-MAKE in their design and construction. The challenge was to create a merchandising/branding kiosk that could show off maker-made kits, as well as our books and magazines, all in a 2' X 2' footprint. The design we came up with incorporates the Maker Faire workbench framing as the internal structure, refurbished fence boards from West Sonoma, and some nicely weathered corrugated shed aluminum that was locally salvaged. The result is a nice combination of weathered shed and repurposed industrial tubing. They're uniquely MAKE, and Fry's is ecstatic. In fact, they were even trucked down and setup by Heather (Harmon-Cochran) and Rob (Bullington) in one day.

These are the stores that currently have kiosks. (San Diego will be set up by Fry's staff next week)

San Diego, CA
9825 Stonecrest Boulevard
(858) 514-4500

San Jose, CA
550 E. Brokaw Road
(408) 487-1000

Fremont, CA
43800 Osgood Road
(510) 252-5300

Sunnyvale, CA
1077 East Arques Avenue
(408) 617-1300

MAKE editor and publisher Dale Dougherty has his five minutes of creativity fire-starting with this recent presentation of "Blessed are the Cheesemakers," at Ignite Sebastopol II. Take a whiff of "the feet of God."

Ignite

Back in August of 2006, on the pages of MAKE Volume 07, Colin Berry shared the story of his maker brother Kevin Berry and the role that the Soap Box Derby played in his short life. This intimate story moved us all. In October of 2006, Colin read the story as part of our Maker Files series, with an introduction by Dale Dougherty, MAKE's editor and publisher. Below is Colin's story in full. To hear him tell the tale, here is the MP3. Or you can get the audio delivered automatically with iTunes.

Spinout
Was building a Soap Box Derby racer my brother's last best chance at escaping his fate?
By Colin Berry

All his life, my brother Kevin was plagued with terrible luck. It began when he was a teenager in the early 70s, in Longmont, Colorado — our hometown — and soon became something of a family legend. If the Trojan theater was giving away free tickets to Planet of the Apes, the kid in front of Kevin in line would get the last one. If Kevin sold enough newspaper subscriptions to win a clock radio, it was broken when he opened the box. If one of his friends shoplifted a pack of Odd Rods bubblegum cards on the way home from school, Kevin got collared for it. It was a pattern. He weathered it well, half-joking about his luck with his shy, gap-toothed grin, but over time it took a terrible toll.

In shop class, however, Kevin seemed to step out from its shadow. He was adept with tools and proved himself a skilled carpenter at an early age. I was seven years younger and remember marveling at the projects he brought home from junior high school: a varnished gun rack; a Newton's Cradle, with its five suspended steel balls; a sturdy set of bedroom shelves for his Revell models. Looking back, it follows that the noisy, meditative setting of the woodshop appealed to Kevin. It was a place where no one shouted at him and where no electronic parts could mysteriously fail.

In our basement, Dad had a woodshop, too, a flagstone-floored, fluorescent-lit grotto with an oversized plank workbench, barrels of wood scraps, and tools hung on a pegboard. It was here, from 1969 to 1972, that my brother built four Soap Box Derby racers. He would start in late winter, when snow still covered the ground outside, transforming a small stack of lumber and paper sacks of hardware into a teen-sized, gravity-propelled vehicle.

Balancing the shell of the car across two sawhorses, he built each the same way: a pine plank floorboard supported several plywood bulkheads, to which he anchored Masonite sides and a top. Each car ran on four red-rimmed Soap Box Derby wheels, controlled by a simple cable steering system and foot-pedal drag brake. Each was painted and then lettered with Kevin's name, number, and sponsor logo (Weicker Moving and Storage). And each one got faster.

In a follow-up to the the WSJ piece, "Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis," NPR did an OnPoint segment on "Tinkering and American Innovation," with the article's author, Justin Lahart, Bre Pettis, and David Hounshell, Tech and Social Change professor at CMU.

Tinkering and American Innovation

Motherboard has this wonderful look inside the world (and workshop) of Ralph Baer, creator of Pong, Simon, and other electronic/video game classics.

Ralph Baer and His All-Purpose Boxes

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 unlimited and limited mobility in the household.

Invented by Sheffield girl Ruth Amos who won the prestigious Young Engineer for Great Britain award for its creation, the StairSteady is produced in Sheffield, by one of the top engineering companies, to the highest standards and is distributed by her own company StairSteady Ltd.

StairSteady Ltd was set up in 2006 by Ruth Amos, when Ruth was just 16years old. It all began with her GCSE resistant materials project. The original project idea came about when Ruth's teacher's father had a stroke and was told he needed to continue to exercise but was unable to use his stairs. A StairSteady would have enabled him to do that.

From Tom Spina Designs.

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 triumphed.

Decades before, in the Soviet Union, math placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand; and, worst of all, mathematics lay claim to singular and knowable truths—when the regime had staked its own legitimacy on its own singular truth. All this made mathematicians suspect. Still, math escaped the purges, show trials and rule by decree that decimated other Soviet sciences.

Three factors saved math. First, Russian math happened to be uncommonly strong right when it might have suffered the most, in the 1930s. Second, math proved too obscure for the sort of meddling Joseph Stalin most liked to exercise: It was simply too difficult to ignite a passionate debate about something as inaccessible as the objective nature of natural numbers (although just such a campaign was attempted). And third, at a critical moment math proved immensely useful to the state.

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 cooler (96 ft of tubing) for his 22 gallon brewpot. [via Zedomax]

Massive DIY wort cooler 96ft long

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 subscribe (free) to the Make: Newsletter here.

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 inspired I am with issue 20 of MAKE magazine. The interview (and foreword) with Adam Savage was extremely fun to read. As a father of a 2.5 year old, I too am anxious to encourage my son to explore, take apart, design, and enjoy the creative process.

Issue 20 was directed at kids, and I think you hit the bullseye, with force behind it. I hope this issue is one of your bestselling ones, and I for one am encouraging parents I know to pick up a copy. I'm also purchasing a few extra copies for some teachers I know.

My son just got done watching me configure my new CNC machine to mill out some fun designs on wood; his eyes could not have opened any wider. I wish all kids could have access to this level of technology and machinery, but unfortunately, our school systems seem to be cutting shop class and art projects and focusing time and money on standardized test-taking skills... how unfortunate.

To bring this all home, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is such a demand for material/content that encourages our youth that a void has been created and cannot be filled fast enough. MAKE is in a unique spot to develop something that goes a little beyond the Maker Shed and the quarterly magazine. Maybe it's a subscription-based activity website, with monthly special projects broken down into categories such as "Do It Yourself" (no parents required), "Dad and Me" (or "Mom and Me" - projects with the parents), and more. Maybe it's a special magazine (like your Halloween special issue) that focuses on even more kid-friendly content. Or maybe a mixture of projects and inspirational interviews (Dean Kamen comes to mind) in a book format.

I'll wrap this up by saying that I, Jim Kelly, hate the three month wait between issues of MAKE... I read every issue over and over again. I'm starved for this type of content. And I'm an adult - imagine what those kids who have this creative streak inside them must feel? They're in need of something... not sure what... and maybe you guys can figure out what to offer them. Issue 20 could easily be just the tip of the iceberg.

Take care,

Jim Kelly

Thanks for your thoughts and kind words, Jim. Reaching the educational market, be it home-schooling parents or teachers in grade school and college, is an increasing focus of ours. We see the new Make: Science Room as part of that effort. We also have the Make: Education social network to reach out to educators and and to create a place where they can network with each other. We've also been working on a dynamic new project-based program of making and mentoring designed to raise the next generation of makers. We're developing this with some very innovative, high-profile partners and are very excited about the prospects. Stay tuned -- we'll be making an announcement about this in the next few months and looking for some kids to participate in a pilot program.

We'd also like to point out that there is something to tide maker parents, kids, and educators over between issues of the magazine: this website, Make: Online! Over the past year, we've been adding much more original content, regular columns, weekly projects, guest authors, and special programs. And then there are our regular Weekend Project podcasts, and special videos, like Collin Cunningham's MAKE Presents series, and Marc de Vinck's how-to and kit build videos. There's a lot going on here, so we hope you're getting your daily dose of MAKE from us. If there's anything else you'd like to see us do here to satisfy your MAKE fix, please let us know. We're always looking for ways to expand and improve the site.

From the pages of MAKE:

Want to know how to build a hydrogen rocket? How about a laser light show in a lunchbox? Or a simple remote-controlled videocam car? Or maybe you want to go old-school and build a wooden mini sailboat or toy car launcher? All this and tons more, plus revealing photos of Adam Savage's maker childhood, can all be found in MAKE, Volume 20, "For Kids of All Ages." Get your individual copy in the Maker Shed, or subscribe now.

In July, 1969, a ham radio operator named Larry Baysinger, from Louisville, KY, used a 20-year old radio from an army tank and a homemade folded dipole antenna array to listen to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon. This page is an archive with the original newspaper piece, photos, PDFs of a couple of radio hobby mags and books of the time, and a sort of where are they now update. MP3 of Baysinger's recordings of the audio are also there. Fascinating stuff.

Lunar Eavesdropping in Louisville, Kentucky

There are lots of custom knife-makers out there, and plenty that specialize in exotic or fantasy knives, but there is only one I know of who has gone so far as to invent a fictional world, complete with geography, mythology, and history, as a context for his work.

Virgil England installed and photographed this life-size dragon skeleton in Chugach National Forest in Alaska in 1990. In his own words:

The part of the Dragon that is exposed is about 18 feet long. The wing is 15 feet high. The skeleton is carved whale bone and forged mild steel with reindeer rawhide stretched and stitched over the bones. I did it to display a 59 1/2 inch two handed sword called "The Veil of Tears". After the ten hour photo session It went to a three day showing in San Francisco then to the buyers.

Virgil's handmade knives are highly sought after among collectors, and you can view more of his edged work at his personal website. The photos of his "Chugach Draegon" that appear with this post are being published online here for the first time. Click on each to see it at full resolution. [Thanks, Virgil!]

Don't forget, we're now publishing a monthly Make: Newsletter. The November edition will be emailed out this coming week. The newsletter covers news and happenings around Maker Media, what's going on here at Make: Online, and contains original material, such as my new "Maker's Dictionary" column, a growing glossary of perennial tech terms and cutting-edge DIY, science, and tech-related jargon and slang.

You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Here to see last month's edition.

William Kamkwamba, is a senior at the African Leadership Academy, a pan-African high school in Johannesburg, South Africa. A 2007 and 2009 TEDGlobal Fellow, Kamkwamba has been profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and his inventions have been displayed at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. He's often invited to tell his story at such venues as the World Economic Forum in Africa, CES, Aspen Ideas Festival, Maker Faire Africa and the African Economic Forum.

During the evening, William was introduced by Amy Smith, and spoke with his coauthor Bryan Mealor, an American journalist covering Africa. Together, they told stories of life in Malawi and William's experiences making and fighting to learn in the midst of a devastating famine.

After the break, there is more video from the evening.

MAKE columnist and Boing Boing super-blogger, Cory Doctorow, has just released his latest novel, called Makers(!) I just got my copy and tucked into it. So far, so awesome. Cory's books always crackle with such amazing ideas, technological and cultural hacks, that seem just over the horizon, or already in some sketchy warehouse or nerd's basement, just on the other side of town. Makers is no exception.

Cory says, of his latest effort:

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Publisher's Weekly writes:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Congrats, Cory!

Here's the book's website.

Here's a channel NY1 report on the recent Pop!Tech conference in Camden, ME. The piece profiles three MAKE contributors, Reuben Margolin, Zach Debord, and Mike Gould. Reuben has shown his work and spoken at Maker Faire, Zach Debord's BEAMbots have been featured in MAKE (and on the cover of The Best of MAKE), and Mike Gould's Laser Lunchbox project is in the forthcoming issue, Volume 20, of MAKE. Great job, fellas!

Science Inspires Visionary Pop!Tech Artists

Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week on the internet. I'm moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel. [via Neatorama]

This fascinating piece, from This American Life (animated by Chris Ware), tells the story of an elementary school where a couple of kids made a TV camera out of cardboard and tempera paint. Soon, the cardboard camera craze went viral and it seemed like every kid was either a camera operator, an anchor, or some other faux TV production person. Then things went positively post-modern.

Chris Ware animation of This American Life story

These "musical towers" are featured in the short film 901: After 45 Years of Working by Eames Demetrios. 901 documents the dismantling of the office of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1988 following Ray's death. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.

The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.

The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15' tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.

There does not seem to be any video of the towers in operation available online, but 901: After 45 Years of Working is available on the first disc of The Films of Charles and Ray Eames, which also includes final and rough draft versions of the classic Powers of Ten. Highly recommended.

I'm going to invent a time machine so I can go back and persuade my parents to name me Jonathan Brilliant, which for now am this guy what made this impressive installation simply called "The Berlin Piece." [via Dude Craft]

"Spike" is a cartoonist (caution: "F-word" on the link) who says she's mastered the art of living well on an artist's income and wants to share what she's learned by writing a book, called Poorcraft: A Comic Book Guide to Frugal Urban and Suburban Living. She's using an innovative website, called Kickstarter, to try and raise money to fund the production of the book. Kickstarter allows you to post your project and solicit backers for it. Spike has a whole bunch of different pledge levels. She's looking to get $6,000 pledged. She already has $3,894 (and counting). A $5 pledge will get you a PDF of the book when it comes out, $10 gets you a signed hard copy.

The "tools" section of media artist Karl Klomp's website documents an impressive amount of bent, hacked and homebrew hardware for video manipulation. Devices such as the Failter (seen above)series go through a number of incarnations while Karl experiments with different hardware and uncovers its glitch-ability. The retro-simple feel of the enclosures give give it all a nicely 'scientific' almost medical feel. Be sure to check out his device gallery/ project list for more examples. Thanks to Becky for pointing this one out!

To "shoot," an anvil, for the record, is to blast it several hundred feet into the air using a charge of black powder. This delightful man, Gay Wilkinson, is apparently the world's champion anvil-shooter. The fireworks start at 1:30. [via Boing Boing]

If you just like us a lot (we love you too!) and want to send us some links o' love, you can post this badge on your site:

We have the HTML code, some other badge sizes, and links to other assets, such as our magazine covers, all on the link below.

We really appreciate all of the support we get from you all. It means a lot to us. Group hug!

Maker Badges

Jim Stogdill sent this to the O'Reilly Radar mailing list:

I caught this on 60 Minutes the other night and it struck me as the ultimate MAKE challenge. Guy designs his own RF therapy and machine to try to battle his leukemia. He didn't win, but looks like the tech holds real promise and is being pursued as a real and viable cancer treatment using RF to stimulate tumor-seeking gold nano particles.

[Thanks, Jim!]

The Kanzius Machine

The UK-based electronic instrument maker known simply as the Sonic Manipulator demonstrates some of his unusual audio devices for the fine people of Earth -

The Claude-a-tron - sort of a throttle-synth that seems surprisingly playable, with "pitch & volume, with oscillator modulation, bass & percussion control"

… and the Rap Rod, a push/pull controlled audio scratching device, which appears to use a handheld cassette playhead with tape samples (though more likely an advance alien technology?)

Check out the Sonic Manipulator's site for his (its?) full collection of instrument demos. [via Create Digital Music]