Marla Parker's Weblog

Discovering Make: technology on your time

I met with Dale Dougherty and a couple of the other cool folks from O'Reilly a few weeks ago, before ETech. Before the end of the meeting, Dale proudly handed me and my boss a copy of the new magazine Make: technology on your time. It is small, thick, colorful, with a busy cover. I tossed it in my bag and forgot about it.

I work from home. Last week my husband noticed the neglected magazine sitting in my home office and picked it up to browse. I kept working.

"What is this?" (I told him.)

Later: "This magazine is weird."

Later: "Where did you say you got this?"

Later: "This magazine is GREAT! It totally rocks!"

Later, after laughter: "I have to have this magazine. You have to get it for me! Listen to this..." (He summarized some articles, including the Urban Camouflage and the homebrew Apple II story.)

By now, I've more or less read (guiltily at first, and then gleefully) practically the entire magazine. I skipped the longer how-tos of the things I have no intention of doing. (We planned the route of our backyard monorail over dinner. Kids were disappointed that it cannot go up or down hills, but they like the idea of bridging the "ravine.")

Besides the many, many detailed bits of the magazine that I love, I mean specific content in this issue, the best thing is an overall feeling of wild optimism.

OK here is a short list of what I loved in this issue: Backyard Monorails, Fab Lab, Heirloom Technology, the kids' books recommended at the end of Heirloom Technology (I'm getting two from the library, two from Amazon), Gauss Rifle.

So I'll get Mike the magazine, and maybe someday he can contribute to a how-to build an owl box with video, a subset of the larger subject of nest cams.

Nest Cams?

We've had a live feed to an owl box for the past six years, with 4-5 baby owls hatching every year. This year, as an experiment, we let the squirrel who tried to move in last year stay. Results: we now have a squirrel cam instead of an owl cam. The baby squirrel was really tiny when we first noticed it. We are sort of surprised the owl did not chase the squirrel away. Not sure what will happen next year! I think we'll chase away the squirrel and see if the owls will return.