Fear of failure held me back from being a DIYer for many years, especially after a few early attempts at home improvement projects went awry.
Here's one of my bad habits: when I go to someone's house, I head straight to their bookshelf.
The Cat Dancer is a 30-inch piece of wire with some little cardboard cylinders on the end. My cats go crazy for it. I stuck it on the wall with the adhesive mount, but I ended up taking it off so I could hold it and play directly with my cats.
I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'
As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.
Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.'
The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.
Cleaning cat litter is an unpleasant daily chore for me, but the DuraScoop makes it much less unpleasant.
Skillshare is a terrific online learning community for creative people. It teaches you new skills through well-made videos with great production values. I've been using Skillshare to teach myself Adobe After Effects. All the videos feature people who are professionals in their field. I love this site.
John Edgar Park introduced me to the gentle art of recreational lock-picking. It's fun and potentially useful to know how to tickle tumblers in the right way to open door locks and padlocks.
In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'
