Magazines have always been my favorite form of media. Having grown up in rural areas of the South, I found the window to my interests opened in their glossy pages. The big photos and words from other worlds kept me connected to all that I wanted to be a part of. If this sounds a bit romantic, it was. The grocery store newsstand and the mailbox were the modem jacks of the time.
Back then, it was music, skateboarding, and BMX magazines, and though those still capture my attention on a …

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Last week, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation — a nonprofit mouthpiece for the entertainment and software industries — unveiled plans to spread its protectionist ideas to the nation’s schools and libraries through the distribution of a curriculum titled “Think First, Copy Later.”  ”Think First, Copy Later” and other intimidating educational materials were produced by the MPAA, RIAA, Business Software Alliance, and other content holders to scare students into believing that making copies is wrong.
EFF knows that the creators and innovators of tomorrow don’t need more intimidation.  What …

The following comes to me and to you from foward-thinking friends Coco Conn and R. U. Sirius. Coco passed on the announcement and Ken did the magazine. It’s the second issue of h+ Magazine, and, well, I’ll let him tell you about it: 

In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006),* Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian wordview that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. Either way, the veneer between the two is definitely permeable, but one needn’t believe in magic to see how.

I just returned to Austin from San Diego, where I was head-deep in the world of five-gallon buckets, toolbelts, aluminum ladders, and drooling paint cans. Yes, construction. You see, my friend Josh Beagle and his partners Ray and Albert are starting a meat-curing business, and I spent the last several days helping them build out their new warehouse facility.

Wow, where does one start? The makers of the world convened in Austin, Texas one weekend in October to make, build, rebuild, battle, and exchange their stuff and their ideas. I even had visitors from two other states join in the fun. Perhaps the best way to approach a summary of Maker Faire’s controlled chaos, of this menagerie of goods and good-doers, of this DIY carnival, of the impossible to sum up is a list with occasional pictures…

My friend and mentor Howard Bloom created this video with Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell, and a crew of renegade NASA insiders to raise awareness about space-based solar power as a possible remedy for the global energy crisis. They introduce the piece with the line “A Message for the Next President of the United States.”

My friend Ben Hiltzheimer once said that riding a motorcycle was a such head-clearing experience because while riding all you could think about was not dying. Riding a fixed-gear bicycle is similarly head-clearing. It’s chess not checkers. Being connected to the bike and its motion feels right in a way that riding bikes with freewheels and brakes never did, but you have to think several moves ahead.

The staff over at O’Reilly Media’s magazines, Make and Craft, asked around to see what features The Ultimate Notebook would include. The result is their newly published Maker’s Notebook. “Clearly, lots of DIYers dream of designing their own project notebooks. We incorporated as many ideas from this Notebook Braintrust as possible,” explains Gareth Branwyn, friend and contributing editor to Make. Well, being the journaling, notebook geek that I am, I got my hands on a copy as soon as I could.

The much-discussed, much-explored interface between humans and machines is seemingly our final frontier. Comparing the interface to the Victorian novel and the 1950s television show (both of which shaped society’s understanding at the time), Steven Johnson wrote, “There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.” The graphical user interface has come to represent all of the many processes going on inside the computer — and the way we interact with each other through them.