“Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.”

“Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers. Great hackers tend to clump together ó sometimes spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc. So you won’t attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. The tendency to clump means it’s more like the square of the environment. So it’s winner take all. At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren’t one of them, you won’t just have fewer great hackers, you’ll have zero.”

“The information presented here will be of interest to those who wish to live more simply and self-sufficiently. Incorporating the tools and techniques outlined here can dramatically decrease your dependence on petroleum, electricity, gas for heating and cooling, municipal water and sewage utilities. Once implemented these sources will be available to you perpetually.”

“Welcome to my Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. On this page, I list wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation, particularly illustration. I welcome submissions, both written and visual. Note that I’m not looking for just bad technical writing ó†there are plenty of examples of that. I’m looking for the inexplicable, the surreal and the strange.”

“This site provides a series of online textbooks covering electricity and electronics. The information provided is great for both students and hobbyists who are looking to expand their knowledge in this field. Please keep in mind that the textbooks are not 100% complete. They are a continuous piece of work, and thus will continually be updated.”

“Q&A: O’Reilly programmer and technology maven Rael Dornfest looks beyond Web services and social networking… Rael Dornfest speaks quickly but calmly when he discusses trends. The words pour out with a hint of a foreign accent; he’s glad to release what his high-bandwidth brain has already absorbed and processed. Dornfest codes software, edits books, and organizes conferences for OíReilly & Associates, the publisher of popular instructional manuals for programmers. The job gives him a close up perspective on computingís grass roots movements.”

“You are about to give a presentation about your project at a prestigious international conference. You have prepared the material. You are an experienced speaker. Surely nothing can go wrong. Or can it? Brian Kelly provides advice on the technical aspects of giving presentations.”

“Over the weekend, while revisiting some citations on patterns, I landed on Mary Lynn Manns’ and Linda Rising’s Introducing New Ideas into Organizations, which is a web page of papers and resources on the patterns of practice they and many others used over several years to introduce the concept of patterns for software design in organizations. As you might imagine, any radically new way of thinking is a tough sell, and their collection of patterns (123 page PDF) for introducing patterns is really a comprehensive cookbook of tactics that can be used to sell any new technology-related ideas in an organization.”

“Capsule endoscopy lets doctors see clear images from inside the small bowel via a tiny camera contained in a tablet no bigger than a vitamin pill.”

“We present a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D displays from cellophane and a laptop computer screen. Stereoscopy requires independent manipulation of the left and right eye views. Our technique takes advantage of two facts; the first is that the light from the liquid crystal display of a laptop computer is polarized light and therefore we can easily manipulate its transmission with a polarizer sheet. The second fact is that a cellophane half-waveplate can change the direction of polarization of light.”

“Every evolving field has its milestones, none of which exists in a vacuum. The timeline on this page shows a few significant events in science and technology that have shaped the field of technical communication. The timeline also indicates concurrent markers in the development of technical communication in general and the Society for Technical Communication in particular.” (Note: Uses frames, click the “Timeline” link)

“I’m going to show you how to glitch like a pro… Wait for something to go wrong, or force something to go wrong… Now you need to capture it before it decays… This is where the artistic bit comes in. You’ll probably want to crop the image to select the region of greatest interest…”

“What are TCPA and Palladium? TCPA stands for the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), an initiative led by Intel. Their website is here. Their stated goal is ‘a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.’ Palladium appears to be a Microsoft version which will be rolled out in future versions of Windows, will build on TCPA hardware, and will add some extra features.”

“We ask 16 of your peers about the technologies and innovations that are changing their jobs.”

“Don Norman on the value of beauty, fun and pleasure in design: Don Norman has a special interest in usability and human-centered design. He is co-founder of the Neilsen Norman Consulting Group, professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, and a trustee of the Chicago Institute of Design. He is a former head of Apple’s Advanced Technology Lab and the author of several books.”