meandering wildly

Whatever arbitrary standards I might previously have employed for assessing my place in the world are rendered suddenly irrelevant.

Ken Jennings just linked to my blog from his.

That is all.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I have always wanted an LCD Panel for my rear window in the car. It always seemed like it would be exceedingly handy to have the ability to fire off one of several pre-canned messages or, if I had a passenger, have some kind of keyboard where they could provide context-appropriate messaging for the cars around me. “Your turn signal is on.” “Your high beams are blinding me.” “That is a very big SUV, clearly you suck.” And so forth.

LCDs are still a good idea, but one can accomplish the same goals in a cheaper, lower maintenance, and much more analog way. What I have made instead is a coil-bound flip book with 14 standard messages I might find myself needing, plus three laminated blank pages at the end on which I can add messages with dry-erase markers. The whole thing is designed to fit in my glove compartment, and has forward and mirror-image versions of each message on facing pages so that cars in front of you can read it through their rear view mirror. Obviously the messages have to be kept short to maximize font size, but other than that, the sky’s the limit. In the hopes that someone other than I can see the value in such a book, I present:

Building your own Car Quips booklet
Read the rest of this entry…

Now that Make: magazine volume 4 is hitting newsstands, I am free to link to my article from volume 3: DIY Security Bits.

Be merciful in your criticism for I was constrained to 700 words, and then edited on top of that.

The smell of it, as I remove the shipping wrap is sharp. The paper smells freshly cut and printed. It is heavier than I remember.

I glide my fingers across the gloss of the cover, down the spine.

Like any good piece of literature, it is more than the sum of its parts. There are individual pages, individual passages which are artful, beautiful. But taken as a whole it transforms, it blends and mixes and unifies. It breathes. And it speaks. It speaks about a world of possibility and the search for substance over style. Of a lost generation’s yearning to understand what is real and good and pure - maybe of every generation’s need for that sense of solidity; of gritty, healthy profundity.

Of course I devour it. The anachronism, the self-contradiction, it does not engage, it compels. Every page makes you want to live up to it, to be worthy of what it offers. It would be difficult, and expensive, but you think about who you would be if you could really master and harness those forces. You would need no other god. You could literally reach out and grab the world and form it to your will and set it back and say “There. It is done. I have created. And I have done it with love, and with precision, and it is beautiful and it is real.”

The Lee Valley annual catalog is better than porn.

The good folks at O’Reilly have finally put up the table of contents for the next volume of Make: magazine; my existence is now a matter of official record:

http://www.makezine.com/current/

Why haven’t you subscribed yet?