Magazine encourages do-it-yourselfism ideas

SEATTLE – You’ve driven 50 miles into the deep woods, and snowy weather is expected within 10 hours. Your cell phone is out of range and out of juice. And “someone” left the parking lights on, so the car battery is dead, too.

If you were MacGyver, or a Make magazine subscriber, you might think to crush a few aspirin from the first aid kit into the battery, add some water, wait awhile, maybe pray, then crank the engine and hope it works.

Or you could try make-shifting a battery charger with potato chips, lime juice and a couple of cans of cola.

“Hey, if it works, it works. That’s the whole point of learning how things are made,” said Phillip Torrone, surveying the ranks of robots flanking his Wallingford dining room. “There could be a hundred different ways of achieving one result. The fun is figuring out something that works, then sharing it with everybody else.”

People with whom this might be worth sharing are subscribing in droves to Make: technology on your own time.

Tinkerers and dabblers can find do-it-yourself inspiration in the new mook (a cross between a magazine and a book) for technology lovers and their secret basement projects. Since its debut in February, the publication has reached a quarterly circulation of more than 54,000 copies.

And it’s got an even bigger following online, where Torrone, Make’s associate editor, runs an active blog for subscribers who want to share their inventions with the emerging “maker culture.”

“I don’t know if it will be like a sewing circle kind of thing, but people are starting to get together,” Torrone said.

Makers are homegrown inventors creating mostly useful gadgetry out of broken-down and outdated consumer electronics. These hobby geeks, once holed up in the garage with their pet projects, are now finding community online. They are also eagerly sharing their ideas through Make and other emerging sci-tech publications.

Such tinkerers might try, for example, to come up with the cheapest methods to:

• Make a rail gun out of a wooden ruler and magnet.

• Turn an electric blanket into a cooler cozy for a beer keg.

• Take aerial photographs from a kite.

• Transform an Atari 2600 into a fully functional personal computer and DVD player.

Call it Martha Stewart for dads.

The living and dining rooms of Torrone’s home are crisscrossed with cables. Robots line the bookshelves. PDAs several years old fill a tall glass vase, waiting to be dismantled for parts.

In the corner, Torrone has rigged an old pay phone to ring when someone calls him using the free Skype Internet telephone service.

Skype typically charges Internet users who want to call a normal phone. But Torrone believes that if he can teach people how to recycle obsolete pay phones into voice over Internet protocol devices, he will have made the world a better, less-expensive place.

“I represent the mortal ability for the human being to hack,” Torrone explains.

He also represents the mortal ability of a man to negotiate space with his wife, who got to turn a spare bedroom into a closet in exchange for letting Torrone have his “workshop.”

“I don’t know too many wives who would allow ‘that’ to be their dining room,” said Beth Goza, pointing to the agglomeration of computer equipment spread out across the table.

“I’ve always been kind of geeked-out myself,” said Goza, who works at Microsoft. “But, as is often the case, I’m the assistant.”

She knits. He makes a robot out of a broken computer mouse.

And whenever Torrone gets to talking with another maker, the conversation quickly turns to potato cannons and homemade rocketry.

But as Goza puts it, not all maker technology has to be “manly and lame and boring.” Women like their own techno-stuff, she said, reaching into her purse for a cell phone decked out in pink rhinestones glued in floral patterns around the shell.

“I think people have rediscovered the joy of making things with their own hands,” said Mark Frauenfelder, Make’s editor-in-chief. “There’s a great deal of pleasure to be had in modifying your technology, because it then becomes part of you on some level.”

Frauenfelder believes that people may have forgotten that joy, in an economy that has made buying new gadgets cheaper than fixing or modifying old stuff. Do-it-yourselfism is about taking back control of a world that has become increasingly complex, he said.

There is also a human need to be creative, which Goza theorizes is why a lot of women like to do crafts and why men like to hack. Hacking gadgets is basically modifying a device to make it operate better or differently from the way intended.

Torrone dreams of becoming a new sort of Mr. Wizard by streaming how-to videos through Make’s Web site. He wants to show children how science and technology can be cool.

He loves the idea of more people turning their garages into workshops, where they dissect machines to teach their children about the inner workings of everyday electronics.

He hopes to draw inquisitive kids to Make with articles about playing music and videos on a PSP, or making miniature-marshmallow shooters.

“When cars first came out, you had to work on them. That was part of the deal. You bought a Model T and you got a new profession: You were a mechanic. Now, few people change their own oil,” Torrone said. “The average consumer loses out, because devices are so complicated that they don’t know how they work or how to fix them.

“There is no reason that a reasonably educated person should not be able to understand the basic principles of science and electronics. One thing that Make does is demystify the technology.”

Like a lengthy explanation about how batteries work, and how people might try to make one if they get stuck in the boonies.

The magazine challenges readers to use their noggins and “makeshift quotient,” or MQ, to overcome such problems with limited resources.

In every issue, Make poses a real-life scenario for readers to MacGyver through. The deep-woods question was presented in the first edition. Next up: creating a drinkable water supply for 20 to 30 people from a contaminated East Asian watering hole in two days with bamboo tubes, an endless supply of coconuts and a bike with two flat tires.

Good luck.