24 Hours of Make: Television

24 Hours of Make: Television
Building a TV show is a project in itself
Dale Dougherty | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 1 mb

It's already late on a Sunday in September in
St. Paul, Minn. In the studios of Twin Cities Public
Television (TPT), there are ten people working
on Make: television, a new PBS show that will be
a companion to this magazine.

The set is a workshop, within a larger workshop
normally used for set construction. The team is
shooting a build for Maker Workshop, the segment
that shows viewers how to make something in each
episode. It's important to get this segment right. It's
like demonstrating a recipe on a cooking show, but
the ingredients and the process are more technical.
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Warholize!

Warholize!
Turn your favorite blonde into a silk-screened glamour queen
James Grant | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 2 pgs | .3 mb

When Andy Warhol made his famous silk-screened prints of Marilyn Monroe, he started with a simple idea: use a high-contrast black-and-white photo, and overprint it with bold swatches of color. Is that idea simple enough for us to emulate it with modern image-editing software? Let's find out. This will work in Photoshop 6 or later versions.

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Surface Mount Soldering

Surface Mount Soldering
Techniques for making modern circuits
Scott Driscoll | Make Vol. 16- 2008 | Pdf | 8 pgs | 2 mb

When cellphones were housed in briefcases,
manufactured electronics had easy-to-solder
leads. Now phones fit in pockets, and the smaller
surface-mount devices (SMDs) inside are driving
through-hole components into extinction.

SMDs can cost less than their old-school equiva-
lents, and many newer devices, including most
accelerometers, are only available in SMD format.

If you design printed circuit boards, using
SMT (surface-mount technology) and putting
components on both sides makes them cheaper
and smaller. This may not matter on a robot, but it
helps a project fit into a mint tin or hang off a kite.

SMDs are designed for precise machinery to
mass-assemble onto densely packed PCBs. Their
tiny leads may look impossible for human hands
to work with, but there are several good, relatively
inexpensive methods that don't require a $1,000-
and-up professional SMT soldering station.

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Make Vol. 15- 2008: Home

Make Vol. 15- 2008: Home
Pdf | 6 pgs | 2 mb

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My Daughter's DNA

My Daughter's DNA
One father's search for the scientific answers
that no one seemed to have
Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr. | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb

If you scrape the inside of your cheek
with a pop-sicle stick and mix it with a few homely
salts and a shot of grain alcohol, you'll see a
fluffy cloud of material floating in the glass.
It looks like cotton, but it's really the code of
you. DNA is deceptively ordinary-looking.

The human genome - the totality of each person's
genes within their body - is a vast chemical space
with 6.6 billion bits of DNA information that con-
stitutes genetically what we are as Homo sapiens.
In that vastness, it's easy for a single deviant bit of
DNA to hide. I suspected that. like many of those
with genetic conditions, my daughter also had a
single DNA base that was awry. Finding that variant
is like looking for a single person in a world of 6 billion
people. It's a near-impossible task unless you have
clues for where to look, for which genes might be
altered. Clues like this always begin with the patient.
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