9 ms·

Am I the only one who finds the 'maker movement' slightly embarrassing. There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movem

by meaty 14y ago

Am I the only one who finds the 'maker movement' slightly embarrassing. There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap. This isn't a flame - I'm just surprised that the application of spin managed to produce such a ton of noise.

jfischer 14y ago
I welcome the maker movement and I'm glad that what I did as a kid is now cool. I got my start in engineering by reading the manuals of my father's HeathKit projects and by building a simple computer using a Z80 and a few other chips that I got through mail order and Radio Shack. Back then, having a personal computer was much less common and I could imagine building something roughly comparable to what was on the market (Altair, Apple II, C64,...). A generation before me tinkered with Ham Radio. Today, HeathKit is out of business and Radio Shack sells overpriced consumer goods. Our electronics is now much more sophisticated and there exists a much wider gap between what one can do from on their own vs. commercial products. I think there was a dry period after the rise of PCs and before the maker movement, where there wasn't much opportunity for a hardware hobbyist. Limor and others like her are coming up with really interesting projects that are still relevant in today's world. I appreciate their re-imagination and invigoration of this hobby and hope to get my son interested when he's a bit older.
jamesbritt 14y ago
What do you mean by "same stuff"? Were you selling kits and tools to people who might not have previously thought of themselves as makers, making it super easy to jump in and get started? This is what I think she's got the attention for.
- meaty 14y ago
  Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap. Everyone sold the tools, kits and parts already. All that had been achieved is the application of hype and turning a bunch of prepackaged modules into a way of excusing the user from having to know what the hell they are doing. It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype. I think you're grossly undervaluing that. Painting by numbers, as goofy as it seems, allows relatively non-skilled people to create approximations of art. For some, that's enough. For others, that taste of making a painting motivates them to want to do more. Just getting people to pick up a paint brush and mess around with some paints can be an amazing trigger. The social aspect may help people see that, having assembled some basic Arduino thing, they could make it do a few other cool things, and other people like themselves (i.e. non-geeks) have done it, and will show them how.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    > Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap. Sounds like you're actually embarrassed that she succeeded where you did not. > It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype. Like the iPad is "just" a big iPhone. Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise. To shit on this is the most deplorable, counterproductive elitism.
    - meaty 14y ago
      Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise. Just teach them engineering! Not pussy foot around and molly coddle them.
      - pyre 14y ago
        Your approach to this comes across as the equivalent of lamenting the state of 'kids these days' because 'back in the day,' if you did something wrong the priest would 'beat some sense into you.' Some people find the idea of engineering and/or mathematics intimidating. If approached in the right way, it will 'click' for them, or at the very least their fears can be assuaged (allowing them to pursue higher learning). I take two issues with your posts here: 1) From your posts here, your approach sounds like you want to 'beat some engineering fundamentals into them.' You say that you've mentored others, so I can't believe that this is actually your approach, but your posts come across this way. This may be at lease some of the reason that people are reacting the way they are to you. 2) You seem to be lamenting the fact that some people will work on these kits, and never go further with the 'higher learning' aspect. This is to be expected. There will never be a way to convert 100% of those curious into the One True Path of Engineering Enlightenment(tm). At the very least, the people that only dabble will get past the idea that all of this 'technology stuff' is some sort of voodoo magic that the majority of the population seems to believe.
- eaurouge 14y ago
  Yes, hobbyist electronic kits were available, both in the US and the UK, in the 90s.
  - gregpilling 14y ago
    I had some in the late 70s or early 80s. Canada
    - MaysonL 14y ago
      Back in the early '60s (or late '50s) I had a thing called a Brainiac kit[0] - a minor league version of an IBM wire panel: I wired it up to play tic-tac-toe. [0] http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/ http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/
    - MaysonL 14y ago
      Back in the early '60s (or late '50s) I had a thing called a Brainiac kit[0] - a minor league version of an IBM wire panel: I wired it up to play tic-tac-toe. [0] http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/ http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/
CodeCube 14y ago
Just because others have come before doesn't negate the fact that someone else may have reached a broader audience through the use of marketing and branding.
danilocampos 14y ago
You're embarrassed by a successful entrepreneur? Can you explain to me what is embarrassing to you? Is it the making money part? Is it the understanding a market and serving it part? Is it the education and knowledge sharing to better energize and expand the market part? Is it the persistence, perseverance and timing part? Is it the creation of a legion of folks who never would have participated had they not been given the encouragement and clear marketplace part? Is it the successful marketing part? Or is it some other part that I have failed to mention? We live in a world where people made billions selling tobacco, blood diamonds, sub-prime mortgages and Justin Bieber albums. But even without those, I can see very little embarrassing about an entrepreneur channeling passion into advocacy and sales of products customers clearly value.
- meaty 14y ago
  Yes I will. I find it embarrassing in the same way as I find computer science portrayals in movies embarrassing. Hax0r the planet etc... Making money - selling overpriced modules and branded crap for way more than marginal profit (compared to say RS/Farnell/Digikey) and shipping an identity rather than tools to solve problems. Understanding the market - actually they created a new market full of flashing LED cube machines and crap which actually performs no useful function other than to make other participants in the marketed identity look cool. About the most intelligent use for all of this I've seen (which isn't served elsewhere) is a computer controlled cannabis farm and that isn't exactly going to serve the intelligence of the person who built it well [1] Education - there is very little going on there. Every person I've seen jump into this comes crawling to me for advice but then shits a brick the moment something more complicated than a 4 banger calculator is pulled. You know what a complex number is right? What do you mean you don't understand why that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source - do you know what Ohms law is? The answer is usually "no - we just googled and copied the picture". Persistence, perseverance, timing? None are relevant. Marketing - the bugbear of the whole thing. They created an identity which actually serves the participants badly. Actually you just nailed it - it is equivalent to selling Justin Bieber albums. [1] Sub-rant - the hacks I've seen people use including twist-n-tape mains cables are going to kill someone one day...
  - 14y ago
stbtrax 14y ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think more embarrassing are characters like Bre Pettis, who take an open source project(reprap) commercialize it, and then proceed to not open source their derived works.
tptacek 14y ago
I think the same thing about Google. We all have 'grep', don't we? Ooooh, look at the big company, running grep on 1,000,000 computers. Give me 1,000,000 computers and I'll run grep on them too! Don't any of you people remember Archie? Google is just Archie with a bunch of movement crap.
- vaxdigitalnh 14y ago
  I remember. I must admit it annoys me sometimes how easily impressed kids are with something like Google. And a lot of it seems to stem from "scale". The web is much larger than in 1995, computers are more powerful, but no web company can take credit for that; they are incidental beneficiaries. All these companies use the large numbers associated with today's web to impress the easily impressed.
xradionut 14y ago
Yeah, there are a ton of us old farts that have been sniffing solder flumes and flipping switches for years. :) Adafruit and newer companies of this ilk fill a need for us oldtimers and the newcomers. Many of my old sources of various parts and kits are dead, evolved or just didn't handle the transition to the internet well.
- meaty 14y ago
  The kits didn't survive, but the parts did. The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits. The whole maker movement solves this by making kits, therefore raising the bedrock abstraction for knowledge way too high. The better solution would be to teach people how to use the parts, which is my problem.
  - spamizbad 14y ago
    > The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits. Huh? If anything, in the good old days, there were WAY more kits than there are today. Besides that, hobby electronics has a long history of doing stuff like "Here's a schematic, here's a BOM, and here's a paragraph on the 'theory of operation' that assumes a solid understanding of electronics and a bunch of domain-specific stuff. Good luck!" -- Pretty much the same as it is today, except we have resources like http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ to answer our questions. Wish that stuff was around when I was younger. Kits just save you the trouble of making your own PCBs and hunting down parts on Digikey.
    - meaty 14y ago
      I think there are more kits now. There used to be kits for oscilloscopes, test equipment etc. Now these are black boxes, some of which are a joke. We had something better than stack exchange - we got an electronics book and a maths book out of the local library and studied it, understood it and developed mental models, rather than expecting a canned answer to plug in somewhere. And yes I have scars from ferric chloride accidents.
jasongullickson 14y ago
Hang on let me pause my Creative Labs Nomad and finish this call on my Palm Treo so I can respond to your comment; oh wait... Just because something is first doesn't mean it is best. Limor took something cool and made it awesome, and you can be sure that in a generation or two someone else will take her work further. I grew up hacking on Heathkits and reading Forrest Mimms books and just as Mimms did for me as a child, Adafruit's products turn a new generation on to the fun, creativity and power locked up in understanding electronics. The fact of the matter is that DIY electronics was fading out by the 1990's in no small part due to the ever tightening noose of proprietary technology and planned obsolecense in consumer electronics. In this environment, Adafruit was able to make soldering sexy and fabrication fashionable; how could anyone find fault in that?
- meaty 14y ago
  You mean Handspring Treo - yes I had one - a 180g... No awesome here if you ask me. It is packaged in shiny and shipped out of the door. Forrest Mimms books were crap to be honest. They were recipe books with very little practical use past stringing together hacks and full of all sorts of errors. Sort of a precursor to this. I think you were brought up with the electronics assembly culture, not the electronics design culture. The two are very different.
phodo 14y ago
A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude Be happy! A rising tide raises all ships (boats / skiffs / rafts / swimmers / floating bathtubs).
- jdale27 14y ago
  A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude You might want to actually read the first sentence of the article you just linked to. meaty is not experiencing "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others".
ChuckMcM 14y ago
When I was in high school I joined the Amateur Radio club, I built a radio from a kit that we purchased from a company called Heathkit, I talked to high school students in Vancouver Canada and Hawaii and Texas and Puerto Rico on that radio, for 'free' with no Internet. I say all that not to brag but to relate how it changed me. I went from a kid living in what was the small town of Las Vegas to talking to people all over the place with a piece of gear I built from parts. That changed my thinking permanently from "people could build something to do ..." to "I could build something to do ..." I was truly sad that as my kids were growing up the world was actively conspiring to keep the knowledge about how things work away from them. In the US at least there is a tremendous amount of narrative that rides along on the 'don't try this at home' meme. Silly stuff like learning to build campfires and sharpen a pocket knife, and stuff like changing the timing of your vehicle's ignition. The problem with that is that kids believe it. They start believing its somebody else's job to invent the new things, to think outside the box, and to do stuff. Into that sadness walked folks who said "You know, I'm going to make stuff you can tinker with." "I'm going to sell kits for people to make silly things and amazing things and I'm going to provide all the information they need to modify or improve or destroy them." They needed a word for people who did stuff like that. "Do-er" never caught on, "Hobbyist" was to generic, "Hacker" got sideswiped by the media, "Nerd" and "Geek" were epithets, so somebody started calling these folks "Makers" in the sense that they made things. And its wonderfully non-specific so people who "make" fabric are just as much makers and people who "make" technology gizmos. Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung back a bit and folks like Limor have helped that effort. That folks would embrace that and push back against those who would protect the status quo of not letting you know how things work, sometimes it requires a noisy and brash "movement." People are much more motivated when they are told "No you can't know that" it seems.
wglb 14y ago
Judging from the comments, yes, you are.
- meaty 14y ago
  Judging by the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, I think there is a divided opinion which needs discussing. I'm open to both sides of the argument.
helmut_hed 14y ago
There's a great deal of value in popularizing, mass producing, and otherwise making technology accessible to the general public. And it's real work, too - it's just not the strictly technical stuff we all love, but solving other problems like organization, publicity, fundraising, etc. etc. Presumably that's why her award is "Entrepreneur of the Year" and not "Circuit Hacker of the Year". IMO it's worthy of celebration.
noonespecial 14y ago
What does it mean when I discover that the things I've been doing forever have suddenly become a "movement"? I was right all along. (Perhaps if the movement gets big enough, my son won't get bullied and called a freak for tinkering like I did. Sounds like win to me.)
tricky_t 14y ago
"There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap." That's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way for people to buy your kits and learn from your vast engineering knowledge, so they've all started giving their money to someone else. Whose fault is that? Talk is cheap. Consider putting your money where your mouth is.

by meaty 14y ago

jfischer 14y ago

I welcome the maker movement and I'm glad that what I did as a kid is now cool. I got my start in engineering by reading the manuals of my father's HeathKit projects and by building a simple computer using a Z80 and a few other chips that I got through mail order and Radio Shack. Back then, having a personal computer was much less common and I could imagine building something roughly comparable to what was on the market (Altair, Apple II, C64,...). A generation before me tinkered with Ham Radio. Today, HeathKit is out of business and Radio Shack sells overpriced consumer goods. Our electronics is now much more sophisticated and there exists a much wider gap between what one can do from on their own vs. commercial products. I think there was a dry period after the rise of PCs and before the maker movement, where there wasn't much opportunity for a hardware hobbyist. Limor and others like her are coming up with really interesting projects that are still relevant in today's world. I appreciate their re-imagination and invigoration of this hobby and hope to get my son interested when he's a bit older.

jamesbritt 14y ago

What do you mean by "same stuff"? Were you selling kits and tools to people who might not have previously thought of themselves as makers, making it super easy to jump in and get started? This is what I think she's got the attention for.

meaty 14y ago
Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap. Everyone sold the tools, kits and parts already. All that had been achieved is the application of hype and turning a bunch of prepackaged modules into a way of excusing the user from having to know what the hell they are doing. It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype. I think you're grossly undervaluing that. Painting by numbers, as goofy as it seems, allows relatively non-skilled people to create approximations of art. For some, that's enough. For others, that taste of making a painting motivates them to want to do more. Just getting people to pick up a paint brush and mess around with some paints can be an amazing trigger. The social aspect may help people see that, having assembled some basic Arduino thing, they could make it do a few other cool things, and other people like themselves (i.e. non-geeks) have done it, and will show them how.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  > Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap. Sounds like you're actually embarrassed that she succeeded where you did not. > It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype. Like the iPad is "just" a big iPhone. Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise. To shit on this is the most deplorable, counterproductive elitism.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise. Just teach them engineering! Not pussy foot around and molly coddle them.
    - pyre 14y ago
      Your approach to this comes across as the equivalent of lamenting the state of 'kids these days' because 'back in the day,' if you did something wrong the priest would 'beat some sense into you.' Some people find the idea of engineering and/or mathematics intimidating. If approached in the right way, it will 'click' for them, or at the very least their fears can be assuaged (allowing them to pursue higher learning). I take two issues with your posts here: 1) From your posts here, your approach sounds like you want to 'beat some engineering fundamentals into them.' You say that you've mentored others, so I can't believe that this is actually your approach, but your posts come across this way. This may be at lease some of the reason that people are reacting the way they are to you. 2) You seem to be lamenting the fact that some people will work on these kits, and never go further with the 'higher learning' aspect. This is to be expected. There will never be a way to convert 100% of those curious into the One True Path of Engineering Enlightenment(tm). At the very least, the people that only dabble will get past the idea that all of this 'technology stuff' is some sort of voodoo magic that the majority of the population seems to believe.
eaurouge 14y ago
Yes, hobbyist electronic kits were available, both in the US and the UK, in the 90s.
- gregpilling 14y ago
  I had some in the late 70s or early 80s. Canada
  - MaysonL 14y ago
    Back in the early '60s (or late '50s) I had a thing called a Brainiac kit[0] - a minor league version of an IBM wire panel: I wired it up to play tic-tac-toe. [0] http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/ http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/
  - MaysonL 14y ago
    Back in the early '60s (or late '50s) I had a thing called a Brainiac kit[0] - a minor league version of an IBM wire panel: I wired it up to play tic-tac-toe. [0] http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/ http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/

CodeCube 14y ago

Just because others have come before doesn't negate the fact that someone else may have reached a broader audience through the use of marketing and branding.

danilocampos 14y ago

You're embarrassed by a successful entrepreneur? Can you explain to me what is embarrassing to you? Is it the making money part? Is it the understanding a market and serving it part? Is it the education and knowledge sharing to better energize and expand the market part? Is it the persistence, perseverance and timing part? Is it the creation of a legion of folks who never would have participated had they not been given the encouragement and clear marketplace part? Is it the successful marketing part? Or is it some other part that I have failed to mention? We live in a world where people made billions selling tobacco, blood diamonds, sub-prime mortgages and Justin Bieber albums. But even without those, I can see very little embarrassing about an entrepreneur channeling passion into advocacy and sales of products customers clearly value.

meaty 14y ago
Yes I will. I find it embarrassing in the same way as I find computer science portrayals in movies embarrassing. Hax0r the planet etc... Making money - selling overpriced modules and branded crap for way more than marginal profit (compared to say RS/Farnell/Digikey) and shipping an identity rather than tools to solve problems. Understanding the market - actually they created a new market full of flashing LED cube machines and crap which actually performs no useful function other than to make other participants in the marketed identity look cool. About the most intelligent use for all of this I've seen (which isn't served elsewhere) is a computer controlled cannabis farm and that isn't exactly going to serve the intelligence of the person who built it well [1] Education - there is very little going on there. Every person I've seen jump into this comes crawling to me for advice but then shits a brick the moment something more complicated than a 4 banger calculator is pulled. You know what a complex number is right? What do you mean you don't understand why that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source - do you know what Ohms law is? The answer is usually "no - we just googled and copied the picture". Persistence, perseverance, timing? None are relevant. Marketing - the bugbear of the whole thing. They created an identity which actually serves the participants badly. Actually you just nailed it - it is equivalent to selling Justin Bieber albums. [1] Sub-rant - the hacks I've seen people use including twist-n-tape mains cables are going to kill someone one day...
- 14y ago

stbtrax 14y ago

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think more embarrassing are characters like Bre Pettis, who take an open source project(reprap) commercialize it, and then proceed to not open source their derived works.

tptacek 14y ago

I think the same thing about Google. We all have 'grep', don't we? Ooooh, look at the big company, running grep on 1,000,000 computers. Give me 1,000,000 computers and I'll run grep on them too! Don't any of you people remember Archie? Google is just Archie with a bunch of movement crap.

vaxdigitalnh 14y ago
I remember. I must admit it annoys me sometimes how easily impressed kids are with something like Google. And a lot of it seems to stem from "scale". The web is much larger than in 1995, computers are more powerful, but no web company can take credit for that; they are incidental beneficiaries. All these companies use the large numbers associated with today's web to impress the easily impressed.

xradionut 14y ago

Yeah, there are a ton of us old farts that have been sniffing solder flumes and flipping switches for years. :) Adafruit and newer companies of this ilk fill a need for us oldtimers and the newcomers. Many of my old sources of various parts and kits are dead, evolved or just didn't handle the transition to the internet well.

meaty 14y ago
The kits didn't survive, but the parts did. The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits. The whole maker movement solves this by making kits, therefore raising the bedrock abstraction for knowledge way too high. The better solution would be to teach people how to use the parts, which is my problem.
- spamizbad 14y ago
  > The problem is no-one knows how to use the parts unless they are assembled into kits. Huh? If anything, in the good old days, there were WAY more kits than there are today. Besides that, hobby electronics has a long history of doing stuff like "Here's a schematic, here's a BOM, and here's a paragraph on the 'theory of operation' that assumes a solid understanding of electronics and a bunch of domain-specific stuff. Good luck!" -- Pretty much the same as it is today, except we have resources like http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ http://electronics.stackexchange.com/ to answer our questions. Wish that stuff was around when I was younger. Kits just save you the trouble of making your own PCBs and hunting down parts on Digikey.
  - meaty 14y ago
    I think there are more kits now. There used to be kits for oscilloscopes, test equipment etc. Now these are black boxes, some of which are a joke. We had something better than stack exchange - we got an electronics book and a maths book out of the local library and studied it, understood it and developed mental models, rather than expecting a canned answer to plug in somewhere. And yes I have scars from ferric chloride accidents.

jasongullickson 14y ago

Hang on let me pause my Creative Labs Nomad and finish this call on my Palm Treo so I can respond to your comment; oh wait... Just because something is first doesn't mean it is best. Limor took something cool and made it awesome, and you can be sure that in a generation or two someone else will take her work further. I grew up hacking on Heathkits and reading Forrest Mimms books and just as Mimms did for me as a child, Adafruit's products turn a new generation on to the fun, creativity and power locked up in understanding electronics. The fact of the matter is that DIY electronics was fading out by the 1990's in no small part due to the ever tightening noose of proprietary technology and planned obsolecense in consumer electronics. In this environment, Adafruit was able to make soldering sexy and fabrication fashionable; how could anyone find fault in that?

meaty 14y ago
You mean Handspring Treo - yes I had one - a 180g... No awesome here if you ask me. It is packaged in shiny and shipped out of the door. Forrest Mimms books were crap to be honest. They were recipe books with very little practical use past stringing together hacks and full of all sorts of errors. Sort of a precursor to this. I think you were brought up with the electronics assembly culture, not the electronics design culture. The two are very different.

phodo 14y ago

A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude Be happy! A rising tide raises all ships (boats / skiffs / rafts / swimmers / floating bathtubs).

jdale27 14y ago
A bit of Schadenfreude? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude You might want to actually read the first sentence of the article you just linked to. meaty is not experiencing "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others".

ChuckMcM 14y ago

When I was in high school I joined the Amateur Radio club, I built a radio from a kit that we purchased from a company called Heathkit, I talked to high school students in Vancouver Canada and Hawaii and Texas and Puerto Rico on that radio, for 'free' with no Internet. I say all that not to brag but to relate how it changed me. I went from a kid living in what was the small town of Las Vegas to talking to people all over the place with a piece of gear I built from parts. That changed my thinking permanently from "people could build something to do ..." to "I could build something to do ..." I was truly sad that as my kids were growing up the world was actively conspiring to keep the knowledge about how things work away from them. In the US at least there is a tremendous amount of narrative that rides along on the 'don't try this at home' meme. Silly stuff like learning to build campfires and sharpen a pocket knife, and stuff like changing the timing of your vehicle's ignition. The problem with that is that kids believe it. They start believing its somebody else's job to invent the new things, to think outside the box, and to do stuff. Into that sadness walked folks who said "You know, I'm going to make stuff you can tinker with." "I'm going to sell kits for people to make silly things and amazing things and I'm going to provide all the information they need to modify or improve or destroy them." They needed a word for people who did stuff like that. "Do-er" never caught on, "Hobbyist" was to generic, "Hacker" got sideswiped by the media, "Nerd" and "Geek" were epithets, so somebody started calling these folks "Makers" in the sense that they made things. And its wonderfully non-specific so people who "make" fabric are just as much makers and people who "make" technology gizmos. Over the last 10 years the pendulum has swung back a bit and folks like Limor have helped that effort. That folks would embrace that and push back against those who would protect the status quo of not letting you know how things work, sometimes it requires a noisy and brash "movement." People are much more motivated when they are told "No you can't know that" it seems.

wglb 14y ago

Judging from the comments, yes, you are.

meaty 14y ago
Judging by the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, I think there is a divided opinion which needs discussing. I'm open to both sides of the argument.

helmut_hed 14y ago

There's a great deal of value in popularizing, mass producing, and otherwise making technology accessible to the general public. And it's real work, too - it's just not the strictly technical stuff we all love, but solving other problems like organization, publicity, fundraising, etc. etc. Presumably that's why her award is "Entrepreneur of the Year" and not "Circuit Hacker of the Year". IMO it's worthy of celebration.

noonespecial 14y ago

What does it mean when I discover that the things I've been doing forever have suddenly become a "movement"? I was right all along. (Perhaps if the movement gets big enough, my son won't get bullied and called a freak for tinkering like I did. Sounds like win to me.)

tricky_t 14y ago

"There are plenty of us before Limor who did the same stuff without the fanfare and movement crap." That's true. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way for people to buy your kits and learn from your vast engineering knowledge, so they've all started giving their money to someone else. Whose fault is that? Talk is cheap. Consider putting your money where your mouth is.