Last year we did a Father’s Day post to collect “Tips My Dad Says,” words o’ wisdom from dear ole dad, granddad, or the other father figures in our lives. We’ll be revisiting that post (one of the most popular from last year), and the downloadble “Tips My Dad Says” card, in a few days. In the meantime, for this year’s Dad’s Day celebration, we’d love to hear your stories about the most ambitious, craziest, most magnificent thing the patriarchs in your life ever made (or tried to make). Please tell us a story in the comments below. My dad was/is a maker (a general contractor by trade), and he is constantly making stuff for around the house: shelving, stools, racks, benches, fencing. But his work is entirely practical. His father, on the other hand, my “gramps,” was a maker mad-man. He was a hardware mash-up artist. He’d go to St. Vincent’s thrift store in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, come back with a box of appliances and junk and he’d invent something with what he’d found. Half of the appliances in my grandmother’s kitchen were one-of-a-kind gramps creations. The one I remember was a pita bread oven he’d made by using door hinges to attach two electric griddles to one another, one on top of the other. In their non-retirement home in Framingham, MA, he basically had a bat cave below it, a workshop he’d chiseled out of the bedrock beneath their house. He was also a police officer, and Santa Claus at Christmas. He was like something out of a Disney film, a magical presence in my life. I wonder how much of my maker ethos I get from him. Oh, and the craziest thing he ever made? He built a still in his bat cave workshop in Massachusetts to distill Arak, Arab hooch. He was so proud of that thing, built from scratch, and using his own grapes grown in his backyard. I can only image what gramps would think of the maker movement and how lit up he would be at a Maker Faire. He was a dyed in the wool tinkerer and would have loved to see a growing culture of tinkerers. 
         
Whitelines describes their namesake graph paper notebooks and pads as the new generation of writing paper. While this seems overly dramatic, the idea behind their designs is quite novel. As Whitlines puts it, the idea is simple: dark lines distract, Whitelines don’t. Whereas traditional graph paper consists of white paper with colored – often blue – grid lines, Whitelines features light grey paper with white grid lines.
To be honest, I don’t recall ever having issue with my designs or diagrams not standing out well enough when drawn on regular graph paper. Even so, I decided to give Whitelines a try and bought my first notebook in early 2011. Whitelines’ marketing claims seemed convincing enough and the price tag reasonable enough, so I figured it was worth a shot. I bought another back in March 2012. It’s too difficult to compare Whitelines paper to other quality notebooks like the Maker’s Notebook (available at the Maker Shed), square-lined Moleskines, and even Marble notebooks, so I won’t. There are just too many apples-vs-oranges differences to declare one style of notebook better than the other. Both A4-sized notebooks I’ve used are square-lined with 2 squares per centimeter spacing. This comes out to about 5 squares per inch, which is what I prefer for most of my graph paper needs. One notebook is of the wire style, the other is hard wire, with the difference being more and non-perforated pages, a more robust wire binding, and hard front and back covers for the latter style. Ruled versions and several other binding styles are also available. Does the Whitelines Paper Live up to the Hype? 
Actually, I remember finding Whitelines a bit underwhelming, maybe even distracting at first, before I got used to it. Drawing with pencil does provide enough contrast for easy viewing, but I initially didn’t see the same degree of boldness as demonstrated in Whitelines’ advertisements and marketing materials. Blue and black ink and other colors stand out remarkably better, especially if you stray away from the rectilinear shapes I typically draw. Some types of drawings, such as circuit wiring diagrams, especially stand out on the paper. Some users find the white lines to poorly contrast against the light grey paper, but I don’t seem to mind it. Over the months it seems that the paper has encouraged me to venture outside the lines at times I would otherwise have picked up a plain sketchpad. I have grown to greatly like Whitelines’ paper and grid style, although this could potentially stem from a subconscious inclination to like new and unusual things. I will say this – I have yet to be disappointed with my Whitelines notebooks. If you’re the type of person that prefers to sketch with graph paper, you may want to give Whitelines a try. I went with the A4 size since this size is closest to US-letter size, but A5 or A6 are cheaper and thus more risk-free to start out with. (A-what now?) I can’t be the only one particular about the type of notebooks I use – c’mon and share your favorites in a comment! Stuart Deutsch is a tool enthusiast, critic, and collector, and writes his passion at ToolGuyd.          
Love the news coming from Hack a Day Hack a Day hasn’t change its format since 2004. Even though MAKE has gone Web 2.0 with buttons using mouseover, and Instructables has fancy drop-down menus, Hack a Day has been a constant black background, green text child of the web circa 2004. A while ago, we decided it was time for an update to our layout. Today we’re pleased to announce an open beta test for our upcoming update – Hack a Day: the retro edition.
The retro site looks great. I’ve been wandering around the MAKE Labs looking for some old hardware to pull the site up on. I think the oldest machine we have might be an old G4 PowerBook. Our neighbors at O’Reilly IT might have something gathering dust though… Introducing Hack a Day: the retro edition – Hack a Day           3D-printed cup from Studio Unfold’s “Claystruder.”
 May, Maker Faire, and Reclaimed Materials Month are behind us, and we’re continuing our 2012 materials theme in June by focusing on ceramics. We’re especially interested in advanced ceramics, 3D printing in ceramics, and unconventional applications of traditional ceramic materials and technologies.
As always, if you have specific resources, requests, or recommendations, please let us know, below. More:          
robfitz on the hackerspaces.org blog put out a call for hackerspaces to participate in this month’s global synchronous hackathon. The challenge for the June Synchronous Hackathon is inspired by Adam Savage, the co-host of MythBusters, who gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012. In Adam’s talk titled “Why We Make”, he describes how and why we are compelled to make the things we make. He also introduces the following manifesto: “It doesn't matter what you make and it doesn't matter why, the importance is that you are making something.” So to support this manifesto I’m asking hackerspaces worldwide to take part in the Synchronous Hackathon over the weekend of the 16th and 17th of June. And the challenge for members and visitors is very simple “Make Something”.
        
This is the second part of a two-part interview with This American Life contributing editor Jack Hitt about his recent book, Bunch of Amateurs, published by The Crown Publishing Group. Read the first part of my interview here. Be sure to read through to the end of the interview for an opportunity to win an awesome prize. This one will surely inspire the amateur in whoever wins!
MAKE: The word “backyard” in the United States conveys the image of someone working outside institutional or “credentialed” constraints (backyard scientist, for example), not solely the outdoor space behind a home. What is it about the American character, and even lexicon, that allows for such a unique understanding of who and what an amateur is (and where they work)? Jack Hitt: This basic narrative—the immigrant journey, lighting out for the territories, or going West, young man—gets played out in miniature in many backyards. That distance from the house—with its domestic burdens of spouse and children, bills and realistic demands—all the way to the dreamy loopy inventive freedom of a garage is more existential than geographical. It wasn't mere serendipity that led David Packard, at the height of the Depression in 1938, to grab his pal William Hewlett and slip into his garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The place has since been restored to its original look and is now a Registered Historic Landmark, acknowledging this very American temple of self-motivated ingenuity. Who doubts that the same landmark status awaits 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos where Jobs and Wozniak squirreled away during the crummy days of mid-seventies stagflation to invent the desktop computer? The Maker movement flowers in the wreck of the worst economic contraction since 1929 or perhaps 1893. Coincidence?
MAKE: Did you ever find yourself attracted to the fields of amateur study you yourself were writing about? Or do you consider yourself an amateur of any field since writing about it? Jack: Personally and most recently, I have been fiddling around with solar panels and a home-built electric car. If you're asking the question as a therapist, I'd say my interest dates back to the time when I was eleven and my dad took me into his little workspace beneath the staircase in our house. He was fixing something and showed me how to operate a drill. Not long after, he died, and I guess on some level, I've been trying to get back to that place beneath the stairs ever since. MAKE: Throughout your book there is this recurring topic of genealogy. Not only of your own genealogical quest (as “the great48-grandson of Charlemagne”), but of amateurs tracing a line back through American history (via writers, inventors, actors, etc.). Why do amateurs – I’m thinking about the Spirit of America here – reference their creative progenitors? Is it because we as a country are still so new? Or are there other conditions, factors of influence that also shape this spirit? Jack: We all grow up being told that our ancestors came here because they longed to escape tyranny and sought religious freedom. Um, please. That's a choice bit of marketing, frankly. Ask any British grade-school student who the Puritans were and they'll tell you terrorists and extremists. And that's more true than not. Otherwise we were indentured servants brought here under contract or slaves stolen out of their houses or second sons from England, chafing under the nonsense of primogeniture. From the passenger manifest of the Mayflower to characters in the mini-series Roots, it is a common story of embittered newcomers, cut off from a past and driven to begin afresh. That is what created our national character, or what we might now kindly call the amateur spirit. F. Scott Fitzgerald once foolishly said, "There are no second acts in American lives." What was he drinking? This is the land of nothing but. Starting from scratch — amateurism — is all that we got, a fact we rediscover in the aftermath of every wave of immigrants or economic collapse. MAKE: And lastly for our readers, do you have any words for makers to reconcile their dreams, their aspirations, with the “pursuit of happiness”, not only with regards to the Declaration of Independence, but also to the playful nature of being an amateur as you frame it. Jack: Most people know that Thomas Jefferson is the author of the Declaration. But less known is that John Adams edited the draft (almost certainly for the legal concepts), and Ben Franklin edited it too, probably for the felicitious and sly phrasing for which he was famous. In those days the cliché phrase that would ring in anyone's ear was "life, liberty and property."—the classic British notion of why governments were instituted at all. I like to credit Franklin for that little edit. We don't know for sure. But it's hard to imagine Franklin not being displeased at the ungainly thud of that last word— "property." For England, a nation obsessed for nearly a millennium over the role of land, it made sense. But Franklin wrote a good bit about happiness and the role random chance had in it. One of his favorite images was the kite. He wrote a piece about floating on his back in the Boston harbor as a little boy, being pulled here and there by his kite. An exaggeration to be sure (imagine an 18th century kite doing anything other than getting airborne) but Franklin understood the unquantifiable element in all creativity, one that Makers understand in their core but which eludes the flat-footed B-school profs who write those plodding tomes every season about "entrepreneurialism" and "innovation." The thing they can't put their finger quite on is that sense of playfulness, the cheery free-floating randomness of being caught in the flow of an obsessive idea, lost in a garage. Franklin captured it in an airy, somewhat ungraspable phrase, the pursuit of happiness—setting into motion the real American dream.
That concludes our two-part interview with Jack Hitt. Thanks to Jack for his time and to you for reading. And now for our final prize giveaway, and yes, that’s a robot up for grabs! Specifically, it’s a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT 2.0, a buildable, programmable robot. This kit comes with 612 pieces and instructions to build up to 4 types of ‘bots. To enter to win: All you have to do is leave a comment below! Comments left before June 14th at 11:59PM PST will be eligible to win this prize. Be sure to leave a valid email so we can contact you if you win. Feel free to tell a story about your own amateur pursuits, although it’s not necessary for a chance to win. For complete rules, click here. 
These prizes are provided by The Crown Publishing Group, publishers of Bunch of Amateurs.          More Recent Articles | 
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