OK, we’re biased, but Make: magazine does some of the coolest, most cutting edge publishing around. It’s an old-fashioned print magazine (described variously as “Popular Mechanics for the 21st century” and “Martha Stewart for Geeks”), but it’s also got a Technorati Top 100 blog, one of the first publishing presences in Second Life, video and audio podcasts available via iTunes, and now, some pioneering 3D publishing, with projects you can interact with.
They started this new initiative with one of the all time most popular Make: projects, the spud cannon from issue 3. This is a device made from clear PVC pipe that you load up with hair spray and a potato, ignite with a tazer, and send off like a tracer bullet 200+ yards into the night sky. I loved the time I was briefing some top IBM execs on my ideas about the future of technology. They asked for a brief run down about O’Reilly, and when I came to Make:, one of them started googling, found the spud gun, and excitedly started showing it to his peers, interrupting the meeting. These are guys running multi-billion dollar enterprise businesses, and they were as excited as kids, or the hackers they once were.
Well, now, this project has been released as a 3D PDF. As Phil Torrone writes on the Make blog: “For the first time ever, you can watch a video of how to make something, print out the magazine article with instructions and then manipulate the object in 3D (!!!) within the pdf to check it out from every angle! Never have the barriers to making a spud gun been so low!” (Requires the lastest version of Adobe Reader.)
(There’s also a video podcast of the same project.)