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Rebecca Nguyen is a high-school senior who is a fan of my young adult novels. Recently, she read my book Makers and liked it so much that she wrote a great review of it, which she placed with the Poughkeepsie Journal. It’s an incisive review, and I’m very grateful to Rebecca for it. Thank you, Rebecca! I hope the Journal gives you more reviewing work in the future — you’re very good at it!

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Adam created UnMakers using the Creative-Commons-licensed text of my novel Makers. It opens with the final scene, and invites you to navigate the text that led up to it hypertextually, following character-based indexes to the text. He’d like it if you’d annotate and further link the text, which is in a wiki.

If you want to find out more about a character then click on their name, it’ll send you to a list of chapters that the character is in, ordered by their place in the storyline. Click through to one of these to continue reading the characters story. You can also have a look at a list of all categories here: Categories

There’s also more, with the thread taken out of the story we can see the gaps, the implied stories of the characters time away from the readers stage. We have the opportunity to fill in these blanks, to explain the characters choices and add more depth to the overall story. Since this is a Wiki, anyone can post up a story and tag it with characters and locations, meaning that that characters timeline gets filled in and fleshed out. Backstories can be added. Minor characters can have their pasts delved into. The story can grow.

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Michael created a dog-shirt equipped with persistence-of-vision LEDs controlled by a LilyPad soft Arduino, and programmed it to output the text of my novel Makers as his pooch ran gleefully around the park at night. Then he photographed it and sent it to me, and my head exploded with delight.

Mounting 5 LEDs on a moving object creates one of the cheapest and largest displays: Persistence of Vision. It’s been done on bicycle wheels, fans and other rotating objects.

In this project i am sewing a Lilypad wearable Arduino board and five LEDs with conductive thread on my dog’s shirt. She’s a Miniature Pinscher running very fast for fun. In curves fast enough for Persitence of Vision. And she likes running in large circles in the park! Light writing.

My Dog Light Writing “Makers”

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Last week, my wife Alice and I stopped into MakerBot Industries, the DIY 3D printing company in Brooklyn, and got our heads scanned. The MakerBotters covered us in cornstarch (so that the laser-scanner could resolve our hair and eyebrows) and waved this crazy, six-degrees-of-freedom laser-scanning wand around us until we had been turned into polygons. Now our heads are online in Thingiverse, along with many others who happened to pass through MakerBot’s doors while they had the scanner on the premises (it was a loaner). It’s no Stephen Colbert head, but it’s mine, and I’m (cautiously) excited about what the world ends up doing with it!

New York Notables « MakerBot Industries