Review: The Big Book of Apple Hacks

Time was, Apple products had zero credibility with serious geeks -- they were perceived as being purely artists' tools. And when Photoshop and other professional design programs migrated to Windows, not even that. The brand seemed so doomed that computer executive Michael Dell famously told a Gartner Symposium that he thought the company should be dissolved. Forget some Slashdot Mac vs. PC flamewar, nerds had very real and very sensible reasons for avoiding the platform. Perhaps it originated in the '80s and '90s when the Mac OS was closed to tinkering and the hardware was proprietary. PCs had a command line and Macs did not. Furthermore, so many important software development tools simply had no Mac equivalent. Serious programmers stayed away from Macs like they were carriers of some disease.

However, with the advent of Mac OS X, all that changed, and a few years later, Apple products are highly regarded in the geek community. And in that group of people, there is no greater respect accorded to a product than wanting to hack the hell out of it. That's where Big Book of Apple Hacks comes into play.

They're not kidding about the "big" -- the book weighs in at over 600 pages and describes 131 separate hacks. It covers every current project that Apple offers, from OS X to iPods, iTunes, and iPhones, as well as less ubiquitous products like the Apple TV. There are also sidebar minihacks and tips supplementing the main articles.

From a GeekDad perspective, this resource has a lot to offer both parent and child. Think of it, how many kids out there pack a mobile phone and MP3 player? Throw in a kazillion laptops and that's a lot of potential hacking. With more and more kids having expensive hardware at home, it's important for them to understand the potential and risks of tinkering. The good news is that Apple Hacks has tons of kid-friendly hacks: Learning how to swap in a larger hard drive (Hack 110) or create your own screensaver (Hack 42) is something many kids would like to do. My 12-year-old is running Tiger on an older iBook. Would Hack 17: Kill Dashboard be helpful to speed up her machine? All it takes is a couple lines typed into the terminal -- anyone can do it.

Here are my favorite chapters:

Chapter 1: Before You Hack
A must read, simply because it educates you on the consequences of your tinkering. For most of us, popping open a product's case is a great way to make it never work again. Hack 02: Create an Emergency Bootable Flash Drive is a necessity before you tinker, as is backing up your data.

Chapter 4: Command Line Fun
While OS X is great, it overlays a much older and extremely stable operating system, Unix. Apple left a lot of stuff off of OS X menus because non-power users don't need them. Things like daemons and shell scripts.
But even if you don't need any of this additional capability, simply learning about the mysterious of Unix is a great educational experience.

Chapter 12: Hack the iPhone
Easily the most hackable mobile ever, the iPhone is screaming to be tinkered with. First, you have to jailbreak the phone -- however, you have to do it smart, because if you mess it up, your phone will become a metal and glass brick. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the chapter describes the jailbreak process, going over each firmware version and the steps needed to break it.

Chapter 15: Hack Some Hardware
Possibly the most intriguing chapter, this is the fun stuff that may be more fanciful than most people want, like home automation and putting a Mac Mini in your car.

Apple Hacks demonstrates the weakness of competing books. A lot of them insult the reader -- some even in the title -- by suggesting that they're well, dummies. Others present a very narrow breadth in headache-inducing detail that only someone who is already an expert would appreciate. Apple Hacks covers all the bases, with fun hacks for each product, giving non-technical types or casual tinkerers plenty to work on. The price is also reasonable. Seems like most tech books run forty or fifty bucks -- Apple Hacks is a mere $23 on Amazon.

Maker's Notebook

Ask a hacker or maker and they'll tell you they measure their life in notebooks they've filled. Whether it's prototype sketches, circuit diagrams, snippets of fiction, role playing game scenarios, ideas, thoughts, or dreams, so much is going through their heads that they must rely on paper to keep track of it all.

Bob Thompson, author of The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, devotes a whole chapter to keeping notebooks:

A laboratory notebook is a contemporaneous, permanent, primary record of the owner's laboratory work.

* Use permanent ink. Erasures are anathema.

* Record all observations as you make them. Do not trust your memory, even for a minute.

* If you make a mistake, draw one line through the erroneous information, leaving it readable.

He goes on to say that for purposes of proving that laboratory work took place, whether for legal or academic reasons, a permanent record is a must. But permanency appeals -- or ought to appeal -- to other users. Unless you're a truly hard-core maker, you're probably aren't worrying about backing up patents. What you want, and what the Maker's Notebook delivers, is a resource that can hold up during use and, once filled, will last forever on your bookshelf.

But... a $20 Notebook?!
My initial reaction when investigating the Maker's Notebook was to cringe at the price. As a fan of composition books for keeping notes, I naturally compared the two. In terms of construction, they don't really have a lot in common, other than both being bound stacks of paper.

Of course, instead of el cheapo paper, the Maker's Notebook boasts 150 pages 1/10" engineering graph paper on 60+ Lynx Smooth Opaque recycled stock. The front and back cover are pure cyan with a white dashed grid -- basically, a canvas for your creativity. Maybe you want to color-code the covers by topic or date, maybe you just want to make it pretty. In any case, you can customize your notebook like it was a Guitar Hero controller: the Maker's Notebook comes with tons of stickers to help you personalize it.

In classic composition book tradition it has reference charts in the back. But forget kiddie helpers like multiplication tables and classroom reminders. This is grownup stuff: it is a section of handy reference material for makers, hackers, tinkerers and scientists. A multimeter how-to, sewing needles, LEDs. Can't remember Asimov's Laws of Robotics? It's in there. Need a Morse Code chart? Got it. There are twenty pages of this reference material. The book even has a bookmark ribbon and comes with a giant rubber band to help keep it closed.

So can it truly be worth $20? Yes, and here's why: The quality of paper and binding are far superior than any grocery store notebook. Composition books aren't made to last 20 years, this is. With a flat spine you can keep track of contents, dates and so on without having to haul the book out of the shelf. And forget spiral bound jobbies, the wire will smush and the pages will fall out. When you factor in the stickers and charts, this notebook becomes a compelling -- not to mention fun -- way to take notes. Your thoughts are important; treat them that way.

(By the way, the Maker's Notebook is only $13 and change when you buy it from Amazon.)

Arduino Class at Studio Bricolage

As a father of three I don't get out for "me time" very often, and certainly not classes to broaden my geeky horizons. But the Mrs. graciously allowed me to take a class, so I signed up for a course on arduino at Minneapolis's cool maker collective, Studio Bricolage.

And what are arduinos? The unsatisfying technical answer is that they're easily programmed microcontrollers. A better answer might be that they're a little chip with a bunch of ports in it. Some of these ports can be designated for input and others for output. For instance, you can plug a switch and a light bulb into the arduino, and flicking the switch causes the chip to send power to the bulb. But there's so much more -- anything that works electrically can be controlled by an arduino. But what's really cool about the technology is that it's inexpensive and easy to control. High school students and middle schoolers can play with arduinos, and that's a wonderful opportunity for kids to delve into the world of electronics and hardware hacking.

Part of the burgeoning movement toward hacker collectives and maker spaces, Leonardo's Basement began as an independent program teaching geeky and crafty classes to kids. Pretty soon, envious parents began demanding their own group! Thus was born Studio Bricolage. I had the good fortune of being a part of the very first formal Bricolage class, Arduinos for Artists.

When I got there with my laptop, there was a box of electronic components waiting for me, including LEDs, wires, a switch, a solderless breadboard and, of course, an arduino. If you've never seen one, an arduino is a small circuit board that fits in the palm of your hand. The first thing we did was install the Arduino software. This is a simple language related to Processing, and can be used to program the arduino through a USB cable. Once programmed, the arduino needs no connection to the computer, so long as it has battery power. The arduino and all associated software is open source, keeping it free for all to play with and develop.

Anyway, back to the class. We were given all sorts of projects to construct -- starting simple with a a button that turned on an LED. But more than just a simple switch that closed a circuit, the switch provided only data to the arduino, telling it when it was time to send voltage to the LED. The learning curve was so non-existent within an hour we were modifying the projects. For the blinking LED lesson, we soon adapted the program to blink at different rates.

At the end of the first session we were given homework -- we were to come up with a "knock your socks off" use for the arduino. For my project I wanted to do something simple because I didn't have much time to work on it. I created a simple circuit that lit up an LED if two simultaneous conditions were met. First, that a button was pressed; second, a Kidwind turbine blade was spinning (and therefore generating voltage). To my amazement it worked after only a few minutes' tinkering. Unfortunately, the following session when I presented the project to the class, it failed to function. Another case of "demo-itis"!

The second session was tougher for me, it was more self directed and I was too sleepy to come up with my own projects. I ended up just observing other students' explorations and reading up on arduino resources.

I'm the busiest dad I know, but I still was able to make time for this course, and get something out of it. I heartily recommend an aduino class for anyone who has an interest in hobby electronics, or just wants to stay up on this amazing new development.

Here is a woefully incomplete list of resources:

www.arduino.cc: The main site of the project.

processing.org: Processing H.Q. Also, check out the awesome and definitive book I link to above.

wiring.org.co has the poop on Wiring, the language that underlays the Arduino programming software.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, run by a couple of brilliant hardware hackers who use arduino in a lot of their projects. Great for inspiration.

Ladyada has a great site and also has a cool store if you want to buy electronic kits, including arduino.

Leah Buechley created the fabulous Lilypad arduino -- wearable electronics! -- demonstrating just how amazing arduino is as a starting point.

And finally, see my Flickr set of photos I took at the class.

Hardware hackers, post in the comments section if I missed any important resources.

RepRap Creates Child, Grandchild

One of the coolest possibilities of the home fabrication movement is the prospect of a fab printing out a working copy of itself. One group, called the RepRap project, considers that capability to be so integral to its mission that chose a name that reclected it -- RepRap comes from Replicating Rapid Prototyper.

Well, guess what, it happened -- a RepRap created a copy of itself. And then the child created a 3rd generation.

Adrian Bowyer (left) and Vik Olliver (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

I cant stress enough go cool this technology is. The prospect of people being able to create all sorts of necessary products in their basement, paying only electrical and raw materials costs, promises to revolutionize the way we live.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of hacking needs to check out this book. The magazine got its start in 1984 and it has covered every peak and valley of of the scene -- momentous events like Operation Sundevil and the bust of Kevin Mitnick, as well as glacial changes like the decline of blue boxing and the rise of the Internet. And for cool, try to spot the pseudonymous contributions from writers who have moved on to find success in the mainstream world. For instance, Cory Doctorow got his start writing for 2600. Preorder this book today, and look for a full review here on Nerdage.net in the next month or two.

YES! YES! OH YES!

Me and a bunch of college kids uploaded pictures showing how much we love Jolt. Who won? I did. SUCK IT, college kids! So Jolt sent me a mess of product.

I really, really love Jolt.

A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?

Slashdot contributor "sharp-bang" put the following question to the supernerds who follow the site:

When I was growing up, my Dad let my brother and I have the run of his wood shop, and kept up a steady stream of Lego kits, Estes model rockets, chemistry sets, Heathkit projects, and other fun science stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalog, and the rest was history. I'd like to give my kids that kind of experience. If your kids were interested in science, computers, robots, and building stuff, how would you build and outfit a lab/shop for them (and you) to play in?

Check out the responses. Many of them are tongue-in-cheek but a many responders left thoughtful comments.

So what about you? How would you equip your child's lab for maximum geekification?

Photo by Ladyada (cc)