Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair hoisted their household from the din and whir of Los Angeles four years ago to live on a breezy South Pacific island one-third the size of Santa Catalina.
Frauenfelder was a technophile and founder of Boing Boing, a popular blog about geek counterculture. Sinclair was the author of "Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Cyberworld" and other books.
So to set up house in Rarotonga with no cellphone, no television and a dial-up Internet connection that cost $6 an hour was a stroke of deliberate irony. They did it with their two daughters for four months in the summer of 2003, using coconuts, twigs, shells and various items lent by neighbors to make the basics: clothes, dolls and food.
It was all training for their next high-tech adventure.
Upon the family's return to L.A., Frauenfelder helped launch and edit Make, a magazine for alpha geeks with soldering guns and a penchant for building their own gizmos. One issue of the magazine featured an aerial camera rig made out of Popsicle sticks, a drugstore kite and Play-Doh. Another had instructions for building a solar-powered xylophone.
The magazine has tapped into an underground movement driven by hardware hackers who wanted to reclaim the mass-produced world of consumer electronics and make devices that are uniquely their own.
"They are curious about how the world around them works, and they want to have a say beyond just the purchasing decision in the technology they use," Frauenfelder says of the typical reader. "They like to alter technology to make it highly personal. And once they figured out how to do something neat, they can't wait to share the idea with other people."
Some of the projects in Make are meant to be useful, such as the battery-free remote control. The vast majority are whimsical constructions made out of common household items.
Take the automatic cat feeder built using an old VCR and a sausage grinder.
"The VCR is programmable and the grinder can be loaded up with dry cat food," Frauenfelder says. "You can program it to grind out food at different times. It's funny and cool looking, but it's completely fantastical. If the power ever goes out, you'd come home to a starving cat and something that's blinking '12:00.' "
