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Gareth Branwyn tracks this media like no one else.
- RU Sirius

[A] better Virgil to lead us through the zones of cyberculture will be hard to find.
- Brooks Landon, Science Fiction Studies

Branwyn lays forth a brilliantly organized survey of fringe media.
- Res
(review of Jamming the Media)

Branwyn's stuff is so good that people regularly rip it off, passing it along in those ubiquitous joke e-mails.
- Washington Post
(review of Jargon Watch)

One of Wired's most popular features...an up-to-date list of slang wielded by the digerati.
- Newsweek
(review of Jargon Watch)

Puts the Mac back on its revolutionary track.
- MacWeek
(review of Beyond Cyberpunk!)

Truly inspired.
LA Times
(review of Happy Mutant Handbook)

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
- Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Models are not true or false, they are more or less useful.
- cyberneticist Stafford Beer

Lenny Bruce died for the shit you're taking.
- bathroom stall graffiti

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
- Andre Gide

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer.
- William Blake

My fingers Emit sparks of fire with Expectation of my future labors.
- William Blake

The heart has precise algorithms.
- Gregory Bateson

What we need is an integrative metaphor, like religion or science, that is not based on the idea of ultimate truth.
- Mary Catherine Bateson

If you don't like what you are playing, you can always pick up your needle and move it to another groove.
- Tim Leary

I've continued to write for MAKE (and its spin-off mag CRAFT). I've had at least one piece in nearly every issue. In the upcoming issue, Vol. 11, I even wrote the opening piece, the "Welcome." It's actually an edited version of a piece I wrote for my site, Street Tech, entitled: "Makers vs. The Blob." You can read the original here. It's about the amazing Maker Faire I worked at this year, in San Mateo. I organized and ran workshops on building my Mousey the Junkbot project. It looks like I'll be at the Maker Faire in Austin, Oct. 20-21. If you get a chance, come to the Faire. It'll blow your mind (if it's anything like the CA event). [Above photo by Scott Beale]

And speaking more of MAKE, I've got a new fulltime job, with O'Reilly/MAKE, as a book producer/editor for the Maker Media imprint. We already have some amazingly cool titles in the pipeline. Should be a very fun, creative, challenging (and exhausting!) job. I'm psyched.

Oh yeah, I'm also now a regular contributor to the MAKE blog. Phillip Torrone (and Bre, Brian, and others) does an amazing job on it and I'm really honored to be asked to pitch in. If you have any DIY projects, hardware hacks, cool stories of Makers in the news, etc., please send them to me for possible inclusion.

I've started doing some periodic Multimedia Gallery pieces for Wired.com. My first one, called "Steam-Driven Dreams: The Wondrously Whimsical World of Steampunk," was on the growing DIY steampunk movement. You can read it here. My next one is on the hovercraft.

In July, I spent the month consulting for Provisions Learning Project, an amazing arts and creative social change org here in DC. Provisions is leaving their physical location on Dupont Circle and likely going all virtual (with an expanded presence online) and nomadic (with regular, traveling art exhibitions). They hired me to help in this transition. I loved working with them and plan on continued consulting as I can. I'm also contributing to their blog. If you want to be kept abreast of art/change news and events, exhibitions possibly coming to your city, etc., bookmark the Provisions site and grab the RSS feed for the blog.

Issue No 6 of O'Reilly's insanely great Make Magazine is out. I have three feature pieces in this issue, including the cover piece on BEAM robotics. Those are my little robo-critters on the cover. Ain't they sweet? I show you how to make them, step by step. The one that looks like a satellite is a "symet," a little solar-powered robo-top that soaks up the sun, stores the juice in three capacitors, and then dumps the charge into the motor, making it skitter across your desk. The little solar car, made from a cassette motor and roller-wheels from a dead VCR, has a similar cycle of sunbathing and fitful motoring. These projects are cheap, relatively easy to build, and leave you with two cool techno toys that'll go great in your Geekosphere and will delight all who spy them there.

My website Street Tech was invited to become part of John Battelle's Federated Media Publishing network. I had the pleasure of working with John during his editor stints at Wired and The Industry Standard and have the utmost respect and admiration for him. He's a visionary, but he also has an uncommon amount of integrity and passion for what he does. All of this is reflected in this project, which brings together a network of really cool weblogs under one banner and is designed to let the blog authors do their thing (create great content) while the business team at Federated does theirs (find advertisers, forge partnerships, offer various support services to network members). We're huge fans of many of the other member-blogs (BoingBoing, 43Folders, PVRBlog, MetaFilter, TechCrunch), so we're really honored to be in such esteemed company.

O'Reilly's Make magazine Make No. 2 has a version of my "Mousey the Junkbot" project from my robot book (detailing how to turn a computer mouse into a light-seeking robot). That's my little Frankenmouse on the cover! Other articles in the issue include a DIY HDTV recorder project, Podcasting 101, extreme Star Wars bot building, an Atari 2600 PC case mod, and more niftiness. If you haven't seen Make yet, and your idea of fun is spending the weekend cavorting through the entrails of your PC, your TiVo, or anything else that has a voidable warranty, you'll want to check out this mag. Every geek that comes into my house goes right to the issue on my coffeetable and starts ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

There were three rooms, the first set up like a viney jungle of zines, with dozens of pubs in plastic bags hanging from fishing line at different heights, filling the volume of the space. The second room had two shelving insets densely packed with my mail and collage art collections and a few zine reading stations. The third room had a ratty reading couch and a coffee table covered with zines and more reading stations along the walls. There were also giant posters of zine covers on the walls.

It was mind-blowing to see my collection (stored in my attic for years) spread over these rooms, and to realize that each item represented an exhange, either a literal exchange of my zine (Going Gaga) or a piece of mail art for someone else's, or at least a letter with a few bucks in it, asking for a copy of someone's pub. Scanning over the material hanging there, thinking about this connectivity (from all corners of the globe), it was like looking at a primitive, analog version of one of those Internet network node maps. This was the "sneakernet" days of cyberspace and the blogosphere. We had the desktop computers, laser printers, copiers, and recording equipment to make this indie media, we just had to rely on a glorified pony express (the international postal systems) to distribute it.

Sean has a few pics of the show here.

I collaborated on a soundtrack project with the amazing artist/composer John Bergin in the summer of 2004. It's a soundtrack for a book, a special edition of Traitor General, a sci-fi novel by Dan Abnett. The book is part of Dan's popular "Gaunt's Ghosts" series.

John did the actual composing of everything. I acted as a producer and co-conceptualizer of what we needed for each piece. We worked with Dan as well. The soundtrack features the haunted vocals of trip-hop singer LoLo.You can hear an excerpt from the track "There Are No Miracles (Only Men)" here (MP3, 796k).

It was tough going (they don't call it HARDware for nothin'), but after months of writing, experimenting, photographing, drawing, etc., a small forest was felled in 2004 to bring you the Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. This book is geared (no pun intended) to the robotics newcomer. The first part is an introduction to the history of robotics, emerging schools of robotic thought, robot anatomy, etc., while the second half contains three do-it-yourself bot projects built from a coat hanger, a computer mouse, and two AOL CDs. I shit you not. There's also a companion website which has a full table of contents and pics of the three critters you can build.

See the archives of Mark Frauenfelder's and my monthly comic, Digital Living Handy Reference Cards that we did for Digital Living Today.

Jamming the Media: A Citizen's Guide (Chronicle) is a 350-page trip through the diverse worlds of DIY media-making. Chapters cover zines, cable access, pirate radio, media pranking, basement audio, webzines and more.

Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati (HardWired) is a collection of my Wired columns on digital culture jargon and slang. Over 400 terms (100 new) with an introduction and resources.

Read an interview with me on La Spirale, a French cyberzine.

Here's an interview with me from Fringecore, a publication of the International Forum for Progressive Culture.