Geeky afficionados of the magazine Popular Mechanics will appreciate a new publication from O’Reilly Media. Make is more fun than a basket of kittens! And I haven’t even tried to make anything myself yet. Just reading about the projects and viewing the colorful layouts was a treat. You won’t find the magazine’s content online even though it has a Web site where you can subscribe. Everything about the jam-packed first issue was interesting from cover to cover, literally. It’s printed on “environmentally-friendly” paper with a ten percent post-consumer waste content. The matte finish makes pages easier to turn and the cover ink doesn’t transfer to skin. Inside, a heavy-duty staff is augmented with some industrial strength contributors like Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling.

The projects are too numerous to itemize and range from descriptions of software to making posting to blogs easier to building your own five-in-one electronic cable (I’m still puzzling over the graphic for that one) to how to mod your robot dog and desolder your Field Programmable Gate Array. No, I made up that last one, but there really is an article about desoldering and the one about kinetic glowsticks talks about the FPGA integrated circuit.

Send comments on what you make to Georganna at Writer’s Edge.