Comments | jeff_duntemann: Odd Lots

jeff_duntemann

Odd Lots

Jul 27, 2010 10:08

Everyone's talking about a recent Copyright Office ruling that jailbreaking of smartphones is no longer illegal, but few have mentioned that several other significant exceptions to the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions have been issued in the same ruling. Most interesting to me are limitations on ebook DRM where they prevent audio interpretation ( Read more... )

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jeff_duntemann July 30 2010, 21:06:21 UTC

It's actually plenty popular; the problem is that it's not Just One Thing anymore. Like a lot of other categories, electronics has fragmented into multiple subcategories because the underlying technology has gotten so broad and so subtle. If he's going to succeed he may have to choose which subcategory to cover, because no magazine could reasonably cover everything anyone might call "electronics."

Popular Electronics anonymous September 19 2010, 04:55:04 UTC

That "Popular Electronics" blog is no longer there, it's September 19th. I did keep checking it and there never was a second post, nor any comments beyond the initial 3 or so. I have no idea when it disappeared, I'm sure I checked two or three weeks ago ( ... )

Re: Popular Electronics jeff_duntemann September 19 2010, 14:05:57 UTC

Yeah, saw that too, and I'm a little sad that it isn't going to at least be tried, but also not especially surprised.

Hobby electronics has changed shape several times in the last 100 years. Early on it was an outgrowth of the "boys" category and things like The Boy Mechanic, while soon after it was absorbed by the radio hobby, both ham radio and receiver building a la the Gernsback pulps of the 20s and 30s. By the Fifties, new wealth and leisure broadened the category to Hi Fi and odd gadgetry like geiger counters and electronic ignition for cars, and in the late 60s the very first digital ICs led to digital counters and so on, even though the projects were scary complex. Nothing, however, changed electronics like personal computers, and once dedicated hobby computer mags appeared, the generalist mags like PE were doomed.

Tim O'Reilly brilliantly recast tinkering as "Making" and now pretty much owns the category, and what he doesn't own Nuts & Volts does. There may not have been room even for a well-conceived mag, and now I guess ( ... )