If you need evidence that engineering is changing, that new doors to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) are opening to the masses, and that companies that have been the foundation of innovation for decades are revising their approach, go to a Maker Faire.

Before the second world war Radio was a revolution in mass-communication much like the internet today. Fortunes were made and lost, empires built, epic patent battles ensued, all of which resulted in the world being more connected than ever before

In the early days radios were very expensive consumer devices costing as much or more than an automobile or a house in some cases. For this reason many listeners resorted to building their own.

Danger, Danger, High Voltage!

Be very careful when working with old radio equipment. Yes, these radios have very high voltage potentials inside. Many even tie the hot end of the line directly to their metal chassis (known as Hot Chassis radios), notably most of the post-war table top radios.

Antique radios can be functional statement pieces, showing both your appreciation for the old styles and your ability to repair just about anything. This hobby is well within the reach of anyone with basic electronics skills.

Isn’t it amazing how one thing leads to another? But I fear we’re in danger of wandering off into the weeds. The reason for this column is that I recently attended the 2014 Huntsville Hamfest, and I made off like a bandit with all sorts of goodies.

One of the items on my to-do list was to grab as many antique analog meters as I could find (and afford). I’ve started to use these in all sorts of projects, because they look so amazingly cool.

“Our right to modify and repair our products has been under attack for decades,” he said. “This is a pivotal moment: the first time that Congress and the President have publicly recognized that a consumer’s right to modify their own electronics trumps the interests of big corporations.”

When amateurs began experimenting with radio more than a century ago, they had no choice but to build everything they needed. Some went on to become successful entrepreneurs, selling their creations to fellow hobbyists who were more interested in operating radios than in constructing them. Others built their own receivers and transmitters either from economic necessity or for the fun and satisfaction of being able to say, “I did it myself.”

After World War II, the market was flooded with surplus electronic components that could be bought in bulk for less than the cost of manufacture.

Step-by-step instructions virtually eliminated the risk of failure. No one embraced Heathkits more enthusiastically than the amateur-radio community.

The advent of solid-state devices, printed circuit boards, and automatic parts insertion removed the price advantage that kits enjoyed. By the time the Heath Company closed its doors in 1992, most amateur-radio equipment was being manufactured in Japan.

But Heathkit’s demise did not spell the end of home construction in amateur radio. Anyone who has ever made a two-way radio contact with simple equipment they built on their own workbench or kitchen table will tell you that it’s a thrilling experience. One of the many thriving subcultures in amateur radio is the QRP community, named for the international Morse code signal for “decrease power.”

Today, the fruits of a kit-builder’s labors can be slipped into a backpack, along with a battery and a roll of wire for a day of hiking, with space left over for lunch.

You might (or might not, depending on where you are) be able to get a signal on your smartphone, but it is truly liberating to be able to communicate using equipment you’ve built yourself — using just the natural phenomenon of radio-wave propagation and without a trillion dollars’ worth of telecommunications infrastructure.

Society relies ever more heavily on a fragile telecommunications infrastructure that is susceptible to overload and outright failure. We can’t substitute for all that infrastructure. But we can communicate, no matter what.

Australia’s Productivity Commission is complaining that high-value, highly-customised – artesan, in fact – products are a drag on national productivity.

In its latest productivity report, the nation’s flint-eyed economists have decided that the best thing for the economy is for every possible product to sink into an identical low-cost, indistinguishable grey goo, apparently, like the generic “food” from the 1984 cult classic Repo Man.

Even worse, it’s really difficult to come up with any way to measure the economic value of product quality: “the higher quality of some of the output produced with these additional inputs may not be fully reflected in the measures of real value added growth for the subsector”.

The HP chip was a relatively simple design, so simple that he was able to reverse engineer the entire schematic from the die images.

he built a drop in replacement on a two layer PCB. This time he used discrete transistors and resistors to replicate the ECL logic

Fixing and upgrading iOS devices can be a rewarding business opportunity, so long as you don’t mind having to fight Apple every step of the way.

So says the founder of iFixit, who spoke at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco on Thursday. The repair outfit’s CEO Kyle Wiens said there is little or no information for servicing the handheld gizmos: everything his company does, from its famous tear downs of new hardware to the manuals and how-to guides it publishes, are put together without any more access to Apple than is enjoyed by the average person on the street.

He said that not only does Apple make fixing its fiddly electronics extremely difficult, but doing so with the blessing of the company is practically impossible: Apple’s authorized technician certification apparently only applies to Mac computers, rather than iThings, and even that qualification is becoming more difficult to obtain.

“They [Apple] have done everything they can to put these guys [third party repairers] out of business,” claimed Wiens.

On the roster of almost 900 new words, new subentries and new senses we find that “beatboxer” “bestie”, “chugger”, “DIYer”, “honky-tonker”, “Old Etonian” “toilet attendant” and “scimitar oryx” have now gained sufficient linguistic weight to merit a nod.