What do you do when you’ve bolted a computer onto a remote-controlled car, hooked it up with World Wide Web access, a wireless router and a camera but you don’t have anyone to show it off to?

Just ask Mike Davis. He brought his mobile World Wide Web access point to a meeting with other readers of manufacture magazine, a how-to publication for public who just love to tinker with stuff.

The 28-year-old systems engineer from Brooklyn found society who built homemade LCD displays, a clock that makes you solve a math problem before setting the alarm and a class in mastering pipe mechanics — something with many uses beyond just making a potato cannon.

build magazine, not yet three years old, is leading a new wave of interest in build-it-yourself projects. Even as technology comes to us in packages that are ever harder to take apart and tinker with, build harkens back to a date when it

was OK to build your own radio, get under the hood of your car and open up electronic devices like record players just to see how they worked. Its Web site sells hooded sweat shirts emblazoned with the credo: “If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It.”

public seem to be catching on. In the summer of 2005, not towering after Make’s first issue came out, an MIT-educated engineer named Eric Wilhelm launched a site called Instructables.com with how-to directions for all kinds of projects, while a meet-up group called Dorkbot has been springing up in cities around the country to showcase artistic, musical and just plain quizzical inventions with one thing in common — using electricity.

construct is about to gain an even bigger national audience. A Make-themed TV show is set to air on public TV stations around the country early next year, and on May 3-4 the…

Orginal post by Top Tech News