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Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder45 posts

Mark Frauenfelder is an American journalist, blogger, author, illustrator, and maker. He started the independent ‘zine bOING bOING in the 1980s with his wife, Carla Sinclair. The ‘zine became a website in the 1990s and then became the popular Boing Boing blog. Frauenfelder helped develop of cyberpunk culture in the 1980s and 90s, and worked with Billy Idol on the Cyberpunk album. Frauenfelder has published several books, and created the magazines Make: and Craft:

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31 Dec, 1984

Graduates college

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Frauenfelder graduates from Colorado State.

I actually started out as an engineer. I went to college and got a degree in mechanical engineering.

1988

bOING bOING zine

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Frauenfelder and Sinclair start the zine as a creative outlet for Frauenfelder, who is bored with his job as an engineer.

Keep it small and you’ll have more fun. Newsstand distribution is a drag. The freight is expensive, the sell-through rates are low, it is a chore doing the accounting, and distributors are famous for going out of business before they pay you. You’ll probably lose money if you try it. Also, don’t start a music zine. There are already ten thousand music zines out there. Nobody cares what you think about music anyway.

1993

Cyberpunk

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mark-frauenfelder-cyberpunkFrauenfelder provides artwork for the Billy Idol album, and consults with Idol on cyberpunk culture, along with Brett Leonard, director of The Lawnmower Man, Timothy Leary, Jaime Levy, the author of books published on disk under the Electronic Hollywood imprint, and Mondo 2000 co-founder R.U. Sirius. They turn him onto The Well, an early online community, and teach him various other aspects of cyber culture in the early 1990s. Frauenfelder also writes a biography for the album.

Joins Wired magazine

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Frauenfelder joins as an associate editor, assigning and editing stories for the magazine.

1995

Wired.com launched

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Frauenfelder launches the website as its editor-in-chief. His responsibilities:

[..] managing a team of editors, designers, and producers to develop Wired’s online presence

1 Nov, 1995

Happy Mutant Handbook

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mark-frauenfelder-happy-mutantSinclair and Frauenfelder publish the book, co-edited with Gareth Branwyn, featuring a scale that allows readers to rate themselves as a Happy Mutant, normal person, or Unhappy Mutant, and entries on ‘Invasion of the Paper Smiles,’ Joey Skaggs, ‘Cacophony Society,’ Toys and Cool Tools, and ‘Are Fan Club Presidents Nuts?’

Oct 2002

The Mad Professor

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mark-frauenfelder-mad-professorFrauenfelder publishes the collection of science experiments for kids, which has wipeable pages and includes recipes for a countertop volcano, making slimes and putties, growing crystal gardens, creating Robot Food, Goon Goo, and Top-Secret Ink.

21 Jun, 2003

Move to Rarotonga

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Sinclair and Frauenfelder move with their children to the small South Pacific island in the Cook Islands chain, planning to stay there for a year:

Memories of L.A.’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, acrylic nails, DSL, and prepackaged diversions for kids are beginning to lose their edge…It only took about five minutes to wipe out any preconceived fantasies we had about island life. The shuttle that picked us up drove past a long stretch of petrol tanks, refineries and warehouses. We didn’t remember any of this from our first visit. Of course, they’ve always been here, but our idealized notion of Rarotonga had replaced our actual memories. Now that we’d come back, in a van that reeked of diesel exhaust, passing little houses on the side of the road with missing windows, rotting roofs, and torn curtains in lieu of doors, the previous six months of romanticizing flew from our heads, to be replaced by dread: What the f-ck had we gotten ourselves into?

Jan 2005

Make magazine

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mark-frauenfelder-starts-make-magazineFrauenfelder launches the magazine after returning from Rarotonga, where he and his family developed maker skills by creating clothes, dolls, and food out of coconuts, twigs, shells, and items their neighbours lent them. He talks about the most common type of reader:

They are curious about how the world around them works, and they want to have a say beyond just the purchasing decision in the technology they use. They like to alter technology to make it highly personal. And once they figured out how to do something neat, they can’t wait to share the idea with other people.

2005

The World’s Worst

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mark-frauenfelder-worlds-worstFrauenfelder publishes the book, which is intended as a catalogue of the worst people, places, and things. It includes entries on Miracle Mike The Headless Chicken, the world’s least adorable pet who survived for 18 months after being decapitated and was fed corn mash down his severed neck to keep him alive, the worst diet, Breatharianism, in which an Australian woman claims to have lived only on air and light since 1993, and the craziest scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA, who ran the MK-Ultra mind-control-experiment project and drugged people including the artist Stanley Gottlieb with acid, to see how they would react.

May 2007

The Computer

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mark-frauenfelder-the-computerFrauenfelder publishes the guide to the history of computers, from codebreaking in World War 2, the battle between Apple and IBM in the 1980s, to use of computers in film and TV such as in 1950’s The Forbidden Planet, up to the current-day era of wearables.

2 Dec, 2007

LA Times feature

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Sinclair and Frauenfelder are profiled for the newspaper, focusing on how Craft and Make magazines were launched after their time in Rarotonga, where they created dolls, clothes, and household requirements from coconuts, twigs, shells, and items borrowed from their neighbours. They had no cellphone, no television and a dial-up Internet connection that cost $6 an hour, and people helped Frauenfelder diagnose a sore on his leg over the internet, as there was no dermatologist on the island.

17 Jun, 2008

SigGraph Maker Night

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Mahalo’s Lon Harris meets Univac, a maker who has hacked a Teletubbie to display graphics on a screen when he touches it, Brett Doar, who made the Bronco table, a piece of ‘feral furniture’ that bucks when people try to place things on it in order to make life difficult, and interviews Frauenfelder about becoming involved in the maker community. He talks about how makers have learned to make hard-to-source parts for old cars by casting them from aluminum from melted beer cans, and how the internet has sped up the evolution of the community. Frauenfelder:

Do-it-yourself communities, special interest communities, people who are into doing something…These communities of interest really propel each other and evolve, and are making things so much faster since the internet

Maker Night feat. Mark Frauenfelder

13 Aug, 2008

Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea tour

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Frauenfelder visits Intelligentsia for a tour with Glanville, the 2008 U.S. Barista Champion who is also espresso research and development director at the company. Glanville explains why the company focuses on importing beans from East Africa and Latin America:

As a relatively small company we feel like we need to focus on places where potential is high, and it won’t take a lot to realize it.

A Morning at Intelligentsia Part 1 (BBtv)

18 Jun, 2010

TIME interview

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Frauenfelder talks about the do-it-yourself movement, and how people need to take time out from busy everyday routines to concentrate on simple things:

It’s really hard to do, you have to steal it [time] here and there from your life. I try to set aside a little bit of time each day to do something that allows me to slow down and just concentrate fully on a task. And it’s really a good thing to do, because when I’m sitting in front of my computer I’m multitasking — I have 17 windows open and website tabs and e-mails and blog posts, and it’s all going on at once, just a swirl. And if I take a break and go outside and put on my bee suit and check out my bees, it’s such a great experience. I’m not thinking about anything else except those bees. I’m really present in the moment.

10 Feb, 2011

Authors@Google interview

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Frauenfelder talks about Made By Hand and how he became interested in urban homesteading, how making wooden eating utensils provides a bigger return on investment than projects like making a cool robot, and the different kinds of projects that can be done such as raising bees and chickens.

I set out with a couple of goals — to improve my family’s home life by taking an active role in the things that feed, clothe, educate, maintain, and entertain us, and to gain a deeper connection and sense of engagement with the things and systems that keep us alive and happy.

Made by Hand | Mark Frauenfelder | Talks at Google

9 Jun, 2011

TEDxKids@Brussels talk

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Frauenfelder talks onstage about how Make:‘s readership includes many families, rather than being only a male audience, and how readership of around 160,000 ‘broad-spectrum enthusiasts’ compares with pop-science and DIY magazines in the 1950s that had circulations of five million, how the maker movement has the potential to become much bigger and how Maker Faire is a ‘science fair on steroids’. For makers:

The variety of tools and services that are available to them are just exploding now

TEDxKids@Brussels - Mark Frauenfelder - Makers

20 Jun, 2011

TEDxKids@Brussels – Brushbot workshop

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Frauenfelder demonstrates how to make a Brushbot, a ‘vibrobot’ made from a toothbrush and powered by a cellphone vibrator motor. The finished product creates a colorful robot that spins around on the floor.

Made by Hand | Mark Frauenfelder | Talks at Google