A secret controller book
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Make Magazine and its blog showcase countless ingenious do-it-yourself projects. Imagine turning an abandoned satellite dish into a solar-powered coffee roaster or building a radio-controlled, neon-lighted mobile bar robot. OK, it takes some level of skill to execute those projects. And the secret controller book, above, probably will take some expertise too.
The idea is to hollow out a book and hide a controller inside. The controller can’t be connected to a computer, but it can hook up wirelessly. The controller -- which can be built with a kit from Make -- can switch lights on and off, sense motion and more. What exactly will it do when it’s hidden inside a book?
Well, that’s still a work in progress. The creators of the secret controller book think it’ll probably sit on a table and observe you watching TV, and ‘somehow battle you for control over the TV, perhaps providing you with literary quotes on a display embedded in the book.’
In case they haven’t figured out which quotes to use yet, here are a few:
‘Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.’ -- Henry David Thoreau ‘A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.’ -- Franz Kafka ‘A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heartbeat.’ -- Henry Miller ‘What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while.... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.’ -- J.D. Salinger ‘One must be an inventor to read well.’ -- Ralph Waldo Emerson ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ -- St. Augustine
-- Carolyn Kellogg
