READER INPUT

Where makers tell their tales and offer praise, brickbats, and swell ideas.

I’m sure a thousand people have already mentioned this, but in MAKE 07, on page 17, the penny-powered LED, there’s a comment about older pennies working better, and it says you don’t know why. I don’t know the year offhand, but at some point the rising price of copper caused the mint to switch pennies to a copper-coated zinc core, instead of pure copper. Cut one in half, or more fun, hit one with a propane torch. By the way, unbelievably great magazine. Keep it up!

—Dave Schaum

I’ve been playing fangirl for MAKE. [My friend] and I met a 15-year-old at the dog park recently who is really into making potato guns (and his mom is very supportive, bless her, but he’s going to try out marshmallows next because he’s afraid of hurting someone). I suggested he check out the MAKE website for more fun projects. The next time I ran into him at the park, he told me that the MAKE site is “the coolest website I’ve ever seen.” I had an extra copy of a MAKE quarterly in my car, so I gave it to him and he immediately started devouring it. It made me feel really good and I hope it does you, too!

—Becky Carella

MAKE has reawakened my creativity. After seeing a blurb on a blog somewhere, I picked up my first copy and remembered just how much fun I had as a kid tearing things apart to see how they work. Since then, I’ve built several projects — including the spider gun and the cigar box guitar — and I’ve launched into several other things as well. MAKE gets the thanks for that, too.

—Andrew Setters

Just read the “Life Hacks” in Volume 07. Don’t forget, XP [extreme programming] espouses pair programming. In my case I am lucky to have a great wife who sits with me and makes sure the unit tests pass....

—James Warfield

I just subscribed to your magazine and I wanted you to know it was because of your podcast that I did so. Although I’m relatively new to podcasting

184 Make: Volume 08

This is in regard to pages 124– 125 of Volume 06. DUAL BOOTING? (sigh) … There’s a better way.

Emulators will run a guest OS without the need for repartitioning and re-installing anything. A good commercial emulator is VMware ( vmware.com).

Us geeks, however, like a more free and open source solution, which is why I use QEMU ( fabrice.bellard.free. fr/qemu).

It is my opinion that QEMU is superior to VMware, which could just be my open source bias, but I have used both and QEMU was better. I have included some screen shots of XP running on my Linux box thanks to QEMU.

—Rev. Martin S. Murphy

I really love what your team is doing. Thanks for the mind candy.

—Howard Horkey

So having seen MAKE before and finally deciding to pick up an issue, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s published by O’Reilly. I have been a fan of your computer books for a while now, and thus, my expectations were high. In almost every way, as I read through the issue, those expectations have