Cool Tools

Andy Baio loves making things online. He’s written waxy.org for the last 13 years, helped build Kick Starter, and organizes XOXO — an independent art tech festival in Portland. His upcoming projects include the XOXO Outpost, which is an experimental workspace opening this January, and the reboot of the collaborative event calendar, upcoming.org.

Matthew Schutte is a San Francisco-based big wave surfer, privacy advocate, political philosopher and innovation consultant. He’s the co-founder of Collaborative Advantage where he helps companies and communities unleash collaborative capacity through transformations in culture, process and information technology.

Sean Michael Ragan is a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. His work has also appeared in ReadyMade, Popular Science, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the co-founder of Foundry.net, a company that helps hardware entrepreneurs design, build, and sell products by connecting them to the tools and services they need to mass-produce goods and grow companies.

Matt Haughey is the creator of MetaFilter, and the co-creator of Fuelly, among many other sites. He spends his free time shooting photos and also rides and races bikes. These days, he works on the editorial team at Slack.

Our guest this week is Gareth Branwyn, Gareth is the former Editorial Director of MAKE. He was also the senior editor at bOING bOING print, a section editor at Mondo 2000, and a Wired contributing editor for 12 years. Gareth has also written and edited over a dozen books. His most recent book, a combo best-of collection and “lazy man’s memoirs” is called Borg Like Me (& Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems).

Our guest this week is Tory Belleci. Tory is best known as the daredevil of MythBusters, and can build just about anything. He has worked with Industrial Light and Magic on films such as: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The Federation battleships and podracers are some of Belleci's pieces.

Our guest this week is Lenore Edman. Lenore is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, an open source hardware, hobby electronics, and robotics company. She likes projects at the intersections of cooking, electronics, papercraft and sewing.

Tara Tiger Brown is the founder of the nonprofit organization LA Makerspace, the premier STEAM service provider for the Los Angeles Public Library. She’s also the co-founder of Kithub, creative electronics kits for kids, and co-founder of Connected Camps, which has online camps for kids including a Minecraft coding club.

Our guest this week is Andrew Leonard (twitter @koxinga21). Andrew is a journalist who writes features for San Francisco magazine, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone and other outlets. He previously wrote for Salon.com between 1995 and 2014 where he covered technology, business, Internet culture, science fiction, and economics, among other topics.

Glenn Fleishman is a Seattle-based technology journalist, and two-time winner on Jeopardy! He’s a senior contributor at Macworld, regularly writes for The Economist, and pens stories about parking and cryptography for Fast Company.

Limor Fried is an MIT engineer and founder of Adafruit, a company she founded in 2005 with the goal to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Adafruit offers tools, equipment, and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests, and approves.

Jesse Genet is the CEO and Founder of Lumi, a company that makes it easy to order custom manufactured goods online, like rubber stamps, silkscreen kits and decals. Jesse's picks this week follow the same spirit of prioritizing high quality, simple solutions and resources to enrich and support a creative lifestyle.

Ryan Holiday is a well respected marketing guru, media strategist and author. He spearheaded viral marketing campaigns as Director of Marketing for American Apparel and has produced several world renowned books on his marketing strategies and philosophy. The list of tools Ryan brings to the table this week emphasizes quality and simplicity above all else, priorities we can all get on board with.

Jimmy DiResta is a maker, toy designer, and TV show host. He’s been the host of a number of DIY shows including Dirty Money, Trash to Cash, Against the Grain, and Hammered with John and Jimmy DiResta. He co-hosts the Making It Podcast, and has a fantastic YouTube channel called DiResta.

Ziya Tong is host and producer of the television program Daily Planet, Canada's daily science show, which airs on Discovery Canada. Before that, Ziya was host and field producer for Wired Science, produced in conjunction with Wired Magazine and NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS. She is on the board of WWF Canada and the founder of Black Sheep.