Everday hackers

Most people hear the term ''hacker" and think of electronic vandals who break, enter, and destroy. But in the earliest days on the technology frontier, the term was a badge of honor given to those who proved themselves the most resourceful, creative, and determined in pushing boundaries ever further.

Today, a growing hacker culture is not only reclaiming the original meaning of the term but also applying its can-do ethic far beyond computer code to embrace everything from home electronics to home improvements. Just as the first hackers looked at behemothcomputers and rudimentary programs and insisted, ''We can make them better," so are modern-day hackers looking at a wide variety of products, services, and materials and saying, ''We can make these better, too."

Take Tony Northrup of Woburn, for example. Dissatisfied with a pet sitter who showed up only sporadically to care for his cat, he didn't merely fire the sitter and find another one. Instead, at the cost of about $250, he built a system of wireless cameras, motion detectors, and an old personal computer to snap pictures of the cat at strategic places -- like the food bowl -- and load them on a website, allowing him and his wife, Erica Edson, to check on the cat from almost anywhere.

This pet-sitting ''hack" -- a hack being the term of art for a ''creative solution to an interesting problem" -- is just one of more than a dozen similar home remedies to be included in the soon-to-be published book, ''Home Hacking Projects for Geeks," coauthored by Northrup and Eric Faulkner of Lowell.

And the publication of that book, scheduled to be released in June, is just one example of the burgeoning hacker culture.

The book, in fact, is one of a series of hack-it-yourself books getting published by O'Reilly Media Inc. of Sebastopol, Calif. Since it launched its ''Hacks" series in 2003 with ''Linux Server Hacks," O'Reilly has published more than a dozen titles, sold more than 200,000 books, and expanded its hacking tips from software to websites to consumer electronics.

Now, as Northrup and Faulkner's ''Home Hacking" shows, O'Reilly is extending hacker culture into everyday life, with plans to introduce a magazine for home hackers.

Already, ReadyMade magazine, based in a Berkeley, Calif., is tapping the hacker market with features that show its 20- and 30-something readers how to make chairs out of old satellite dishes, lamps from old blenders, and salt-and-pepper shakers from burned-out light bulbs.

Its hero: MacGyver, the '80s TV character who in the pilot episode disarmed a missile with a paper clip, stopped a sulfuric acid leak with milk chocolate, and made explosives from sodium metal and a cold capsule.

In just over two years, the magazine's paid circulation has grown to about 70,000 while its website attracts some 20,000 hits a month.

''We're sort of the indy-rock hackers," said Shoshana Berger, the magazine's editor. ''We're hacking our homes, hacking our furniture, hacking the stuff on our persons."

The spread of hacker culture is very much related to the spread of technology, which now pervades almost every aspect of life. Among techsters, hackers are the good guys, as opposed to the malevolent cybercriminals to whom they refer as ''crackers."

Rael Dornfest, editor of O'Reilly's hack series, describes hackers as ''citizen engineers" inspired to make the technology fit better into their own lives.

And in a society in which almost everything is mass-produced, added Berger, hacking offers a way to customize and put a personal stamp on one's surroundings.

Said Dornfest: ''The difference between a hacker and consumer is a consumer says, 'I wish it would work this way.' A hacker says, 'I've got a screwdriver and a few minutes.' "

Hacker culture is even developing a body of literature, including a creation myth, the ''Gospel According to Tux," referring to Tux, the penguin mascot of the open-source software known as Linux. In 2001, Pekka Himanen, a Finnish philosopher, published ''The Hacker Ethic," tracing a key component of the open-source sharing of knowledge back to Plato's Academy, where information and ideas flowed freely between teachers and students.

Paul Graham of Cambridge, a hacker who founded the company Viaweb and sold it to Yahoo in 1998, will soon publish, with O'Reilly, a collection of essays exploring hacker ideology called ''Hackers & Painters."

Graham, too, sees a hacker ethic in history, including 15th-century Italy, where a community of artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, shared a desire to push painting, sculpture, and beauty beyond established boundaries.

He even sees the hacking impulse among the Founding Fathers, who also broke convention and basically ''hacked" self-government.

''Hacker culture has thrived here because America's social traditions allow people to break rules, to not be kept in a box," Graham said.

''We're allowed to do unorthodox things, and in the knowledge economy that's as important as having big coal and mineral deposits."

As it is known today, hacker culture was born more than 40 years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a small cadre of students became fascinated by the power and potential of the computer. The ethic that evolved embraced creativity, resourcefulness, and the free flow of information, as well as a ''fight the power" attitude that drove these early hackers to bristle at -- and break -- the restrictions that were applied to what were then huge, and hugely expensive, mainframe computers.

This ''question authority" outlook had its roots in the MIT students' long tradition of ingenious pranks, such as putting a plane atop the school's Great Dome. These pranks are also known as ''hacks."

Alan Kotok, now associate chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium, was among the first of the MIT computer hackers. Then, he recalled, using a computer that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to print a term paper or play games was just not done. So he and his compatriots wrote word processing and game programs.

''To us," he said, ''those were good hacks."

Of course, what were then good hacks, are today deeply ingrained in 21st-century life. And the hacks, some good, some maybe not so good, keep coming.

In addition to his nanny-cam for critters, Northrup, the coauthor, of ''Home Hacking Projects," has developed an inexpensive home security system that, for example, sends instant messages to a work computer if a would-be burglar tries to lift a window.

Another of his hacks retrieved the latest weather information from the Internet, converted it into a computer-generated voice and piped it into his bedroom so he would know the weather forecast before getting dressed.

The weather hack seemed pretty cool, until his wife, coming out of the shower, unexpectedly heard a strange male voice in the bedroom, and had the daylights scared out of her.

Needless to say, Northrup now gets the weather forecast like the rest of us.

Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavin@globe.com.