Description
Why is the channel named House of Hacks? Today Harley explains the reason for the name.My (mostly inactive) blogs:
Software: Skylark Software
Photography: Hooked on Light
Religion, politics and philosophy: The Episodic Author
This is the seventh episode of Vlog Every Day in August 2017 (aka #SSSVEDA2017).
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For a written transcript, go to Why the name House of Hacks?
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Transcript
Why's this channel named "House of Hacks?" We'll find out today.[Intro]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfters. Harley here.
So why did I name this channel "House of Hacks?"
Well, before I got into video, I had three written blogs. One was a software blog, one was a photography blog and one was kind of a catch-all, more philosophy, religion, that kind of thing.
And I found as I was writing those blogs that every once in a while I'd have a topic that didn't fit neatly into any one of those categories and I still wanted to talk about it. So I didn't really have a place to put it.
So, as I was thinking about video, I wanted to take this lesson into consideration. And, so I wanted something that was a little bit more broad based, something where more than one thing could fit into that topic if I wanted to make it fit that way.
So a house is a single building but it has different rooms for different purposes. So this kind of fit in with the broad collection of things that I wanted to have to designate what this channel was about.
So why "hacks?"
Well I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. So that kind of fits in with the "hack" mentality where you kind of work away on something until you get it and you may not necessarily do it the most efficient way, the most elegant way, but eventually you get the job done in a way that's acceptable.
This fits into the old term, the old definition for "hack" where... one of the classic definitions is "modify or change something in an extraordinary way" or "a clever solution to a tricky problem." And that's kind of the sense of the word "hack" that I'm working with here.
Not the new sense of the word where it's kind of become "people that break into computers." That's not what I'm talking about. That's more, I prefer the word "cracker" or "crack" for that type of activity where you're cracking into computers and breaking through security. That's not what we're talking about.
I'm talking about putting things together, maybe not necessarily things that were meant to go together but putting them together to come up with a solution to a problem.
And "Hacks" alliterates nicely with "House." So that was a bonus.
So that's really why I came up the channel name. "House" meaning a collection of things and "Hacks" meaning putting something together until you make it work. And that's really how I kind of approach most of my creative projects. I'll have an idea and I'll go in and just working away on it until I have a solution that works for me and for my purposes.
For the rest of this week, I want to talk about the paragraph I use frequently when I'm closing my videos. That paragraph goes something along the lines of:
I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.
Sometimes this manifests through making things with a technical or mechanical bent to them.
Through this channel I hope to inspired, educate and encourage these types of makers in their creative endeavors.
Usually this involves physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography, or other similar types of things.
If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.
Thanks for joining me on our creative journey.
Now go make something.
Perfection's not required. Fun is!
And that's how I finish quiet a few of my videos.
For the rest of this week, I want to go through that kind of line by line, phrase by phrase and talk about why I chose those phrases for that closing to describe the whole purpose of House of Hacks. It's really kind of do a deep dive into the "why" of House of Hacks. Why I'm doing this channel.
I hope that sounds interesting to you; that's going to be the rest of this week.
And until next time, go make something.
Perfection's not required. Fun is!
