Dust off your reading glasses and put your eyeballs back in: there’s a new issue of HackSpace magazine on the shelves and it’s waiting for you to read the hell out if it! Buy it in all good newsagents or save yourself time, effort and money by subscribing.

This month we’re doing something that most people have dreamed about at some point: starting our own maker business. We bring you words of wisdom from industry experts to help you make the jump from weekend maker to pillar of the business community.

If you happen to have switched on the news and felt sad lately, you’re not alone. Cheer yourself up with a glimpse into the future of open hardware. People are creating clever, amazing technologies to help humanity, from more efficient generators to cheaper, more intelligent robotic arms. And it’s all thanks to open hardware.

Just as clever is the ancient art of Japanese joinery. We strip away the mystery and find out why it looks so different to Western joinery, how the industrial revolution gave us worse tools, and how people everywhere end up making pretty much the same things.

Do you know what a transistor is? Of course you do! But do you know what a transistor is made of, what it does, and how exactly it does what it does, down to the behaviour of the electrons? Read the latest part of our electronics guide and the answer to all those questions will be a big fat ‘yes’.

Plus we show you the fastest, funnest way to carve wood, nearly electrocute ourselves with a dodgy power supply and make a circuit out of play-dough. Plus we finally learn the difference between a Philips screwdriver and a Pozidriv. All this and more, in HackSpace magazine issue 13!

You can subscribe to HackSpace magazine as a paper product here, or if you like the sound of it but aren’t sure yet, download it for free instead.

If that weren’t enough, 12-month print subscribers get an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express to play with.