If you look for long enough, you will find yourself. Are you happy? Hard to say. Are you?

They seem very single-minded these people… going about their business etc. I wish I had their… drive. Their get up and go… although I’m guessing a lot of them are like tiny Stepford Wives.

The weird thing about this, is that it looks completely normal and natural. It looks like the way things “should be”. I wonder if we’ll ever get it together. I hope so.

It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s art. This is what science fiction should look like. Actually it’s what science looks like.

I wrote my own rss feed aggregator a year or so ago – it looks a bit like the way Opera renders RSS… which was almost certainly also the inspiration for pinterest I think, which itself has a shitload of clones now… in fact there’s an EU company that’s apparently worth about $200m – and it’s main tactic is to take applications that are foolishly only available to the US market, then clone them, build up a user-base, then sell them to the original companies.

But I digress… I have a hand-coded feed a bit like pinterest, but with 3 columns – and it’s basically science fiction now. Real, but still sci-fi. Kindof. The Sci Fi singularity is almost on us. It’d be fucking cool… if we could just get rid of the fascists.

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Click here for a massive photo of the earth

It’s worth watching the guy’s other videos on Youtube… the ball could be mistaken for really insanely skilled craft… but his art goes deeper than that. Here (for example) a bass-reliefs of castings made of Taliban bullet holes from Afghanistan… which he cast himself

I’m quite interested in this… in a tangential sort of way, because CNC fabbing makes “showpieces of skill” from yesteryear, downloadable and printable… for example $20,000 antique wooden watches from Russia

Could probably be designed in a CAD system, and fed to a CNC machine. Especially now gaps are being filled… hardware problems are being solved as software problems, eg: this online cog generator:

Which is not to say that Piers Secunda’s puzzle is part of this process – it is (I think) good old fashioned skill, honed over many years. But it’s only a matter of time.

Which is a car roof that has solar panels by day, and lights up inside at night… oled screens etc that change according to ambient light conditions.

But who cares about that? This is a totally cool design – and a classic example of what you can do when you get computer-controlled machines to do the fabricating.

The photograph is taken from the point of view of… I don’t know… a cat probably.

There isn’t much on the BASF website… apart from a classic example of what will come to be known as Early 21st Century pre-World War III, Fascist Design. You know the sort of thing.

I don’t know why they’re always doing that. People in suits, tinted blue… but at least you can see them coming. The really insidious stuff has people who are full of… “life”… like the ones in coca cola or beneton adverts.

Three Cubes Colliding from Jimandtonic on Vimeo.

3D Printed bits + aerospace fabric + A LOT of fiddley construction.

Really cool though because (as far as I can tell) it’s modular, so you could make smaller ones out of the same stuff. Or bigger ones… maybe. Or different shapes. Stick it up on kickstarter. You’ll make a million dollars.

Mind you, if I had a choice between the kite, and the lenses they used to shoot this video, I think I’d go for the lenses.

A thing here about how to make molds using a 3D printer and sugru… which I find interesting because the bit they just made is a bit that I’ve needed myself, over 5 billion times.

Initially I found Sugru to be quite annoying… not sure why. There was something a bit “yay” and “wow” about the way it was marketed… and I’m deeply suspicious of Hoxton types… I don’t know if the woman who made this is a Hoxton type, but the signs are there. Hoxton types made that little printer thing that looks a bit like hitler.

I’m just deeply suspicious of anyone trying to be “Passionate” about something they’re selling.

But then I bought some and it’s actually really useful. I’ve used it to replace all the rubber bits on my laptop that have gotten lost, as well as make this little thumb-guard thing to stop me accidentally hitting the touchpad, which was a real pain before. I’ve also used it for making a rubber foot for a clamp… for making golden mean calipers, and used it in place of heat-shrink on a cable that was always breaking. It’s weird stuff. Like blu-tak which turns into hard rubber.

Anyway, using a 3D printer to make molds is quite a neat idea… because it allows you to make a lot of very similar things very quickly. Which is pointing out the bleeding obvious I suppose… but it kindof bridges a gap. Not everything that we might want to make is a one-off. Things like candles or soap… or product-specific packaging… or toys… or… dunno. Art. Stuff gets interesting when you can do it big.

Guardian of the Hole : Korean artist U-Ram Choe

Sign of the times – big scale, mathematically-linked but unique shapes… laser-cutter/CNC makes all this a hell of a lot easier than it once was – although you do need a bit of a budget for it… and the thing above goes way beyond this – making a kind of Faery-Steam-Punk… like Swiss-Watchmaker-Punk.

INCREDIBLE 3D DRAWING MACHINE from David Battistella on Vimeo.

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Which is a thing for holding your head still so you can trace reality on the inside of a concave dish.

The Art & Science of Touch from Siri Rodnes on Vimeo.

It’s using one of those 3-armed robo-things that stack pancakes, but in reverse. Those are the things that I think repraps should be based on… once they’ve got their spacial calibration sorted out.

Speaking of which, have you seen this?

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This guy’s made a really really high-res DIY 3D printing machine… looks like it prints from the bottom, rather than layering on top. All is not well in IP land with this one though – he says he’s going to a) release it as a kit but b) patent it… and there seems to have been some sort of fracas over the whole patenting notion. Intellectual Property in the shape of patents is a type of poison that contaminates everything that is built up on them… and if you’re not rich enough to take Exxon to court, what’s the point?

Anyway, progress etc here, http://3dhomemade.blogspot.com/