The 3D printing revolution is here and it looks like consumers, or rather makers, are going to lead the way and industry is going to play catch-up. Remember the idea of print books on demand at your local book store? Never happened. Now it’s print anything on demand. (Okay, anything plastic, but with printed concrete houses under consideration, I think the possibility for other media is open for the time being.)

A young Brooklyn couple loved the Pilot Hi-Tec pens so much that they decided to create a stainless steel housing for them. They decided to try to get funding for their effort from Kickstarter. They had a modest goal of $2500. They ended up with $281,989. And now I wish I was one of their investors, who at $50 got a pen, because now they are selling them for $99. Too rich for my blood, but oh so lovely in stainless steel.

I must remember to browse Kickstarter more often. It’s so lovely to see people designing and making things.

I just purchased Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World and once I completed my purchase, Amazon showed me a set of books in which I might also be interested. There’s Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, both of which appear in my own book. Frauenfelder, by the way, is a regular contributor to BoingBoing. I am so in the right place right now.

It’s a great idea: take the beloved Mason jar and turn it into a coffee cup — one sees an entire secondary market in convenient sleeves cropping up — but Cuppow is only available through its own website. It’s price of $7.99 is not bad: this is obviously meant to target a particular market which is willing to pay for its green-ness and/or cleverness. (Hey, I’m in that market, so I can write that.) But the shipping of $5 means your total cost is $13. Too much. Get back to me, Cuppow, when you have gotten your costs for one or the other down.

Because sometimes you really do have a bunch of cheap LEDs lying around. And sometimes this is exactly what your daughter wants to do with them. And sometimes being a parent really is a way to have a second childhood. Directions are at Instructables.

The maker in me is fascinated by these home-made machines. The human in me is always saddened to see machines made to kill. Carbuzz has the photos, as well as some too glib prose.

Wish your LED Christmas lights didn’t flicker? So do a lot of other people.

Thanks to John Gruber for the link to Elevation Dock, which is on KickStarter looking for start up funding. The best part of the KickStarter page? The video showing the guy behind the project milling aluminum stock down to the dock — and the ending with the aluminum shavings being swept into a pile is a nice touch.

Essentially Hockfield boils it down to two concomitant issues: a lack of political will at both the national and state level to fund research with no immediate application in sight and the lack of commitment by entrepreneurs to not only inventing here in America but making things here in America:

Don’t just create ideas, also make products here. Buying back technologies that we invented changed our surplus into deficit. We need to have a substantial fraction of technologies that are made in America.

Posted on the Intel blog, of all places.

Brett Victor has a lovely, long, and fully illustrated post that he is calling a rant against “Pictures Under Glass.” Those pictures under glass are, of course, the emergent “touch-based” paradigm of the iOS devices and the various copies of it. Victor argues that these devices are not as “touchy” as we imagine and their impoverished version of touch means we haven’t fully explored what it is tools do and how it is we humans interact with them. His illustrated exploration of a hammer is fantastic.

Wired has a nice write-up on the new Arduino project boards which have graduated from 8-bit to 32-bit and are now ARM based. I am looking forward to having the time one day soon for me and Lily to play with robots of our own making.

The Wikipedia entry on LEDs has the basics I need for converting a couple of old flashlights to LEDs.

When I am doing just about any kind of reading or film watching, I find that having my iPhone or iPad handy is really about having Wikipedia handy.

(If you haven’t donated yet, you should. Do it now. Give them $5. $10. It’s easy. I’ll wait. Really. No, really, I’ll wait. Go donate something.)

Occasionally I have my MacBook with me, and I actually find myself looking for the Wikipedia app that’s on my phone and tablet. Crazy, yes, but when you want to look something up quickly, it really is nice to go straight to where you want to go.

With that in mind, I would like to thank Andy Ihnatko for point out how easy it is to create desktop web apps in the latest iteration of the Mac OS, Lion. How easy?

This easy:

1. Launch Automator.

2. Click on create a new App.

3. Find and drag the “Get Specified URLs” action into your workflow. (Just type the name into the search box until Automator finds it for you.)

4., Paste in the URL of the site you want to view.

1. Find and drag the “Website Popup” action into the workflow. Choose a size for the window.

2. Save. Done.

Here is what you get:

wikipedia-app.png

And it pops up this:

Wikipedia app using the iPhone sized screen

I am three days behind the schedule I set out for myself on Monday of last week, but the revision of the essay for the Journal of American Folklore is done, with one exception that I will discuss in a moment. The prose revisions were difficult primarily because I have not had my head in that essay for so long. The materials are interesting, however, and I find myself really drawn to linguistic work. There is simply so much one can do with it.

After the prose, it was time to turn my attention to the two illustrations that accompany the essay. The first figure is a map:

Like its companion, the map was a little, hmmm, sophomoric in appearance. It worked, but it was neither professional looking, to my mind, nor compelling. The same could be said for the diagram:

It took me an hour or more to decide not to try some sort of multi-dimensional version of this figure. In the end I decided to keep it two-dimensional because I had neither the data to explore more dimensions — pwned as I am by one Tim Tangherlini — nor did I have room in the essay to explore yet more analysis of the limited data I had. Even so, the line I drew to foreground the shifts in discourse genres needs explaining and it raises some important possibilities for analysis within the overall study.