2015-05-03

Notes.

Yesterday Zach and I (with the *so* gracious help of Nick, Wing, Dara, Daniel, and Tracy) packaged up about 300 of The Public Radio's Maker Kits and got them ready to send to our Kickstarter backers. There is still *so* much work to be done on the assembled radios, but this was a big milestone - and I'm really excited to have reached it.

I also visited CIMP-3D this week, and while I was there I got to see a print of my seatmast topper being inspected and analyzed by their CT scanner. I'm still waiting for the pictures (it's a DARPA funded facility, so cell phone photos are strictly disallowed), but will be posting a full report soon :)

Pathfinding.

• Stratasys is trying to outlaw tampering with DRM systems on 3D printers.
• Amazon and The Wirecutter are collaborating directly on Amazon.com's site.
• Sam Altman on how to live your life & career.
• Dara on embracing difference in the workplace.

Building.

• A consortium of companies - including Microsoft, Autodesk, Dassault, Shapeways, netfabb, and SLM - announced .3MF, an open source, human readable, and extensible file format for 3D printing. I'm interested.
• Fetch Robotics released videos of the warehouse robots they're working on.
• More evidence that when you create holes in graphene, you can increase its electrical storage capacity.
• This article (and the video at the end) is a little over the top, but I'm down for anything that pushes reinforced composite FDM 3D printing away from cartesian machine designs.
• Zaha Hadid designed an enormous airport for Beijing, but apparently it *will* have a human scale feeling (not sure I believe this).

Logistics.

• In terrorem, Latin for "into/about fear," is a legal threat, usually meant to compel someone to do something without needing to actually take legal action against them.
• If you want your city to fix a pothole, just draw a big penis on the asphalt around the pothole.

Evaluation.

• A really good, long, article about a "successful" Kickstarter campaign that will never deliver. <- This is worth a think. I thought about it for a while, and want to find time soon to write down how I see it.
• Why you should get tortas - not tacos - if you live in NYC.
• An analysis of podcast sponsorship.
• A good overview of how the Autodesk Spark team sees the holes in today's 3D printing workflow.
• An interesting piece on the racial implications of photography color balancing.

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• My first week without an Apple watch.
• Farhad Manjoo on bidets.

And.

Phew.