I’m no kind of engineer or industrial design guy. I do make a lot of physical things, but it’s mostly artworks, and old fashioned artworks at that—stone and wood carving. Nothing much has changed in those media in 150 years, and even then it was just power tools to speed up the same things they already did.

It’s perverse to live in the 21st technological Renaissance, and limit yourself to materials and techniques that have been around since the end of the Bronze Age. With this in mind, I recently borrowed a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer, downloaded a program called Fusion360 and set about joining the 21st Century. (I’m lucky to have friends who can lend a guy a printer!)

Holy $%^#!, but this stuff has come a long way. Forget the printer—Fusion360 is a potential career killer. Don’t even start playing with it unless you’re prepared to get obsessed. It’s magic, really. It takes a little time to get the basics, but it’s a nice shallow learning curve and you can start building simple designs the first day.  

Continue reading “Nobody is Amazed Enough” →

You’ve probably heard of the “Internet of Things”—the cool kids call it IoT—but if you’re like most people, all you know is that it has something to do with kitchen appliances that can order groceries for you.

Like so many of us, jaded by decades of technological miracles, for years I mostly ignored IoT as just another TLA in the never-ending cacophony of buzzwords, but now that I’ve put some time into learning what it’s all about, the scales have fallen from my eyes.  It’s not just smart coffeepots and burglar alarms the call your iPhone. I’m coming around to the view that it’s ultimately going to rival the Internet itself in scale, and may well result in epochal changes to the human condition.

Continue reading “Skynet” →