Lisa Katayama

If Mr. Potato head was in the army...

...he'd look like this. These prototypes were created with a 3D printer by Avihai Shurin.

[via Designboom]

Steven Leckart

BBG on... PARC

One early morning a couple months back, we ventured from San Francisco down Highway 101 to 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., where a terracing three-story concrete building sits amidst rolling hills and horse farms.

The Palo Alto Research Center was established in 1970 as a division of Xerox (in 2002, PARC became an independent company). Through the years, PARC has churned out more than 6002100 patents and patents-pending in a variety of disciplines &mdash from computing and engineering to electronics and biomed. At one time, PARC's patent portfolio was worth an estimated $1 billion.*

The Alto was dreamt up in 1972 and unveiled in 1973. PARC researchers were responsible for unleashing the first GUI in 1975. Researchers at PARC created the first worm in 1978 (it was intended for good: seek out idle servers to distribute processing load).

Famously, in 1979 a wide-eyed 24-year-old named Steve Jobs visited PARC and had his mind totally blown. About the GUI, he later recalled:

"I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life... within, you know. ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."

To honor the place that's more or less responsible for envisioning, creating and instigating the modern computing era, BBG will be posting a series of stories today about PARC: historical tidbits, current research, photos, video, insights and more.

*see Open Innovation

Steven Leckart

A club chair fit for Johnny Blaze

I'm at the HD Expo in Las Vegas, where I'm wandering the conference halls trolling for strange gems like this flaming skull chair made by SIF Technology. The company creates its digital leather using a process whereby several layers, including a print adhesive, polymer, and polypropylene, are applied to the chair to create and protect a printed image.

Steven Leckart

Maclover's Printer Driver Museum

The Mac Driver Museum has a nice selection of printer drivers on file. Good stuff if you're the kind of person who wants to refurb an old dot-matrix.

[image via Mac History]

Steven Leckart

How To: Build Your Own Letterpress

Every spring, the wheels of the reprehensibly-shiesty wedding industry begin turning. Planning my own nuptials went smoothly. But if I had to do it over again, I would have tried crafting my own letterpress invitations and save-the-dates instead of outsourcing to an online digital printing service. Sure you can pick up a little bulb-operated Gocco, but going deep into pre-20th Century techniques seems appealing (even if you don't get into historical garb). I'm not alone...

In the last five years, there's been a surge of renewed interest in letterpress (just check Etsy or any artsy-fartsy card shop). Evidently, a lot of new-old printers are women. According to the folks at Boxcar Press (hint: amazing resource/supplier), nine out of ten (!) of their new customers are female -specifically, these are ladies looking to print DIY wedding invitations. I'm not going to invoke a battle of the sexes, because that's just silly (plus, the one pro letterpresser I know is a dude). Still, consider this: Benjamin Franklin got into printing when he was 12. So if letterpress is downright American. Building your own press could be construed as civic duty.

We found two homemade models -a lever-based rig and a screw press - and probed our pro presser for some advice/critique, after the jump...

[Above image from JWG]

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Lisa Katayama

Rapid prototyping maid figurine wows nanotech conference attendees

At a nanotech trade show a couple of years ago, Japanese company Nakamura Choko unveiled this figurine replica of a maid created using a non-contact 3D digitizer and a rapid prototyping machine. The process was simple--scan human with digitizer, adjust with modeling tool, hit print--but the real question was, why would a materials manufacturer dress their booth babe up as a maid and then shrink her with a 3D printer? The answer: maids sell. Ever since maid cafes became big in Tokyo,a girl in a frilly French maid costume has guaranteed at least marginal popularity to pretty much anything. Nakamura figured that, since most of the people attending this trade show were science geeks, they would flock the maid booth like flies on fresh poop. [via Tech-On! (Japanese)]

Joel Johnson

Three examples of dot matrix printer music

Younnat used this dot matrix printer to provide the rhythm track to his marimba and synthesizer etude. Soothing.

Sue Harding made music with dot matrix that is a bit more glitchy and alien.

Canadian art duo [The User] made an entire album titled "Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers" by programming large series of text files to play 14 different printers. Dig those track names. (You can grab this on eMusic.)

Joel Johnson

Obligatory: Office Space printer smash

A scene so potent, there are several tribute videos. Here are two, after the jump.

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Lisa Katayama

High-end 3D printer art

3D printers are great for complex engineering projects, but what happens when you try to get creative with it? Most artists obsessed with digital fabrication opt for milling machines or laser etching--which are cheaper and easier to access--but some have stuck with rapid prototyping (aka rapid manufacturing) because building ultra-precise objects out of nothing is undeniably awesome. Can you imagine if Torolf Sauermann tried to make this snail shell-esque math art using a pottery kiln? (He actually designed it using TopMod, an open source 3D topological mesh modeling system, and then sent the image to a printer for conception.) Keep reading for more examples of 3D printer art by artists, designers, and surgeons whose work has been featured everywhere from high end boutiques to the MoMa.

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Joel Johnson

You can still buy new dot matrix printers. Why?

They have have gone the way of trackballs* and Hercules graphics adapters for most of us, but did you know you can still buy a variety of Dot Matrix Printers down at your local Office Depot? They aren't cheap, either—the lowest-end Epson is $300. They're still used in a lot of places to print out receipts, reports, and forms in systems that haven't been updated since the early '90s.

Some stores even have new color dot matrix printers like the picture Okidata Microline 395C, which you can add to your office for just $1,164. (Available exclusively in Nicotine Stain beige.)

Is there a good reason you're still using dot matrix printers in your workplace, besides an affection for their cicada-like screams?

* Sorry, trackballers, I can't resist an opportunity to tease.

Joel Johnson

MakerBot: 3D Printers for the mildly solderphobic

3D printers are coming to the home, undoubtedly. In five years. Or maybe ten. No more than twenty.

Until Canon is selling home models for nearly nothing just so they can lock you into buying their proprietary extruder paste cartridges, your options are limited: the cheapest commercial models, like the "desktop-sized" Objet Alaris 30, are still $40k; and building your own, using the open-source RepRap, takes time and skill.

There's a new option, though, that splits the difference: MakerBot Industries sells a build-yourself variant of the RepRap (still open-source) for $700, called the CupCake CNC.

The 3D models you make with the CupCake CNC won't be mistaken for ones that come out of commercial printers, but the pro machines aren't offered with an optional Frostruder that can squirt icing onto cupcakes in preprogrammed patterns, are they?

Joel Johnson

Themes

We're trying something a bit different today for the first time. Once or twice a week, BBG will have a "theme", and the majority of the posts during that day will be variations on that theme. They might be overtly techy (today we're starting with "Printers") or they might not (Friday we're going to go with "Gardening"), but we hope they'll be a fun way to explore our chosen subject matter perpendicularly to the way it is typically presented in a blog.

It'll be a muddle-til-we-make-it sort of thing (what's new?) but I think you'll enjoy it. I don't plan on always doing any introductory post announcing the theme, but may when it seems appropriate. But I do want you guys to feel free to send in any links to things old or new that you think would fit well into the theme, as well as questions you want answered, so we'll have to figure out some good way to announce it early in the day.