Home on the Digital Range
The CD that came with the printer only has Windows versions of the XYZ Printer software, despite proclaiming Mac versions as well. Fortunately, the software is downloadable from their website.
Next, Helen created a model in XSI of an egg cup that looks like a bird's nest. She exported it to Blender and then we created an STL file which we then imported into the XYZ Printer software. The print for this took about 3 hours, and the results were less than perfect. The egg cup still looks pretty cool though.
This morning I printed a 3D printed shell and ordered an Arduino so I could reset my filament cartridge as described here.
So far I'm pretty happy with the printer. It was pretty cheap at £500, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it. I'm keen learn a lot more about 3D printing, and I think that this printer is a great one to start with.
I received 5 iBeacon transmitter units from ibeaconmodules.us today. They arrived unassembled, so I put them together and configured their local names with my iPhone.
The first hurdle I found in setting them up was getting the battery in the right way around. Each unit comes with a watch battery, and you need to have the side with the plus sign facing away from the circuitry.
Here is a YouTube video showing a researcher working with an Oculus Rift and Three Microsoft Kinects. Even this simple setup looks amazing!
I read an interesting post yesterday, about how much we change over the course of our lives. Yet, when we look forward at our future, we project forward the same person we are now. We don't expect ourselves to change much at all.
I've been reading the "Beyond Scarcity" series on FTAlphaville recently, and it's made some very interesting points. The posts argue that the current economic environment is deflationary with regard to goods. I think that is true, and one of the reasons is because of technology. Firstly technology is constantly making everything more efficient and because of global competition this is both reducing the production costs and making goods cheaper. Secondly technology is causing structural unemployment, which means less people have money to spend and there is less money flowing around the economy. Other factors causing deflation are the tight monetary conditions, the aging population, and potentially the effects of quantitative easing.
There is an interesting clip over on YouTube, that shows what having Google Glass (or something similar) might someday be like.
There is an interesting post over at pieria.co.uk called "The Financialisation of Labour". Frances Coppola compares the changing economic incentives between a company making a capital investment in a slave and an employee. She then suggests replacing the word "slave" with the word "robot".
Jon Perry has written an interesting post listing some strategies for dealing with the Technological Unemployment Problem.
The Technological Unemployment Problem is the issue of technology replacing humans to the point that there is massive unemployment.
Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.
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