3-D printing on the cheap

Desktop Factory's cheapo 3D printer is coming - Engadget

Tinkerers, schemers, makers and DIY-buffs: grab your ball-peen hammer and heaviest piggy bank, because you're about to need a loan. A company called Desktop Factory is going to make your 3D-printing dreams a serious reality with the introduction of its 125ci 3D printer, a $4,995 hunk of concept-plastic magic which could possibly represent a paradigmatic shift for the state of three-dimensional printing for the masses.

The interesting thing is that this isn't one of the "open source" projects -- they're planning to make money selling it.

Remember how fast the price of color laser printers went down? Same story here; this is just the first salvo across the bows.

Monday update

Some random updates. Nothing vital.

I don't appear to have mentioned what we got at Costco yesterday. The main thing was a SwissGear (Wenger) 24" rolling suitcase for the flower_cat Normally I'm the one who gets luggage, and the Cat just grumbles about it, but this was purple. Came with a nice little carry-on bag, as well.

The Dell Vostro 1000 laptop that I ordered for the Younger Daughter arrived this afternoon. I was shocked at the small amount of packaging -- the huge box was mostly empty. Apparently it uses cleverly-folded cardboard to keep the styrofoam inner box with the laptop in it from rattling around too much, but it was still altogether too loose for my taste. Well, it booted up this evening, so that's ok. Took me a while to figure out some of the stupid installation steps: after it gets through figuring out that it's connected to a wired ethernet network and bloody-well registering itself, it asks you to set up its internet connection and asks you for your ISP's phone number. At that point you have to back up three steps and tell it you don't want to set up a connection now. Idiots!

Got in a decent three-mile walk at lunchtime.

So much for that...

The Y.D.'s laptop is now properly set up with Firefox and OpenOffice.org. BTW, you'll want to download OOo from a mirror -- the main site is down to a crawl. You have to scroll down to find the mirror, and then go browsing around the mirror to find the right image. Bad web-page design.

She can take it from here, except maybe for figuring out how to change her workgroup name. I couldn't figure it out, either; it would probably take an hour or so of trying various control-panel icons to find whichever non-obvious one it's now kept under. I'll ask $EMPLOYER's IT guy in the morning, if I remember. And at some point we'll want to copy files; the simplest way is probably to pull the drive and mount it in a USB enclosure, although booting up Linux and sharing it with Samba is a possibility as well.

Needless to say, I haven't gotten much else done this evening.