[mobile ink-free photo printing]

I am so going to get one of these! A way to print photos without a printer. Tools required: PoGo and a mobile 'phone.

According to Ken Sander at DVICE:

" PoGo, an inkless digital photo printer slightly bigger than a deck of cards that prints 2 x 3-inch snapshots. It uses Zink (no ink) technology, which uses heats dye crystals in paper to create prints. The prints don’t smudge, are water-resistant and are almost tearproof. The PoGo prints pictures from cellphones via Bluetooth in about a minute, with the paper costing about 33 cents a sheet. For digital cameras, it connects easily through USB PictBridge. The colors and clarity of the prints looked surprising good."

Read more at Dvice.

[kate pullinger: digital writers resist!]

In her article in today's Guardian, Kate Pullinger shares her ideas on the move from publishing print to publishing digitally. She raises some interesting points including how it is actually much cheaper to publish digitally (especially after fees have already been worked into a paper copy which is being converted into a digital edition) but authors are still expected to accept their *usual* 10-20% cut. Hrm...doesn't seem quite right.

"At the end of the day, the writer herself is a more valuable brand than the publishing house and it's time for writers to wake up to this fact: why should we sign contracts giving us a paltry 15% royalty in an industry where actual costs are being massively reduced overnight? Why aren't writers jumping up and down over this?"

Check out the whole article here.

[diy 3D printing]

"Hod Lipson didn’t set out to revolutionize manufacturing. He just wanted to design a really cool robot, one that could “evolve” by reprogramming itself and would also produce its own hardware—a software brain, if you will, with the ability to create a body. To do this, Lipson (below, center) needed a rapid-prototyping fabrication, or “fabber.” Picture a 3D inkjet printer that deposits droplets of plastic, layer by layer, gradually building up an object of any shape. Fabbers have been around for two decades, but they’ve always been the pricey playthings of high-tech labs—and could only use a single material.

“To really let this robotic evolutionary process reach its full potential,” says Lipson, a Cornell University computer and engineering faculty member, “we need a machine that can fabricate anything, not just complex geometry, but also wires and motors and sensors and actuators.” Lipson and his grad student collaborators, Dan Periard (right) and Evan Malone, decided to put the problem to the people. They developed a low-cost, open-source fabbing system—Fab at Home—and encouraged experimentation by starting an online wiki for hobbyists. People report printing with everything from food (Easy Cheese, chocolate), to epoxy, to metal-powder-impregnated silicone to make conductive wires.

A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400. Lipson compares it to early kit computers such as the MITS Altair 8800, which democratized computer technology in the 1970s. At-home fabrication, Lipson says, “is a revolution waiting to happen.” As for that robot? Wait a year, he says, and it really will walk out of the machine."

video of 3D printer