There always seems to be “how-to” pages popping up, especially now with Make: magazine galvanizing the do-it/make-it/invent-it-yourself crowd. One recent website that I caught over on Boing Boing has probably gotten lots of exposure, but it’s worth pointing to here: a page on how to make analog watches (Link). I’ll look at that more closely when I have the time not to need a watch. It’s the second one, however, that really piqued my interest.

Last year some time I suggested to the guys at Core77 that there should be a “Toy Design” section of the design forum. They obliged and as I was involved in both its creation, forum moderation and convincing(?) fellow CIA alum Todd Herlitz (who runs a small ID studio near Chicago) to moderate that forum area, I posted a few initial threads to get it started. One thread was simply titled “Vinyl Toys” (link) and it recently received a nice necropost pointing to an indie toy maker’s DIY page (Link).

The above image is one of Figurepunk’s offerings and is the subject of that how-to. So if you want to read up on some really low-end mass production work, be sure to stop over and maybe even buy one of them – they’re pretty cheap compared to the stuff I usually see for sale. The only thing I wonder is whether there are options to use other, eco-friendly materials. Something to research… right before I no longer need a watch.

{Image Copyright © FiGUREPUNK 2004-06}

There’s a slow thread over on the Core77 forum (Link) I’ve been visiting occasionally. It may not move very fast, but the comments that are coming are worth noting.

The thing was virtually dead when a couple of PLM vendors started plugging their (limited) wares – Paxonix and Design2Launch. Hit and run stuff. However, it’s the most recent posting by “pier” to which I want to call attention. Here’s one sentence that hit home for me:

I have worked with companies using Primavera, JDEdwards, MatrixOne, SAP, PLMWorks, Enovia, IMAN, etc. All were grossly problematic, universally despised more than any work tool, bad boss or environment. All companies had stupendous, costly installation, training and familiarization time periods, averaging 2 – 3 years from acquisition. In fact, every company had a customized version of their PLM installation as no one package solution was adequate. In some cases, the customization was by independant third party contract as the PLM software company disagreed or disapproved or had exclusive integration agreements with other software companies different than what the company was using.

This sounds like my experience using PTC’s Windchill back in 2001. It also sounds quite a lot like some game development software out there.
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From nanofactories to nano-bacteria factories… or something. New Scientist has a story (Link) about bacteria creating what are effectively electrically-conducting nanowires. This is pretty wild stuff. For some reason, the scene from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” comes to mind, only instead of a bunch of workers I’m seeing a bunch of bacteria. So long as they don’t form a union.

via Boing Boing

{Image source: New Scientist/Rizlan Bencheikh and Bruce Arey}

Let me start off by apologizing for the lack of posts. Things really are a bit crazy on the meatspace side of the screen. I’m not scouring the net right now and so instead I find myself peeking in on a couple of good posts elsewhere. That can be a good thing as I’m following some cool comments that I might have otherwise missed.

One such post is over on Clickable Culture where Tony has – amidst all the recent news of marketing efforts making their way into Second Life – called out some of the problems with the latest bandwagon jumping. Go read both his post “Marketing Mistakes in ‘Second Life'” (Link) and the comments. Well worth the few minutes.

Seems like Nokia is going after some Chinese manufacturers alledgedly ripping off their design according to an article over on TMCNet.com (Link). This isn’t anything new of course. Everyone knows that design rip-offs are everywhere. It wasn’t long ago that news an entire corporation was pirated made the rounds and I mentioned it here (reLink). I raise it again only because there were a couple of recent articles that discuss the potential effects.

Yahoo News carried an AP story, “Piracy hurting China’s own industries” (Link), detailing how Chinese software developers are being hurt by their fellow countrymen. From the article:

Kingsoft Corp.’s English-Chinese dictionary program is used on most of China’s 60 million PCs. That’s the good news. The bad news: Kingsoft doesn’t make any money from it, because 90 percent of those copies are pirated.

One by one, the Beijing-based software maker has seen its sales of such popular products destroyed after black market producers flooded the market with cheap copies.
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