Flother - North Atlantic Radio

North Atlantic Radio episode 16

2010-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Three-dimensional printing is on the cusp of going mainstream, and as parts get cheaper and cheaper it’s inevitable that access to these tools will become common place. How does this affect the way we shop, build parts, and make films?</p> </span>

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Links</h2>

Jay Leno</a></li>
Iron Man suit</a></li>
Thingiverse</a></li> </ul>
Transcript</h2>
Welcome to North Atlantic Radio.</p>
I’m your host, Brian Suda</a>.</p>
And in this episode, I’m going to talk all about 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and print-on-demand machines.</p>
The sounds you just heard were a 3D printer in action.</p>
I think the first time I saw a 3D printer, it was 1996 or 1997.</p>
I was visiting the university, and in their engineering department, they had two rapid prototyping machines.</p>
One cut out thin pieces of paper, which were then glued together to stack up the 3D model.</p>
The other was a gooey solution that the laser would heat up the surface of, making it hard.</p>
Then, it was submerged in the goo, and the process was repeated.</p>
Slowly, the part was built up.</p>
Both formats worked in identical ways with different mediums.</p>
Ten plus years later, and that’s still the basic concept we’re using today, but now 3D printing isn’t the realm of huge corporations or universities.</p>
Such hobbyists now have access to cheap, under $1,000 US dollar 3D printers.</p>
There is a statistic that’s bantered around about the price of laser jet printers from 10 to 15 years ago, and how it compares to modern day 3D printers.</p>
Laser jet printers used to be a few thousand dollars each, and now you can pick one up for cheaper than the cost of the toner.</p>
That’s the same price curve that they’re predicting for 3D printers.</p>
They will start off extremely expensive, but now are less than $1,000.</p>
The next part of the curve predicts that 3D printers will become so cheap that there will be one in every household.</p>
So how does this paradigm shift affect us?</p>
Well, there are plenty of really interesting aspects to be able to print on demand.</p>
One of the strangest use cases I’ve seen, but probably one of the more real world examples, was the comedian Jay Leno taking 10 minutes to talk about the joys of 3D printing.</p>
This is an unlikely source because he isn’t exactly known for his technical background, but he does love classic cars.</p>
And as cars age, parts tend to break, you know, that’s life, but it also means that it’s more and more difficult to get replacement parts.</p>
Now, he can take the broken or missing part and quickly get them created in cheap plastic.</p>
If that kind of fits and works, then it can be taken to a proper machine shop and a replica can be made in metal.</p>
Maybe the plastic or printable metal versions can act as a cheap test or potentially a full replacement.</p>
But it doesn’t stop there with creating mass market products.</p>
In the movie Iron Man 2, the suit that actor Robert Downey Jr. wears isn’t just some suit that’s created for an actor.</p>
It was created especially for him.</p>
By taking measurements of his body, the plastic parts for the suit were created using a 3D printer to fit to him and only him exactly.</p>
This allowed for the maximum value to be achieved from the design.</p>
This isn’t just some Hollywood experiment in the future.</p>
Print on demand might be as simple as visiting a website, finding the patterns that you like, and printing them at home.</p>
Imagine you want to build that cool new LEGO spaceship.</p>
Rather than going to the shops and paying for it, you could visit the website, pay a smaller fee, and print out just the pieces you need yourself.</p>
It saves LEGO on manufacturing costs, supply, and transport.</p>
The same idea holds true for accessories from just about any other toy, from army men to dolls.</p>
If you want the latest and greatest new hat, you can print it yourself at home.</p>
But what if we take it one more step?</p>
In-game avatars, like your World of Warcraft character, are unique.</p>
You’ve spent hours and days tweaking the look and feel to reflect your in-game personality.</p>
What if you could download that figure’s 3D shape and print it at home?</p>
You could not only be making new accessories, but new toys as well.</p>
Big companies might not like this because then consumers aren’t buying all new toys just to get a hat.</p>
But if they won’t offer such services, then other people will, and they’ll lose the potential sales altogether.</p>
In fact, sites like Thingiverse have free downloadable plans for loads of stuff that people have already created.</p>
As 3D printing becomes more and more popular, community sites will spring up all over the internet, focusing on different niche possibilities.</p>
It’s exciting times for 3D printing, and I’m looking forward to creating loads of ideas, from new-style clock faces to models of my house to broken pieces from things I’ve got laying around.</p>
Thanks for listening.</p>
In the next episode, I’ll be discussing the 10K competition by A List Apart.</p>
The competition is to submit a fancy web application in less than 10 kilobytes of HTML, with the help of a JavaScript library or two.</p>
There’s already a few very interesting submissions.</p>
As always, if you’ve enjoyed this episode or have any comments or questions, you can always reach us at our email, hello@northatlanticradio.com.</p>
Thanks for listening.</p>
Bye bye.</p>

North Atlantic Radio episode 15

2010-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Brian talks about his new book Designing with Data and all the little places that atomic chart types make a sneaky appearance. The book covers much of the basics of charts and graphs and gets you started in a world which you might not be so familiar.</p> </span>

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North Atlantic Radio episode 14

2010-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

In this episode Brian interviews Drew Neil about his site all-sorts.org</a> and his collection of collective nouns. In the podcast he explains how you can submit your own and some of the stranger submissions he’s got.</p> </span>

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If you have an extra 6:20 seconds, you can also watch Drew’s Pecha Kucha presentation</a> on the topic and see some of the prints that have been made of the various works</a>.</p>

North Atlantic Radio episode 13

2010-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

In episode two Brian talks about a book he recently read titled Web Forms Design: Filling in the Blanks, by Luke Wroblewski. It’s all about how to imperially design better forms based on years of research and hard evidence.</p> </span>

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North Atlantic Radio episode 12

2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

This is the beginning of a five-episode North Atlantic Radio mini-series. In this first episode, Brian looks into the history of the first talking computer, the IBM 704 and its relation to 2001’s HAL.</p> </span>

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North Atlantic Radio episode 11

2010-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Here it is, the final episode of our first series. In episode 11 we cover newspaper paywalls, Google and China, TweetCC, software patents, data.gov.uk, and — as always — the books we’ve been reading.</p> </span>

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We hope you enjoy this last episode of the series as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.</p>

Paywalls</h2>

How the New York Times should construct its paywall</a></li>
The Financial Times, the paper that doesn’t want to be free</a></li>
New Scientist paywall, an open letter</a></li>
Amazon charges for reading blogs on the Kindle</a></li>
The Guardian iPhone app</a></li> </ul>
Heroes</h2>

Google, for standing up to China</a></li>
TweetCC, for allowing people to free their Twitter messages</a></li> </ul>
Villains</h2>

Google, for their map reduce patent</a></li>
Software patents in general</a></li> </ul>
Site of the episode</h2>

Data.gov.uk</a></li> </ul>
Books we’ve been reading</h2>

Unseen Academicals</a>, by Terry Pratchett</li>
Letters from High Latitudes</a>, by Lord Dufferin</li>
Black Swan</a>, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</li>
Married to a Bedouin</a>, by Marguerite Van Geldermalsen</li> </ul>

North Atlantic Radio episode 10

2009-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

You lucky lucky people, you have an extra long episode for those long winter evenings over Christmas and New Year. A veritable cornucopia of topics awaits, including Google’s latest software, HTML 5-based games, web site pay walls, the differences between reporting and journalism, and, bizarrely, mid-nineteenth century British politics.</p> </span>

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Google’s recent releases</h2>
First, SPDY</a>, an upgrade for the HTTP protocol. It looks good, even though we don’t think it’s likely to make an impact. And why would the search giant release Google DNS</a>? To speed up page loading time, or for some as-yet-unknown reason related to Google Chrome OS and Android? Finally, we talk about the new labs feature of Google’s webmaster tools, the site speed checker</a>.</p>

HTML 5 games</h2>
HTML 5 is still only a draft but we’re seeing some real innovation here. From only a few months ago when games written in HTML 5 were just a twinkle in our eye, we now have two real-world games, Pie Guy</a> and Some Adventure Guy</a>, you can play right now. We talk about these games along with some of the problems that have yet to be overcome.</p>

Pay walls</h2>
Pay walls can only work if just about everyone promises to implement one. How are the companies that want pay walls going to manage to get everyone to agree? What about free options like the BBC News website? Are pay wall advocates just doing what the music industry did ten years ago, and fighting against the inevitable? Should they not be looking into new and sustainable business methods?</p>
Reporting versus journalism</h2>
Reporting is something social media can be good at (although there are still problems with trust and authenticity), but journalism is different. Journalism takes time, effort, and more than 140 characters. Can newspapers survive by admitting they’ll never win at the former, but can do the latter better than anyone?</p>
Heroes</h2>

The Guardian, for their new iPhone app</a>.</li>
Wikileaks</a> is my hero for standing-up to The Man.</li> </ul>
Books</h2>

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby: Volume II: Achievement, 1851-1869</a>, by Angus Hawkins</li>
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension</a>, by Michio Kaku</li> </ul>

North Atlantic Radio episode 9

2009-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

This episode sees us talking about open government data, including the soon-to-be-released web site from the UK government as headed by Tim Berners-Lee. We also slam Adobe for trying wheedle to wheedle their way in to open data with their distinctly unopen Flash.</p>

Along with that we mention games, NASA, and the books we’re reading.</p> </span>

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Open data</h2>

Newspaper Club</a> and their data.gov.uk newspaper</a></li>
Making Ordnance Survey data public</a></li>
Þjóðfundar</a></li> </ul>
Heroes</h2>

Amanita Design, for Machinarium</a></li>
NASA, for debunking the 2012 conspiracy stories</a></li> </ul>
Villains</h2>

Adobe</a>, for their ‘open data’ ploy</a></li>
Verizon, for their Droid fees</a></li> </ul>
Site of the episode</h2>
After last episode’s chat about native gaming in browsers we were very impressed to see Gil Megidish implement part of the old classic Another World using Javascript and canvas</a>.</p>
Books</h2>

The Forgotten Prime Minister: the 14th Earl of Derby</a>, by Angus Hawkins</li>
Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State</a>, by Steven Heller</li> </ul>

North Atlantic Radio episode 8

2009-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Heroes and villains</h2>
Matt thinks Flickr are being particularly heroic this time around for their work integrating OpenStreetMap with geo-located photos</a>. But Royal Mail are bad bad boys for their insistence on keeping UK post codes for themselves</a>.</p>
And Brian? He loves Mozilla for standing up to Microsoft and their buggy Firefox plugin</a>. He’s not so impressed with Twitter though, for introducing the cop out that is lists</a>.</p> </span>
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Legal deposit and the web</h2>
For background, see Matt’s ideas on legal deposit and the web</a>. We discuss why web sites aren’t covered by national legal deposit laws, why as a culture we seem so comfortable with losing so much of our contemporary written culture, how this would have affected the US Declaration of Independence, and what we can do solve this.</p>

Site of the episode</h2>
If only because it’s beautiful to look at, out site of the episode is Midtone Design</a>.</p>

Books we’re reading</h3>

Imprimatur</a>, by Monaldi and Sorti</li>
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England</a>, by Ian Mortimer</li>
Index on Censorship</a></li>
Blue Ocean Strategy</a>, by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne</li>
Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations</a>, by Ian Witten</li> </ul>

North Atlantic Radio episode 7

2009-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Join us for episode seven: native 3D graphics in your web browser, web hooks and APIs for SMS messaging, our heroes and villains, site of the episode, and the books we’re reading.</p> </span>

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WebGL</h2>
Native 3D graphics are coming to your web browser: the development versions of Webkit and Firefox now include support for WebGL, a Javascript binding for the OpenGL graphics library. It’s early days but very exciting, and we talk about what you might be doing in you browser in a few years time.</p>

A preview of Webkit’s WebGL and canvas 3D</a></li>
WebGL in Firefox nightly builds</a></li> </ul>
Taykt</h2>
Taykt is a service that allows you to send SMS messages programmatically. There’s an API and you can use web hooks to interact with your users over SMS. We talk about potential uses for the service and how in the future you might use it to make money.</p>

Taykt</a></li>
Taykt API</a></li> </ul>
Heroes and villains</h2>
Matt says Google Chrome Frame is heroic but Google Sidewiki is villainous. Meanwhile Brian is too pessimistic to come up with a hero but calls Apple as his villain. Listen to find out why.</p>

Google Chrome Frame</a></li>
Jeff Jarvis on the dangers of Google Sidewiki</a></li> </ul>
Site of the episode</h2>
Next time you’re making up some slides for a presentation, pause before you use Powerpoint, Keynote, or Google Docs and try 280 Slides</a> instead.</p>
Books we’re reading</h3>

The Image of the City</a>, by Kevin Lynch</li>
Paradox of Choice</a>, by Barry Schwartz</li>
Predictably Irrational</a>, by Dan Ariely</li>
Imprimatur</a>, by Monaldi and Sorti</li>
European Architecture 1750–1890</a>, by Barry Bergdoll</li> </ul>
Those TED talks Brian mentioned</h3>

Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice</a></li>
Dan Ariely asks: ‘Are we in control of our own decisions?’</a></li> </ul>

Flother - North Atlantic Radio

North Atlantic Radio episode 16

Links</h2> Jay Leno</a></li> Iron Man suit</a></li> Thingiverse</a></li> </ul> Transcript</h2> Welcome to North Atlantic Radio.</p>

Transcript</h2> Welcome to North Atlantic Radio.</p>

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