Fab @ Home @ Work

The Fab@Home machine is coming along slowly but surely, an hour here and an hour there. I'm soldering wires, and my colleague David is assembling the chassis. The online instructions are fabulous, wonderful detail and illustrations. As we've assembled it, we've been really impressed by the thought that went into the design. Assembly is still tricky - I'm terribly out of practice with a soldering iron, and some of the wires and connections that would have been easy when I was a teenager are so small that they are nearly invisible to me without a magnifying class!

We've set ourselves a deadline of mid-April to have it up and running, so we'll keep plugging away!

hulu goes live

Hulu is a joint venture of Fox and NBC Universal. I've been using it for the past couple of months and it's impressive - very good video and audio, limited commercials. According to an article in the New York Times, a quarter of internet users have watched a full-length program on line in the last 3 months. This is reaching a tipping point very fast. It's a wrenching change for the economics of the broadcast industry, but great for the consumer of media.

What do Trent Reznor and I have in common?

Not a whole heck of a lot, actually. However, Nine Inch Nails' new creation Ghosts I-IV ("album" and "CD" seem quite out of date) is licensed under the same terms as this blog - a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike license. In other words, you can take his work and remix and mash to your heart's content as long as you don't claim it's your own or try to sell it.

The marketing for Ghosts is remarkable - you can download part of it free; you can download the whole thing for $5; or you can buy various deluxe packages at price points from $10 to $300 (except the $300 limited edition is already sold out).

Most people who understand the Internet have known for the last 10 years that a new model for music distribution and sales had to be developed. It's great to see an intelligent and creative attempt to do something really different.

Are you an odd-looking photographer?

So, the London Metropolitan Police wants people to turn in photographers who "seem odd." In my experience that would apply to a significant percentage...

(Photo from Thomas Hawk's Flickr site, used under Creative Commons license.)

Desktop Factory's Netxplorateur Award

Cathy Lewis is back from Paris after receiving the Netxplorateur award on behalf of Desktop Factory. She let me take a photo of the rather cool looking (and very heavy) award shown here. I'm pleased to see that they are making good progress, particularly on producing models with more easily removed supports. I know they are more interested in shipping product than winning awards but the Netxplorateur and the Popular Science award and the continuous press interest all continue to demonstrate interest and demand for a really innovative product.