Your Comments

Welcome to the fifty-eighth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Makezine, our Facebook page, Google+ Community, and Twitter.

In the article MAKE Flickr Pool Weekly Roundup, kongorilla commented:

We need to invent a new word for the feeling one gets when they discover a project they shared on, say, Thingiverse (such as my “low poly mask”) gets used by someone else to make something totally unexpected (as seen in the photo, “.yes, that eye is glowing”). Now I see, looking on Thingiverse, that this project is a few steps down the sharing chain from mine. Yeah, a new word, mixing surprised/happy/proud parent and “how the heck?”

In the piece Makerbot Changes the Name of Thingiverse to Makerbot Thingiverse, chuck remarks:

The 3d community is mostly geeks. Geeks are passionate and tend to be social around their passions. When a community forms we tend to take a more hands-on approach than other online demographics. That hands-on approach is seen by us as ‘sweat equity’, i.e. ‘Our participation made your site what it is so we should have more of a say in its evolution’. This is valid to an extent, but we have to remember that while we were busy stretching the bounds of the technical and application end of things, there was still someone coming up with the filthy lucre to keep the lights on. While we see Thingiverse as a hot bed for the biggest manufacturing revolution since Henry Ford, there are others who see it as a marketing tool to sell 3d printers. There’s plenty of overlap in the Venn diagram, but our idealism is a shade over the lamp of economics- money is still an important concern in any project and the one who provides it gets to call the shots.
While Makerbot has the right to do what they will with their product and their marketing avenues, they don’t seem to have been as sensitive to the reaction of their customer base as they could have been. The benefits of an open source model to the upstart company (community-sourced R&D, word of mouth marketing, customer loyalty) comes at a price- change has to be slower and hands have to be held to keep the customers happy.
The take away here is that our community, as a market, will react to things that Sony’s and Apple’s customers won’t even bat an eyelid at. Anyone wishing to to tap the geek market in the future should take note of this. Personally I’m going to make some popcorn and enjoy the show.

In response to our question, “What would you 3D print if your print volume was 23 inches tall on an 8×8 print bed (1400 cubic inches)?” Facebook user DJ Sures answered:

Anyone who uses that style of 3d printer knows the answer is easy… “leaning tower of pisa” At that height, nearly everything will come out crooked

On Google+, Mark Frauenfelder posted this quotation:

“Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out. The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements. It is impressive to observe how with a fading of the individual’s creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination for joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist – slipping because of a drying up of the creative flow with – drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.” — from The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer (1951)

In response to Star Wars Barrel Organ Made of 20,000 Lego Bricks, Twitter user pammoran had this to say:

The juice of curiosity and creativity lives in this Lego barrel organ – a “so cool” whimsy that works http://j.mp/UFoUFE via @make

In the article MAKE at CES 2013: Ford Opens Up to Developers and Hackers, Jim Gugliotti remarked:

What about when it says “I ‘ve just picked up a fault in the ae35 unit”???

to which Christian Restifo quickly replied:

Tell it to queue up “Daisy Bell” on the sound system.

Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.