Your Comments

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

In the article What is “Making”?, Eric commented:

I did some research on this in preparing a presentation for our local Makerspace, Omaha Maker Group. The conclusion I came to is that the tinkering, hacking, engineering, fixing, and so forth only becomes “making” when there becomes a social aspect to it – sharing our successes, crowdsourcing ideas, seeking input to solve a problem, collaborating on an idea, or just plain gathering together to work on projects in a shared space with shared resources.

In the piece MAKE Asks: Speakers for Maker Faire, chuck remarks:

What I’d really like to see is a ’3D Printing Reality Check’ panel discussion with some of the luminaries of the 3D printing scene as well as an engineer, an economist, a designer and other experts to clear up some of the confusion as to what we can and can’t do with the technology and where it’s likely to be heading. The recent printed guns hysteria is a good example of confusing what we may be able to do in the future vs. what we can do right now.

On Google+, MAKE Editorial Director Gareth Branwyn asked, “Soldered, sewn, cooked or coded, what is one thing you made this weekend?” Matthew Gryczan replied with:

Design work on wooden boxes with dividers that will hold interesting rock samples from places our family has gone on vacations — uranium from the Grand Canyon, fulgurites from Silver Lake, Mich., mica from Yellowstone. The idea is to have a decent display case that reminds us of these places — not a rock collection.

On MAKE’s Facebook page, we posed the question, “What are your favorite robotics-related quotes?” John Reilly Morgan responded with:

‘Robot walks into a bar orders a drink, lays down a bill. The bartender says, “We don’t serve robots,” and the robot says, “That’s all right, someday you will.”‘

On Twitter we saw:

The current @make magazine is chockablock: Raspberry Pi, Sake Brewing, Growing Ghost chilies… Right up my alley.

— mastodon.social/@fenbranklin (@fenbranklin) January 28, 2013

In the article Bunnie Teaches Outsourcing to China, markie remarked:

Bunnie makes some good points about the process of offshoring, potential hazards, potential gains, etc, but local manufacturing is a much more viable solution for small and sometimes medium runs, especially if you’re dealing with multiple processes.

The advantages of working with a local manufacturer during the first iterations of your product are perennially underestimated, and the hidden costs of moving abroad (time, travel, delays, customs, miscommunication, etc) are huge. It’s far easier to drive an hour and sit down with your manufacturer. If there are any issues, he’ll just call you on your cell phone.

There is a point when going abroad makes a lot of sense, it’s just later in the process.

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