MakerBot Industries

If you’re looking for an easy way to modify and prepare your STL files for printing and you run Mac OSX 10.6, then you should check out Pleasant 3D. Besides being absolutely beautifully designed by Zaggo himself, it’s a very powerful tool!

What is Bruce Sterling making?

First, I rip the cables out of the bubblepack. One USB2TTL cable to talk to all my new machinery. Various cat5e cables to wire the fabricator system, and to enable me to screen a galaxy of global video entertainment through poorly-policed peer-to-peer sharing services.

One standard ATX power supply, made in China; its lavish carbon-footprint will also serve me as my hotplate.

A toolkit with a glittering host of aluminium tongs, tweezers, spanners, hex keys, and Ikea-knockoff assembly tools. These items will double as my cutlery, since I’ll be living mostly off ramen noodles from the local Korean grocery, when not grabbing a tasty plate of feijao maravilma over at the “Favela Chic” Franco-Brazilian bar and techno niteclub.

I also possess three NEMA 17 stepper-motors to drive my fabricator. This nifty Tyvek bag contains all the nuts, bolts, belts, pulleys and bearings. These gleaming rods are high-quality precision-ground steel shafts for the X and Y axes.

This device also boasts pre-assembled 3rd-generation electronics from the vengeful wreckage of the Ivrea interaction-design school. These bearded techno-intelligentsia were once harmless left-wing Italian academics, but now they are fully prepared to crush the planet’s entire industrial order through methods even the Chinese can’t comprehend.I have a pinch-wheel plastruder to melt my giant reel of plastic cable. It extrudes that molten plastic as solid, durable, slightly warped and drippy consumer objects. I mean fruit bowls. Forks. Lampshades and hat racks. Most anything Deirdre might have found while leafing through her overpriced shelter magazines.

These pale, gormless extrusions of the formless will have no copyrights, no branding, no consumer cachet, and no Walter Benjamin “aura”. They will just work, they will function practically. They will function in the same mute, ugly way that a prison shiv will work for some east London hoodlum locked up half his lifetime for knife-crime. You may imagine there’s some vast class chasm between this old-school knife-waving wide-boy and me, a bespectacled, hypermodern Web geek – but let me confide this to you: he’s my landlord.

via Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.