Now that I've had a couple of days to sleep and get most of my brain operational again, how about some stuff that other parts of me have stumbled across?

Building your own electronics is pretty difficult. The actual electrical engineering aside you still have to cut, etch, and drill your own printed circuit boards which is a lengthy and sometimes frustrating task. Doubly so when multi layer circuit boards are involved because they're so fiddly and easy to get wrong. There is one open source project that I know of called the Rabbit Pronto which is a RepRap print …

Older denizens of the Net probably remember the name Gareth Branwyn. His name and visage were well known amongst people who were active in what came to be known as the cyberculture of the late 1980's and early 1990's, that weird mish-mash of hacker culture, people who identified as cyberpunks, psychedelic culture, rave culture, and other tiny social groups so far out on the fringe that they never really coalesced but instead moved in the cracks and fissues left in the wake of those other groups. Most of us remember two major projects he worked on at the time, the …

Regular readers of my blog (when I post... I'll write about what's been going on soon, promise) know that I keep a sensor net focused on the field of microfacture - personal manufacturing and rapid prototyping. Most of the time I natter on about 3D printing, but depositing layers of material to make something isn't the end-all-be-all of small scale manufacture. The other end of the spectrum - milling, or carving feedstock - is just as useful, and for many applications it's a preferable technique for making things. The thing about automills is that they're not yet as common as 3D printers. People …