Easy 3D printing/Foot Petals/Maker tips
Easy 3D Design Application:
I got a great new 3D printer (the award-winning Original Prusa i3) and I’ve been using it to print useful things for around the house. The 3D design program I use is the free, web-based Tinkercad. It’s easy to get up-to-speed by watching a couple of brief introductory videos. I’m going to design a plastic ukulele with it. — MF
Wearable:
One of my favorite pair of sandals recently cut my heel open. These foot petals now prevent that from happening. They also keep my shoes in place and make them much more comfortable to wear. — CD
Maker tips:
Every week Gareth Branwyn gathers the best workshop and maker tips he finds online and posts them on the Tip section of the Make website. There’s always a couple of good ones. Like last week: use the search term “grandfather’s” when searching Craigslist for bargains such as old tools, lumber, and other materials generated when someone clears out grandfather’s stuff. — KK
400 free online tools:
This list of 400 Awesome Free Resources You Can Use to Grow Your Business is useful for anyone. There are links to online image editors, extensions to enhance your email, design inspiration, and tools to help you focus — all free. — CD
Dirt cheap magnification:
I’ve sung the praises of this 40x lighted hand held magnifier. It’s $1.90, including shipping, on Amazon. I splurged and bought three. I can now read the numbers on tiny capacitors, inspect splinters in great detail, and check my kid’s head for louse nits. Uses 3AAA batteries (not included) — MF
Instructional listen:
I greatly enjoyed this episode of my long-time favorite BBC podcast, In Our Time: The American Populists. It describes an earlier rise of populism in America around 1880, an era I knew nothing about, but one that has a few parallels with and lessons for the current outbreak of populism in the US. — KK
— Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson