When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

— Steve Jobs, from a recently-released 1994 interview

Let me be the Polaroid back for your brain.

— Bruce R. Pfeiffer, Jr.’s original concept of ‘Tangible Imagination’

The goal is to achieve a lead-time from idea to physical reality that is so short as to be more like a single action than a process; almost indistinguishable from magic.

— John Pfeiffer, re-interpretation of ‘Tangible Imagination’

I like making things.  And because I have so many ideas in my head, I place a high value on anything that makes executing those ideas easier.  I was born at a time when the ‘personal computer’ had just come into existence, and so my life has been tightly intertwined with the evolution of technology in this era.

It’s a very exciting time for me; computer-controlled machine tools, DIY desktop 3D printers which can print the parts to make more printers, consumer laser-cutters…  People are getting smarter and more capable every day.  We live in a time when companies consisting of just a couple people, are pulling down millions of dollars a year selling things they freely give away the designs for, where any sufficiently-motivated group of 2-5 twenty-somethings can be the next Apple, the next Microsoft…

I don’t envy big business right now, we’re approaching the point where any fairly savvy person is going to be able to make a lot of the doodads they would otherwise buy, not to mention make the doodads for the less-savvy to buy.  But that’s just the start…  Eventually these tools—these things which make other things —will become so turn-key that everyone will be able to use them.  It’ll be a very bad time to be a big corporation or a manufacturer…and a very good time to be a designer or a creator.

And so, with this blog, I plan to document my making of cool things, and my making of things to make the cool things.  To share my knowledge as best as I can, and hopefully keep it interesting and entertaining.

Enjoy!