As part of our grand plan to Take Over The World® we’re happy to announce a new and exciting development! A few of us (Adam Mayer, Bre Pettis, and Zach Hoeken) have formed a new company called MakerBot Industries to do awesome things. What is MakerBot Industries? Well, we make open source hardware. To be more specific, we make robots that make things! If you really wanna get into the nitty gritty, we created a RepRap derivative called CupCake CNC which is a cheap, easy to build 3D printer!

If you’ve been at NYC Resistor lately, you may have seen random prototyped bits laying around. We’ve done pretty much all of our R&D for this machine using our laser cutter and the other various tools we have at the hack space here. I’m personally really happy to see something like this blossom out of our shared space, and I’m looking forward to hacking on this machine much more in the future. If anyone wants to try and design a 3D model, we’d be more than happy to try and print it out for you. We’ll have the machine fired up and printing stuff out for craft night this Thursday, and hopefully all the Thursdays after that as well!

Do you want to learn more? Check out the MakerBot Industries website, or watch the video below.

I made a little hand made servo with a PID feedback loop. It’s really fast and snappy. And adorable!

Anamanaguchi makes some incredible guitar-infused NES based chiptune music, and is streaming their entire new album online along with some amazing 8-bit inspired visuals. You can experience the whole thing fullscreen at dawnmetropolis.com or check it out embedded below. Just click on a video stripe for the song and video.

With strong, catchy melodies, an excellent blend of chiptune and analog sounds, and an unrelentingly optimistic pace, Anamanaguchi definitely ranks among my new favorites artists. This is true musicianship using 8-bit tools.

Check out the videos here:

Or you can get the album from http://normative.com/#/anamanaguchi

Group photo!

So, there was discussion today around the tables at NYCResistor as people worked on their various projects regarding the ability to produce bots that “baited” people. Bre, remarked that designing a bot that sat around eliciting angry responses would be simple and very similar to simply capturing things I say and spraying them about.

This is when I was reminded of a project I wrote when I was in my first year of college. I was having some trouble showing up to classes, and I needed to ween myself off of IRC, so I basically wrote a bot that would take care of my IRC session for me while I was gone. It was like methadone for an IRC addiction. Sure I was still suffering withdrawal, but the channel was none the wiser and I suffered no ill effects from my repeated absences.

What’s really astounding is the simplicity of the code, and that it somehow lasted 3 weeks before someone realized it was a bot. Ultimately the zero delay responses are what got it caught.

Anyways here’s a blast from the past… one of my first perl scripts…

openfly.pl

Full of early 2000 IRC goodness. Enjoy! Please don’t judge me.