hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0878.txt

Episode: 878
Title: HPR0878: OpenShorts Episode 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0878/hpr0878.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:58:08

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Music
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, this is Mr. Gadgets, and I guess we'll call
this one Open Shorts episode for Open Shorts, the podcast, the very infrequent podcast about
open source and hackable hardware.
It was my dream once, and I really do have a passion as if you can't tell about making
things and building kits and things like that.
And I was thinking that this would be my contribution, of course I never did get it together
to do more than a couple of episodes.
So one of my earlier hackable videos, I called Open Shorts episode three, and we'll call
this an Open Shorts episode four.
This will be somewhat of a continuation of the discussion we've had over the last couple
of weeks.
I think we need more makers, we need more young people being makers, and we need more older
people getting into makers.
And when I say makers, I am referring, of course, to make magazine the O'Reilly publication.
So if you are interested in electronics at all, I would suggest that you might want to
at least take a look at Maker Magazine because it has lots of interesting projects that
you can go beyond just the magic black box of your computer and get into actually baking
electronic circuitry of your own.
And rather than do kind of a black Friday report or anything like that, strictly the US,
I will give a briefest of reports that a couple of oddities that I saw.
It's always interesting to see the odd little accessories that people come out with.
Quite often, you see them actually in the storage in real life on the Christmas season.
So see if you can sponsor anything weird like this and report it in.
I saw two odd little things.
One was a telephone handset that looked like an old ant log phone telephone handset.
For those of you who are too younger, remember this, you know, before cell phones, they
were supposed to connect to the wall, right, and they would have a coiled cord that sometimes
you got an extended cord, you know, so you can walk all the way across your kitchen or
something like that.
And there's a mouthpiece and a earpiece or an ear receiver and that's how you would make
your call.
Well, somebody decided they wanted to go retro with their mobile phones and so I hear
that was the X, he was the X, actually has a cell phone that's built into an old western
electric phone.
And so he's carrying it around this old red western electric phone.
I believe it's the red one and I actually have one of those upstairs in my pile of
carp.
It's the nanogram and you see why it's got a cell phone inside so you can make a cell phone
call from his old style ant log phone.
Well, they weren't willing to go that far, but there's a pretty much a standard connector
for smartphones other than Nokia.
I think Nokia doesn't follow this, but there's a, instead of just tip-ring sleeve for the
3.5 millimeter connector, which we actually use proper metrics for telephone connectors.
We don't call them one 30 seconds and one eighth jacks, but I think that was the one eighths
of an inch jack.
I don't know, anyway, the, you know, still just having the three connectors for stereo,
there's a fourth ring, there's a fourth connector, there are two rings.
So you have tip-ring-ring sleeve and of course the extra connector for the microphone.
And I believe you can use the same kind of microphones for iPhones as you can for most
of the Android devices.
So apparently this would be cross-platform across most of your popular smartphones.
And so they have that came in even in various colors because just because we want to go
retro doesn't mean we want, don't want to have our pretty colors there.
So it came in various colors and it was about 20 bucks, whatever the exchange rate is
internationally.
I'm sure you could buy it even cheaper if you were in Bangkok or any of the places that
have wonderful electronic stories, so I have more direct connections.
And so in that case we were, we were talking about a, you plugged that into your cell phone
and then you hold that up to your ear and it would look like you're using old sessions.
So that was a funny little thing I thought.
You know, I'll say myself some of those.
Now some of the other ones though that I did see were the, were, was a really strange
little cannon device.
Cannon used to make printers, I mean, it still makes printers, but cannon used to actually
make a computer or two.
In fact I believe it was actually cannon that made some of the original parts for these
original knackentoshes.
We're all cannon manufactured.
And there's Gunning Jeff Raskin who was on the original knackentosh team who was really
a user interface kind of a guy and you should look you up on Wikipedia.
He came up with just an alternate kind of a, it was kind of like a word processor to
does everything, kind of a lot e-next, but not with the same list kind of programming language.
Anyway, his idea was, you know, you should have everything all in the one user interface,
your database, your word processing, even some calculations, types of capabilities.
And he came up with a program before he passed once again before his time.
And so maybe we'll talk about him at some other episode.
But that was a cannon, I believe it was a cannon cat, which was not to be confused with
the little cats that were barcode readers that were all the rage that in the 80s.
So cannon has an accessory here besides just your printer.
And it looked kind of like a mouse with a calculator put on the top.
And it was a Bluetooth mouse, tinkey pad, and calculator all in one, 40 bucks.
Little high, I think.
But the main reason why I think people like to have tinkey pad is because they're essentially
tinkey pad experts, they're like touch typists with numbers at the tinkey pad, they know
where all the numbers are and can give them data, very numeric data very quickly with the tinkey
pad.
And this does not work for that because the number pad was too small, it wasn't even
the right range of it, all those kinds of things.
So who knows whether they will actually sell of you those or not, but they actually have
those too on a nice little cannon display, little cardboard you know, sold out display.
So those are some of the oddities that I found.
And I did actually manage to get one of the door buster kinds of things here in the Thanksgiving
holiday tradition of Black Friday that will have what they call door busters.
And so one of the big door busters that I was actually interested in this particular year
was a three terabyte USB drive, the free agents from Cgate have this three terabyte USBs.
And they had an amazing price for the three terabyte drives and normally it would be closer
to 200 than not depending on sales and things like that.
And they had it for 100 and I actually found one not by going at 10 o'clock at night or
earlier camping knowledge in the line for the midnight opening of Beth by to get to it.
I actually found it in the Beth by at like one o'clock in the afternoon, but it was on
a shelf where extra just drives were usually stored if they didn't have enough for their
normal place where the drives would be on the lower shelves.
Up on a high shelf and it didn't push the back and no one could tell that it was there.
And I found it in the one o'clock in the afternoon and still got the door buster price.
So there you go, there are busters without even having to camp all night.
But what I wanted to talk about, when this open short episode was open source hardware,
we finally, ladies and gentlemen, finally children, we have open source hardware really coming
into being true open source hardware.
And this, of course, is in the form of various MakerBots and RepRap machines.
And this is the new revolution.
I attended a session where the person who ran the session at Ohio Linux was way into
this kind of thing.
And he had, I believe, a MakerBot, these are usually made of wood.
And if you go to the magazine site or go to the Maker Store, you can see these.
It's called a single medic and it's kind of a wooden box with holes kept in it so you
can see what's going on inside and get to the things that are being built inside.
And this is the way, with a lot of the stepper motors and electronics involved, that
moves a platter around, not a platter in the, or, new a table around essentially a square.
Move around the table, back and forth, underneath an extruder that extrudes plastic.
So it eats up the plastic and then essentially prints little bits of plastic.
It's a 3D printer.
So the 3D printer revolution is upon us and this is very analogous to the PC revolution
which I actually experienced back in the middle 70s.
And there are many, many kinds of parallels here.
In fact, I would put to you that you're better off now as then you were in the PC revolution.
Number one, because there are more people with the skill sets to be able to do the programming
to program the 3D printers to do things.
So there's a place called single-verse and single-verse has a bunch of plans, essentially
3D instructions for these 3D printers to be able to make these little plastic doodas.
And right now, of course, it's all about plastic.
Eventually, we're going to get to the universe that, not exactly what you think of as Star Trek,
and you order your hot coffee and essentially something along the lines of the transporter
type of transportation of matter, I think, was involved in that.
And Captain Picard would say Earl Grey Hot and the chief would order his double-chocolate,
double-sweet or very things like that.
But that's just kind of materialized magically, right, in the microwave of the future.
At least that's kind of what it looked like.
But that was kind of like transport of technology.
I mean, they have developed ostensibly in this future time the way to manage the whole
energy matter and going back and forth between things, right?
This is more like a printer, except instead of printing ink on a page, it is printing
the threat level of plastic.
Not in the future.
I imagine we will have available for relatively inexpensive prices, things that you can have
at home that will even be able to do metal of various types.
But right now, it's plastic.
And basically the ITS computer, right?
The model instrument telemetry system is computer that was the first computer kit that
caused a big computer revolution.
And was the reason why Bill Gates stopped going to Harvard and he had followed and moved
to New Mexico, which is where the place Altair, who made the MITF, was actually located.
And they moved there and wrote the basic computer interpreter for that to be able to print
and do the rest of the history as far as Microsoft and to a certain extent, the computer revolution
in general, right?
Everything was based off of that.
There were a few little things here and there before that, but that was the first
code and put real computer, right?
That's a team available with that 8,000-eighth processor, eight-bit processor.
And what in today's world would be a ludicrous amount of memory in terms of how small it was.
But was a huge amount of memory compared to A-frames?
Or at least equal to what A-frames had.
So at that particular point, in my mind, I could go back and I could look at the specifics
of the prices.
But I'm fairly certain that MITF, because I left an afternoon, I wanted so much to be
able to afford an MITF kit, but it was somewhere in the range of $800,000 for that kit.
I may be a little bit high, but I don't think so.
I think it was closer to the 800,000 range that it was the, you know, say, 600 to 800
grades.
Given inflation, which does exist in spite of what central banks want to tell you,
between 1970s and today, the price of a kit for a 3D printer now,
is well below in terms of average income.
And in today's dollars, compared with $19, you know, mid $70, the $75, $74 we're talking
about here, it is cheaper in terms of the equivalent dollars than those mid $70 compared
with the average income and, et cetera, et cetera, back then.
And I think this is going to be as revolutionary in terms of 3D objects as the printer was for
the printed page and information.
Now, true, not everybody in the entire world probably has a usage for a 3D printer device
in their home.
But imagine not having to stock things in the store, but just going into the store the
same way you go in with paint.
And they don't have to stock every color of paint now.
They just look at your paint chip you're interested in and it figures out what the pigments
are to mix together to have paint whatever color you want.
Now, imagine that with parts.
And instead of having to go to the other parts store and then having all of the parts
actually in stock, they can actually just print up a part for you.
I think this is in rural areas, imagine this beyond just rural areas, imagine this in
something here in Africa where that part might literally be unavailable for any price
or at their minimum is going to take maybe weeks, two months to get there.
That's plastic parts now, but do you realize how much of your life is run by plastic parts?
The insides of lots of things, including lots of things in your car, our plastic parts
are nylon parts.
And I'm not sure that we're very far away from 3D printing on nylon.
And in fact, the ABS plastic that they're printing with is really strong material.
We have a group here in town that has several of these at the mini-maker fair as well
as the full-size-maker fair that we had here in Kansas City.
So I've seen them up close and personal.
I have handled the parts they made as well as the IOTO limbic stuff.
And I always have to do in my mind that these are some kind of soft, squishy plastic kinds
of things that, you know, yeah, maybe you could build up the plastic model, but it really
would just be that.
It would just be a plastic model, but it really wouldn't be useful in terms of structurally.
No, this is fairly hard plastic that use useful in many, many situations.
And in fact, one of the most exciting things about this is a 3D printer is actually able
to print out the plastic parts for a new 3D printer.
So if you own the 3D printer for the more reasonable amount of money than compared with, say,
buying that first computer kit or any of the computers in the 70s there, up until the
very late 70s, commercial printers, commercial printers.
Commercial computers that were coming from someone all put together were towards the end
of the 70s there, right?
First one, Apple II, and then candy came out with its computers, and there were several
other ones that you'd get that weren't in GIFs one.
They were more extensive than the $600 price, by and large, until some of the color computers
and candy came in and started low-balling and being more affordable for the average person.
But in this case, those things weren't able to create another computer.
Now there was a person who came up with an idea of these were actually commercially available
for a while.
Now you got a picture of this before the internet and before MP3 players.
Like when we all used to play our music on polycarbonate notes, okay?
So CDs were the norm.
There was a person who came up with this idea and there was a whole company that had this
where you would go to the CD store and the CD store could literally stock thousands of
CDs that were real oddball kinds of CDs, right?
Independent, things like that.
What was going to happen with this was you're going to figure out what CD you wanted,
and it would burn the CD for you on the machine and you'd carry it home with you.
Now this would be a CDR, right?
Instead of the Whitney close reliable, the Stan CD or anything like that,
but you'd have access at the CD store, which was your only way to buy music, right?
Of a wide variety of things.
I don't think it was anything technological.
In fact, I think these guys had a better die system and a more reliable, less scratch-prone
kind of a way of producing the CDs with the burner.
Right there in the store, it wasn't a technological problem.
It was a licensing problem.
I know how hard it is for you to believe, but the music companies could not get their heads
wrapped around where it would be an advantage to them to have their old catalog available in
every CD store in the land. And they weren't going to have that. They were going to control,
it wasn't that hard to believe. They wanted to control the distribution of the music
and not have music available in the store.
I mean, you could have gone and do a convenience store in order to CD.
Not just those pre-made CDs that you hate, right?
That they might sell at the convenience store, but a wide variety of music.
All available from a machine, a little kiosk machine, that would essentially burn it for you
right there. But the royalties stopped it from happening. With thing overs, it's a totally open
system. Everything they publish out there is everybody can take it and do with it what they want.
And there's all kinds of really interesting things. The cheap problem with the systems now
are they're pretty extensive for people that there was a guy who didn't see it. He didn't get it
at the Ohio Linux system. He said, well, you know, I think this is a $800 or the rep rap
was a $800 machine. And he said, well, $800 is a lot of money. What's it good for?
And he doesn't see the revolutionary aspects. Okay, trust me, it's not going to be as big as
computers in general. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is. Maybe it's going to be bigger.
But we're on the cut of another revolution. And that's another revolutionary wave. And you can
ride it. So at the very minimum, go out there online, find Make Magazine and start looking at it
there. You can find lots of sites that talk about this. And I will, of course, have various kinds
of links that I will send. And Kim, Alan, St. Kenneth of Hacker Public Radio will put them in
the showdown. And this is the revolution folks. Trust me, this is the revolution. I've seen
it before and I know what I'm talking about. And there's nothing quite like it. Be in there
at the beginning of the revolution and participating in any way, shape or form you can.
You can produce the parts aside from a little bit of
middle rods that are involved. Okay, there's few middle rods, some threads, some knots that are
involved. You buy those little hardware stores. And there's, of course, stepper motors that are
involved to control all this. But the plastic parts, the machine itself can reproduce itself. It can
produce the parts to build another machine. And people are getting real money for just those plastic
parts. Okay, there's something here involved called the hobbled boat bolt. Okay, it's a bolt that
has a dud on it. I don't even understand exactly what it is, but you have to have one,
right, for these machines. If you've got any mechanical kind of attitude, I've seen people
throw them hobbled bolts on eBay for $35. I don't guarantee you, there's not $35 worth of bolts
and nuts and whatever else is involved there. So there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity
if you can acquire a machine to print out parts for other machines and sell those hobbled bolts.
I know because of my practical arts experience, back when I went to junior high, which was seventh
and eighth grade here in the States, back in the sixties, we had to have a certain amount of
practical arts. And mine consisted of going to industrial arts class for my seventh and eighth grade
years. And then I didn't have to do any in high school to fulfill my couple of hours of credit
that I needed for that. And I know for a fact, my hand-eye coordination and my mechanical skills
with my hands are not that good. The only thing I got a really good grade on in my entirety of
those two years was the electronics class. Of course, when we were starting the other parts to build
circuits, and of course I built every circuit that was involved in the class inside of the first
months of the quarter, I think, and then there were several months that I just did extra credit
for other circuits and things like that. That was really decent. Great I got. And I know from my
model building, I'm not the best in terms of my mechanical skills and all that type of thing.
So I'm not even sure I wouldn't buy pre-cut, you know, versions of the rod, the straight rod empty,
the rod that is threaded. There's all kinds of possibilities where you can jump in,
you can start producing things and spreading it around. And I'm not sure you're going to
make a living at it, but you'd probably be able to buy yourself a bigger machine.
There's all kinds of interesting things here. In fact, what I'd like to see is every single,
every single machine out there, and every single time you print the parts for a new machine that
you sell, you print an equal number of parts for a machine that you can donate to a school.
And I think every school, not just every school in the US, every school is your every school on
the planet eventually should have a 3D printer. And yes, there's a computer involved that runs
the small amount of electronics that's on the board that runs the stepper motors. And yes,
we have to figure out how to get the stepper motors. But, you know, once we start getting the
plastic parts, and the other is that we can figure out a way where, you know, maybe every six
machines parts will get you enough money to buy a stepper motor, and eventually you can have
the entire kit. Stepper motor plans everything and you can donate it to a school.
Every school should have one. And even for the schools that don't already have a computer,
the kids will have running the software. It's not going to, we're going to be able to get that
software running on practically anything. That Raspberry Pi that they're working on over at
Cambridge, it's going to be able to run this software. That one top per child could probably run
this software. It's just a question of porting it. Okay, so computing platform is the cheaper
and we have the ability to have a system where I speak into the hymn of people who can learn
how to do 3D printing and can then go with that. And who knows where we can go.
Eventually, we could be having 3D printers that could be revolutionizing the way we make all
kinds of things in our lives. And you're right at the beginning. You're right at the cut.
And it's going to change things. And pretty soon, that guy who said, well, that's a lot of money.
What's the good for? He is probably going to look back on that and realize what if we save it that
was. But you know, it's hard to see it from here. And it's hard to see it anytime there's a
singularity. Okay, and I'm not talking about the big singularity that Kurzweil talks about.
You know, the transhuman singularity that that Werner Vingy or Vinge, however you pronounce it,
actually wrote about in Peace War, which is an excellent novel you should read from the 70s.
I'm not talking about that, but what I am talking about is little singularities that on the other
side of them, you literally rethink how you think about the world, okay? Whatever your politics
or whatever else you think about it, September 11th was a singularity. And there are certain
differences in the way we think about things now that we really can't conceive. We could not
conceive of that before that happened. Okay, the micro computer revolution was a singularity.
Before that, there were a few people who had an idea about how cool computers were,
but that was all big iron, or at least mid-size iron. You know, Bill Gates never touched the
micro computer when he was in school. In high school, he was lucky enough to go into a school that
had access to a mid-size computer, a time share computer, right? And that was the access he had
to the computer system. And that was the access that already had the computer system there.
It was especially people, and it was a specialized kind of a machine. And at the time, he literally
could not figure out why anybody would need a computer in and out. Okay? Everybody knew what a
computer was for. Everybody knew why it is you would get into computers, and what you would do
with computers. And then micro computers came along, and pretty thin, there's computers everywhere,
and there's computers and everything, and it changed the world. And this is another one
that's going to change the world. And you can get on that now. Truly open source hardware.
And that is open shorts. That's the floor. Links will be on the web page now, get both of them
and if they're not, well, I'm going to get those out to you, then we're going to have those
ready. And of course, you can always contact me. Tell me that I am full of carp,
mangram, or agree with me, or tell me what you think about this open source 3D printing revolution
here, or what other kind of oddball thing it is that you saw in your Christmas shopping this
year. What kind of crazy tech, right? Have you seen out there just the strangest thing? Who is
never going to buy that? You know? Because we need more shows, people. We need more shows.
So, what are you shopping for this Christmas? What kind of odd thing did you see when you were
shopping this Christmas? What do you think about open source hardware? All those kinds of things
you can, of course, send me email to hbr at mrgadgets.com and get ahold of me that way via email. And
until next time, this is Mr. Gadget. And I am out here on trailblazing to find out the latest
things that I can about open source hardware to report that back to you. And until next time,
this is Mr. Gadget. Say it and be careful out there.
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