Imagine a spirograph crossed with a candy floss machine crossed with a printer. Or put it another way - remember the replicator from Star Trek which would beam up a fabulously tasty concoction out of this air?

Wouldn’t it be cool if that were real?

Well, the fabulously named Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have done just that with their latest production CandyFab (aka The Evil Mad Scientist 3D Fabricator)

3D printers aren’t totally new. But they are extremely pricey. The Z Corp Z450 will set you back a cool $40,000. But Candyfab was first built using three sacks of granulated sugar, an aquarium pump, a car jack and some recycled printer parts. And it only bloody works.

It’s totally open source - so you can make one at home. In fact, since people have been making their own at home, printing has been refined from 5 ppi to 20 ppi. Not bad for something home-grown and made using odds and ends on the cheap.

Yet another example of innovation at its best when driven by the minds of many rather than the minds of the few. (And apparently my interest in geeky things to do with printers!)

See the whole process in its full glory at Flickr

[ as always, courtesy of Wired ]

Happy New Year! And what better way to start the new year than with one of my favourite things….robots! Someone has modded an iRobot create by adding a dot-matrix printer to blast talcum powder onto the pavement in the pattern of your choice … which can then be controlled wirelessly.

Not quite as practical or environmentally-friendly as the clean ads that SAS developed, and probably not likely to be adopted on a mass scale, but it uses freakin’ robots to make street art! Which qualifies it as pretty bloody cool in my book at any rate.

[Read more about the mod at Engadget]

So Apple has shut down Think Secret after a protracted legal battle. Apple’s suit claimed that bloggers shouldn’t enjoy the same rights to protect sources that are granted to mainstream journalists, in response to Think Secret leaking details of forthcoming Apple products.

Hmm.

Apple is a cool brand, and its products generate lots of interest. Generating word of mouth is the holy grail for the vast majority of brands, so shutting down a site which is actively promoting the brand and serving as a powerful brand advocate strikes me as exceptionally counter intuitive.

In doing so it it seems that Apple appears to value control over communications about its product above all else, and seems to reckon that the products will generate enough word of mouth by themselves, without any help from those dirty bloggers thank you very much.

Apple could have chosen to get bloggers on board, working in partnership with them to release key info about forthcoming products which they could then communicate to their loyal readers…

…but instead by prioritising top-down control, they’ve undoubtedly pissed off a load of people who were die-hard fans of their brand. I for one am a self-confessed Mac-geek - I still love their products, but this decision has left me with a rather sour taste in the mouth.

Apple may have won their settlement but I’d be interested to see whether their ‘victory’ will be quite so beneficial to their brand in the long run.