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A machine that builds itself? Adrian Bowyer, leading researcher at the University of Bath, shows us that this seemingly fantastic idea is not far from becoming reality. The self-replicating rapid prototyper, or “RepRap,” could have dramatic effects on people in developing countries.

(Via The Pirates Dilemma.)

The thought of being able to take any design, and automatically cottage-industry manufacture it for the cost of materials & time feels unbelievably transformative. The possibility of bootstrapping this with a self-replicating machine…

I wonder if IKEA will be the first people to figure out how to let us print out their product at home… though being able to reprint a replacement screw/gasket/washer even if I have to run to the hardware store would be sweet.

I reinstalled my local copy of maven2 recently, and thought I’d add into to google a problem I experienced trying to unarchive the tar.gz or tar.bz2 flavors of their binary distribution. (.zip files seem fine)

The problem shows itself while extracting — tar reports “tar: A lone zero block at 2970″. Some googling seems to trace the problem to a maven/ANT lib problem encoding tar files. I got this with both 2.0.8 and 2.0.7, possibly with other releases as well.

Continuing the meme of looking at twitter usage, here’s mine:

Heavily JA-SIG slanted, but Sakai is starting to gain…