Last April, I was lucky enough to be contacted by the Discovery Channel (Canada) and have them put the spotlight on the DShape and the Rygo Project. I was unlucky enough to have suffered a bike accident a week before filming, so the bruiser and stitches above my eye make me look significantly gruffer and meaner than I really am. But I digress … I’d like to take the opportunity to broadcast a little gratitude for this project. this was a tough project and the video only covers half of it. Enrico, his brother and the rest of his team put an inordinate amount of work into printing the Rygo and I’m really grateful for their efforts.

I was really excited about this project (and still am) but Kickstarter has left a bad taste in my mouth with their silly policy change banning product renderings and simulations. That said, I’ll focus on the excitement I have for a project I jumped on earlier last week. Boys have robots, LEGO, and a ton of other engineering related fun that doesn’t look frilly, pink or attach much emotion beyond, DON’T TOUCH MY TOYZ, RRAAAGHHH!!! Debbie Sterling, a Staford Engineer is set to change that. GoldieBlox is a project she launched a couple weeks ago that hit the $150,000 goal over the weekend.

Autodesk is pushing its globulous mass (I mean that in a nice way) into every corner of everything that has anything to do with creating–Engineering, Architecture, Manufacturing, Media and the community-minded machine of fabbers, modders and tweak-freaks. They delivered their 123D software to make it all so much easier, but as Wired reports, the software may be making the ‘Make’ too hard and leaving makers skeptical.

I’ve marked today as the day I’ve seen the largest number of ‘WTF’s ever recorded by man… in the field of product development. Three new policies for product design and hardware projects were set in place by Kickstarter as described in their blog post, Kickstarter is Not a Store. It’s a game changer for those wanting to launch a project on Kickstarter, but even with these ridiculous (albeit well-intentioned) policies that enforce what you can’t do, there are still things you CAN do.

The tunnel stretched out before, unraveled in the morning light fraught with moss spores lifted by the rain. To think this was the last time she would see that light left a chill. Yet one hope remained. Where ever the tunnel led, she would hold in the vile, the essence of these links. Simon Cheng…