The article reviews Jeannine Mosely's exhibition to be held at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts on June 8, and at the Siggraph 2008 Convention in Los Angeles on August.
X-Y plotters were once a common sight in places that needed high-quality hard copies of computer-generated line drawings. Blueprints and charts of all types could be produced with multiple colors on large pieces of paper, with perfectly smooth lines and curves. But eventually pixel-based laser and inkjet printers increased sufficiently in resolution-and decreased sufficiently in price-to make plotters something of a rarity. . Still, some things were lost in this particular march of progress. One casualty was the distinctive lines of vector-based graphics and text. Another was fun: Watching a laser printer print is about as interesting as watching a refrigerator, while there's something mesmerizing in seeing the head of a plotter spring to life and construct an image line by line through confident sweeps and arcs. The US $171 iBoardbot from JJRobots is intended to bring back some of the romance of the plotter, but with a contemporary twist-it's cloud controlled and self-erasable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
What better way to introduce a young person to the joys of engineering than by giving a gift that you construct together? I tested four suitable kits. Two are for unusual electronic musical instruments, and two are for dabbling in radio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]