Something I’ve been waiting on for years, since 3D printers first became viable, is for the price point on these little devils to fall enough that artists and designers could buy and start using them in their personal experimentation. Well, that’s begun to happen.The New York Times has an article discussing how these 3d printers are being employed as micro-manufacturing across a wide range of industries. If you’re interested in getting one yourself to fool around with, here’s one (and here’s a discussion of it at boingboing) for about $1500, and goop to fill the sucker for about $50. If you’re more of a picture-making person, you can also look into personal manufacturing with this little marvel, that I’m kinda into: the eggbot. This is a little devil that, via open source software, draws onto round surfaces. It’s being described as an object to make pictures on eggs, since that has immediate cultural connections for many different folks, but it could be used to make almost anything round and pictorial in nature: world globes, Japanese characters, stylized Russian dolls, decorated Appalachian orbs, you name it. All possible.