3D printing is slowly but surely being integrated into our tech heavy lives, and it's easy to imagine everyone having a 3D printer or three in their homes to help them do all sorts of fun and useful stuff.
But before the 3D printer can become like every other printer in our home we should take a few minutes to learn how they work with this fun demonstration video by ElectroBOOM engineer Mehdi Sadaghdar.
Note to Mehdi- buy some work gloves you wild man!
-Via Laughing Squid
One of the challenges of demonstrating and teaching 3d printing is that it's science fiction technology, but is not yet up to the level of science fiction. People who see it at my library often get really excited, then disappointed when it doesn't work like a Star Trek replicator by building objects instantly or operating without 3d files.
But over all, it's a lot of fun. Right now I'm trying to build a series of files that will let me recreate maps of every electoral college result in party-specific colors and heights representing the relative number of electoral votes by state. I'm currently not aggravated by my 3d printer, just SketchUp and MakerWare.