"This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted." And this is what it looks like.

"I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch - beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster." This is clearly amazing, and a timely reminder of, you know, what the age of mass production really means.

"Established by rock band They Might Be Giants (TMBG), Dial-A-Song consisted of an answering machine with a tape of the band playing various songs. The machine played one track at a time, ranging from demos and uncompleted work to fake advertisements the band had created... Due to the nature of an answering machine, only one caller could listen to the current song at any given time. This had been noted as creating a special bond between the song and the person calling as it is playing just for them... John Linnell stated in an interview in early 2008 that Dial-A-Song had died of a technical crash, and that the internet had taken over where the machine left off." How did I not know this? There is nothing about this that is not brilliant.

"Imagine if Apple had decided to make a MacBook that was priced like an iPod. That's what Asus is doing."

"One thing is clear. Microsoft has to move beyond its mentality of being a software company that can launch fast and fix later. With global markets and global launches, the consequences of such a cavalier approach to hardware quality can start to pile up." Detailed, long article from Dean Takahashi on the myriad problems with the 360 hardware, and how Microsoft responded.

"So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts." And, best news of all: Availabot will be coming to market. Excellent.

Bunnie Huang's experiences on mass-producing a product (Chumby) in China. Lots of video, lots of great insights into what modern manufacturing looks like.