You could just buy the new Goldie Blox which are marketed to that demographic:

http://www.goldieblox.com/

When they get older, buy them Technics Lego brick sets

Try OpenSCAD --- it's 3D modelling for programmers and there've already been a fair number of car parts designed in it.

I've tried to list all the 3D opensource / free design options here: http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/i...

(Had to exile SketchUp to the Commercial page when Trimble changed the license)

I'm looking forward to trying ``Laywoo-D3'':

https://www.inventables.com/te...

essentially it's PLA w/ sawdust, but the possibility of controlling the colour using temperature looks to afford some interesting possibilities.

Really?

http://www.snaphow.com/4611/is...

There were others which preceded this, but they were all pre-web and have been fixed.

If you want parametric, an elegant solution is OpenSCAD (or the even cooler ImplicitCAD).

You can mill a circuit board now w/ a hobby-level router --- the ShapeOko 2, full kit is $649 ($685 for the 220 version).

One doesn't even need a 3D printer w/ support for directly printing metal --- just print in PLA at a size which takes into account shrinkage from casting and use the traditional ``cire perdue'' (lost-wax casting) to cast in whatever material you're able to melt (I've known people who do aluminum and cast iron in their backyards).

Wound up w/ a second ShapeOko (a 2, which I got so that I could write the instructions at http://docs.shapeoko.com/ ), so have been planning to turn it into a 3D printer.

The initial (naïve) plan was to just mount an extruder I'd bought, source a hot-end, connect it to a spare stepper driver on my AtomCNC board, reflash w/ Teacup or Marlin and print --- anyone who knows anything about 3D printers can quit laughing now.

The current plan is:

  - mount an extruder (a Wade's reloaded)
  - wire up a hot-end (a J-Head Mk V or so w/ 0.35mm orifice for 1.75mm filament)
  - source a new Arduino (an Uno w/ just a 328p won't cut it)
  - source a stepper shield which has 4 stepper drivers (one for each axis, one more for the extruder, plus electronics support for powering the hot-end and monitoring its temperature)

Still haven't decided if I'm going to buy a heated bed or no --- hoping to manage w/o one ---you 3D guys may quietly laugh again now.

Unfortunately, there wasn't as much in the way of documentation on the RepRap wiki as I'd hoped for: http://reprap.org/wiki/Categor...

So I'm documenting things here: http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/i...

And still has some nifty features to support pen computing.

Other apps in the space:

Xournal --- more like Microsoft Journal as the name implies (OneNote has more organizational features such as tabs &c.) (see also Jarnal)
Flash --- in its rôle as the tool which succeeds the the pen drawing tool FutureWave SmartSketch ---
Mage Software's InkBook --- (Mac OS X)
EverNote
Treenote, if I'm remembering correctly was quite interesting, but there's a placeholder page for now.
sBook --- (Mac OS X) --- nifty A.I. driven freeform address book which can be used as a general-purpose notetaking tool --- I'm still bummed the Windows version crashed when one tried to write into it on a Tablet PC and wish it had better support for graphics --- opensource: http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/

The odd thing is, I loved Millenium Software's Notebook.app on NeXTstep, but haven't found occasion to buy Circus Ponies' Notebook

Mostly though, I just use Macromedia FreeHand for drawings and am trying InkSeine for notes on a ThinkPad X61 Tablet: http://research.microsoft.com/...

Moreover, the money that an employee pays into the unemployment system is not used to fund payments, but purely to cover administrative overhead. Companies have to pay for unemployment based on a weird formula for how many people they let go under what circumstances.

In the U.S., if you're working independently, or even trying to, you're not eligible for unemployment.

There's a lot of push-back against people ``double-dipping'' by both drawing un-employment and working independently --- actually, it's considered fraud. I've always been somewhat offended by Judy Chicago having at least one of her ``workers'' working on the ``The Dinner Party'' while he was on unemployment (and she couldn't even see the need to have him teach others how to do what he was doing).

The big difference is the U.S. tax rate is about a quarter of the G.D.P., while in Europe it's over a third, but the number of government checks in the U.S. is going up as noted in a recent story.

not by Alexis de Tocqueville though:

``The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.''

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A...

earliest known occurrence is as an unsourced attribution to Tytler in "This is the Hard Core of Freedom" by Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951): "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

using mirrors and lenses from disposable cameras:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...

Interesting examination of that in the novella _Manna_ by Marshall Brain: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...