It’s called moneygami! I wish there were instructions to go with this gallery but I imagine they’ll come soon. My favorites are the penguin and dog above.

Filed under: crafts, cuuuuute, diy, neat, origami · 0 Comments

This is pretty neat. ThirstyLight is a plant sensor that you stick in the dirt next to your plant and when your plant needs watering, it’ll start to blink!

I have a feeling I wouldn’t notice the blinky light on some of my plants though (because they’re tucked away in a corner)…but if they also made a small beeping noise when they’re thirsty, they would definitely get watered.

Still, it’s a great idea!

Filed under: blinkylights, gadgets, neat, plants, thirstylight · 2 Comments

Throw out your Don Ho records! (via boing boing)

Filed under: neat, tiki lifestyle · 1 Comment

This actually happened last weekend but I unfortunately missed it. My friend Jesse and some friends of his decided that Austin needed an ice cream festival, so they put one together! Here’s a video of the making of the ice cream truck (he’s the one driving it)…and a linkie to the website.

Ice cream is my all-time-favorite-food-group and drug of choice (all my attempts to OD on it have failed miserably though) so I wish we had an ice cream festival here too!

Filed under: neat, transportation · 5 Comments

Energizer A23 12V [[batteries]] sell for under $2 for a pack of two. Inside each A23 are eight 1.5V button cell batteries. Perfect for tiny LED projects :)

Filed under: neat, tronix, video · 0 Comments

Shoes is a new project by the infamous why:

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Check out the book reader tutorial on Hackety.org

simple screenshots:

Filed under: code code, neat, opensource, osx, ruby, WhyTheLuckyStiff · 1 Comment

reCaptcha is a project by Prof. Luis van Ahn at CMU.

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

reCAPTCHA is a great project. I added the WordPress plugin to TikiRobot, which will hopefully reduce all the crap that Akismet fails to catch. If you haven’t seen Prof. van Ahn’s TechTalk on Human Computation, check it out. It’s very good!

His other projects are The ESP Game and PeekABoom.

Update: Here is a quote from Brewster:

“I think it’s a brilliant idea — using the Internet to correct OCR mistakes,” said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, in a statement. “This is an example of why having open collections in the public domain is important. People are working together to build a good, open system.”

Filed under: archive, books, code code, neat, opensource · 4 Comments

Having two monitors really does make you more productive! Without the second one, I couldn’t get any work done, because Flickervision is fullscreen on the first one :)

Filed under: neat, photos · 1 Comment

I just ordered this toaster and can’t wait to get it. The plates that come with it aren’t quite as cool as The Holy Toast, but are still pretty cute I think. It comes in 3 different colors (red, white, blue, or black) and you can get it at Target or online at Amazon.

(via OReilly Radar)

UPDATE: Never mind the one i just mentioned above…this one’s even cuter!!!

…and there’s this one too (for those times you want to offer a yummy sandwich to the cute person who lives next door ;-)

Filed under: gadgets, neat · 0 Comments

Link to Robot Makes Tea on CNN

Filed under: lifehacking, neat, tiki lifestyle · 3 Comments

wow, these are awesome.

Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5″x11″ page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.

I want to make them all! although i’ve noticed they are missing a pineapple readymech. how could that be? maybe that’ll be my project this weekend :-)

Filed under: crafty, gadgets, neat, toys · 3 Comments

What a neat idea! “Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use….The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the users personal way of drinking tea.”

Filed under: design, neat · 4 Comments

No…this isn’t an item from the SkyMaul catalog…it’s actually something you can buy right now, today. And I think it’s brilliant!

HOLY TOAST BREAD STAMP

In the beginning…there was bread…. Make that boring bread an inspiration by embossing it before you toast! Our easy-to-use HOLY TOAST stamper always makes a good impression.

Press the stamper into an ordinary slice of bread, toast it, and behold a miracle!

Filed under: neat, tiki lifestyle · 1 Comment

This is a web 1.0 classic, all of the Earth Nation’s flags graded A-F. The bad grades are dangerously funny, I almost injured myself laughing so hard.

Features a hawk sitting on a toilet.

Link to “The world’s flags given letter grades”

Filed under: all talk, design, neat · 1 Comment

A timely news item given that a certain someone impersonated the venerable Blue Screen Of Death for Halloween (don’t worry, I’m not posting the pictures … yet :-). Apparently you can download a BSOD screensaver from microsoft.com that not only displays the chilling blue frame, but all the info is taken from your system so that “its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers.”

Use Bluescreen to amaze your friends and scare your enemies!

Link to The Register “Download your Blue Screen of Death – from Microsoft”

Filed under: meta, neat · 3 Comments

Deep wisdom from LifeHacker about the oh-so-corporate task of digitizing whiteboards….

This is a trick I picked up when I was working as a consultant. This process quickly and efficiently sends out notes from a working session to all the collaborators. The steps are:
1. Capture whiteboard notes with your cameraphone.
2. Send your images to your laptop/PC via Bluetooth (or email).
3. Use CutePDF to “print” them to a PDF file.
4. Email PDF to all collaborators.

This sounds like a lot of steps, but Dan says it only takes about 5 minutes, depending on how many images you’re distributing.

Not that I capture a lot of whiteboards, but I like my way better.

• Step 1, buy a MacBook or a MacBook Pro
• Step 2, Open lid of MacBook and press power button
• Step 3, Point the MacBook’s built-in camera towards the whiteboard as you snap a picture with PhotoBooth

I know it’s a lot of steps, but you only have to do the first two once every year, and the third one only takes about 4 seconds, depending on how many images you’re distributing.

Now that Scanr thing they are talking about that converts your whiteboard pictures into PDF and then emails them back to you … that’s pretty neat.

Link to “The MacBook Family”
Link to Scanr

Filed under: apps, lifehacking, neat · 2 Comments

Google just launched a neat service called Google Co-op that lets you create a customized search engine for a single (or a couple sites) so I created one for TikiRobot and put it in our sidebar (it’s all the way at the bottom). There are some other revenue sharing and customization aspects associated with the service that I haven’t really explored yet, but there’s more info here. In the meantime, you can now find that long-lost-post that you’re pretty sure you saw on this site, but don’t remember what we tagged it (cause even i don’t remember what I tag things).

Filed under: meta, neat, support · 9 Comments

and i’m already thinking of snow.

This neat toy was made by zefrank

Filed under: design, neat, toys · 4 Comments

Here’s a neat app I found on O’Reilly Radar today. Rentometer is a Google maps mash-up that tells you what the average rents are for your location and the type of apartment you have. It’s got a really clean UI and is super easy to use.

Speaking of apartments, I finally found a new place after weeks of stressful searching! It’s smaller than my current place and needs a bit of fixing up…but it’s in Bernal (on Park and Andover) and also ridiculously inexpensive, so I’m happy. yay! i get to play with zara more often! :-)

Filed under: apps, cartography, neat · 4 Comments

according to this neat applet that lets you visualize your website as a graph. I forget what these types of graphs are called (tree graphs? it looks kind of like a dandelion to me) Anyways, here’s what the dots represent.

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
grey: all other tags

Some graphs for other sites are over here.

(via Drawn!)

Filed under: cartography, design, neat · 2 Comments

Link to the weirdest photo I’ve seen all week

Filed under: bobslobster, neat · 0 Comments

mikest made these gorgeous steampunk goggles with machined and polished brass, hand sewn attic leather, and dichroic filters from an old cyberlight. The quality of Mikey’s work always blows me away!

Filed under: estee, neat, tronix · 6 Comments

Jamie tipped me off to Radiant, a CMS (content management system). I didn’t even know what a CMS was. To me it looks like a really pretty and easy to use wiki type of thing. I guess that’s what content management is. “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Oh, and Radiant is an open source project based on Rails.

Filed under: code code, neat · 1 Comment

You guys have probably noticed this already but I added a little twitter status thingy to our sidebar! so you can uh, keep track of my twittering (not sure why you’d want to, but let’s just pretend you do :-) I’ve been playing with it for a couple months and I really like it! It’s sort of like IRC via SMS, the benefit being that I don’t have to be at my computer to send messages (cause I can’t carry my laptop with me everywhere…and important things could be happening…like that time I couldn’t decide between Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey, where were you people????) Anyways, you can decide whether you want to get updates or not – just turn them on or off anytime from your phone. No need to go to the web to manage all your options – check out all the commands you can issue via SMS on the fly! (I sent you guys invites so you can add your twittering to our sidebar too :-)

Filed under: inspiration, multitouch, neat · 2 Comments

I’m testing this thing called twttr (an odeo side project :-) I can send updates about whatever I’m doing via text message from my phone to the box above. As you can see, I ain’t doin much right now…but that could change…I guess that’s the idea.

Filed under: neat · 3 Comments