Here Be Treasures

New Calendar Time

Thursday, December 10th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

For the Gregorians amongst us, it’s coming up to the New Year, and every New Year needs a new calendar. So here are a couple of ideas for you.

If you‘re really cheap like arts and crafts you can make your own calendar. Not one of those stuffy ‘photo-pasted-over-month’ thingies. No! I give you the ‘dodecahedral calendar‘. You choose the year (2010, obviously), the language (Albanian to Welsh), day to start the week, and the format.

Perhaps you like the standard calendar format of picture and month. Then you can make your own calendar at Glennz Desktop Calendar, where you can choose the start month and then select which images you want from a set of cool illustrations.

Sketch Your Own Criminal

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

If you’ve recently been mugged by some hooded youths, now thanks to the power of the FlashFace you can create your own sketch of the thug that offended your dignity. I’ve put together a sketch of the French Philosophy student that stepped on my toes at a party recently.

Animoto—Your Photos To Videos

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | cool tool, photography, video | No Comments

Animoto.com takes your photos and makes a hip and happening video out of them. Simply upload your photos and choose your settings and you have a funky video.

TinEye

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

TinEye.com is a reverse image search engine. You upload an image, and it’ll find that image on the web. Great for finding the original source of an image, and also for detecting copyright infringements.

Image Mosaic Generator

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

The Image Mosaic Generator will take any photo you throw at it and generate a huge mosaic of Flickr pictures that will blend together to recreate your picture. The images produced are about 4MB, so it can take a while to generate. I found a kitten, the moon and a pair of boobies in my image… and I’m not going to mention the man in his underpants.

Get Out Of Bed

Monday, April 20th, 2009 | cool tool, humor | 1 Comment

Monday morning rolls around once again, and our dependency on alarm clocks is yet again tested. There have been many attempts to build a better alarm clock, and including this water-pistol alarm clock for the DIY enthusiast. Few of them though, actually succeed in getting us out of bed. So I introduce to you the Run Away Alarm Clock, which is an alarm clock on wheels. When your alarm goes off, the alarm clock rolls away from you. So you have to get out of bed.

Visualising Music

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

The Music Animation Machine is a site that hosts a series of animated music visualisations. It appears quite low-tech, but it is actually quite enjoyable to watch the music. I recommend “Johann Sebastian Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”.

Flickr Toys

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

Big Huge Labs have a large set of mash-up technologies that allow you to create all sorts of goodies from Flickr content. From jigsaws to games to calendar cubes there’s enough here to keep you occupied all morning whilst work is slow.

Large Screen Action, and I Mean Large

Friday, April 10th, 2009 | cool tool, technology, video | No Comments

Greenpix are pioneering a zero energy media wall project that had it’s first application in Beijing during the Olympic games. Basically it’s a giant video wall. You can watch demonstrations here, and you can also see how your own movies would look on the greenpix wall. Now, if we could just figure out a way to hook it up to the playstation…

Annoyed By TVs at Restaurants?

Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | cool tool, technology | No Comments

Then you can build one of these gizmos: TV-B-Gone. The site has instructions on how to put it all together, and a link to buy a kit, if you want to take a short cut. One inventive customer actually constructed a hoodie in which her tv-b-gone was embedded. It won’t win any fashion awards, but until restaurants realise that people are there to eat and not to watch TV, what alternative is there?

Upside Down Text

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | cool tool | No Comments

I got requests asking how I did ǝɥʇ ǝpısdn uʍop ʇxǝʇ  on Here Be Treasures for April 1st. These are characters that exist in other languages that happen to look like the English equivalent when upside down. Use the flip tool at the revfad website to get an instant result.

The Rasterbator

Thursday, March 26th, 2009 | cool tool, photography | No Comments

The cheekily named “Rasterbator” is an online tool that will convert an uploaded photo into a set of images that you can then piece together to make a giant image. Done well the results are fantastic… As you can see above, it makes a great wall decoration.

How Popular Is Your Favourite Word?

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 | cool tool, language | No Comments

Jonathan Harris has developed a program that counts the frequency of word usage. The data, culled from a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language, is presented interactively in a linear fashion, with each word displayed at a size indicating it’s usage relative to the next.
It tracks almost 87,000 words and has presented some interesting phrases generated by the order, such as “vagina conservationists, condoms downright plagued” and “Germany october products popular”.
The word count ‘about’ page is also interesting and has some links to some derivative word count projects.
At the very least, you can find out how popular your favourite word is…

Handy Drink Calorie Conversion Tool

Friday, December 5th, 2008 | cool tool | No Comments

From the lovely people at BBC radio 1, comes this handy visual alcohol calorie comparison tool. And before you ask, I’ve no idea why a radio station is making a visual comparison tool.

Yet Another Image Generator

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | cool tool | No Comments

Says-It is probably the best word-image generator out there. There’s a huge range of options, from the church sign to the warning sign to delivery trucks and even a self-cutting arm. What’s even better is that you have the option to get most of the images printed onto merchandise. Send someone you love a truly personalised mug or t-shirt or fridge-magnet.