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.

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”.

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…

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?

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.

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…

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.

Ever wanted to be on the cover of a magazine? Well, now you can, and without the hassle of actually doing anything worthwhile! Simply go to MagMyPic and upload your photo and choose the magazine cover you want to be on. Unfortunately they don’t have a ‘Dentistry Monthly’ magazine, or that would have been where I’d have put Mr. McGowan.

Now who’s going to be the first person to hack together a speech from something like this. Unfortunately, it’s already been sanitised of many innocuous words.

Anyway, here’s one for Americans: Nuclear. [Do you see two u's in there?]

Here’s one for everyone: Mnemonic.

PhotoFunia takes an uploaded portrait photo of a subject and cleverly transposes it into a selection of images, so that the subject is now on the front page of a folded newspaper, or on a TV watched by cats, or being fawned over by a couple of adoring girls, or sported by Beckham as his latest tattoo, or being drawn in chalk by an artist on the ground.

It’s very clever really and the results are excellent, well worth 20 minutes of your time. You can download the results or post them online.

This cool tool will create a text art from any photo that you upload. I’ve demonstrated with a photo I took outside the British Museum a few years ago. The site provides you with the actual text, which you can open and look at in any text editor.

I’ve used my ace skills to Palinise Michelle, and Obamasize Sarah. To-wit, my results:

Before I introduce the new feature, consider this scenario…

It’s Friday night, you’ve just stumbled in from the pub and the thought occurs to you to check your email. You manage, after clicking on three other icons first, and *beep*, there’s a new company-wide message from your boss. You decide to reply, telling him/her where to get off, and how you really feel about your slacking co-workers, and hit send. You go to bed and wake up in the morning with a hangover and a guilty conscience that you did ~something~ last night that you shouldn’t have, but you can’t remember. Monday morning you stride into work, notice the stares, and *BAM* it hits you. “The email…” you groan to yourself… hoping the fallout won’t be too bad.

No More!

The good people at Google have introduced Mail Goggles, designed to prevent such a scenario. You stumble in, compose your email, and then hit send. This is what you get:

You’ve got 43 seconds to solve these simple math problems. If you can do that (proving you’re not drunk), then the email will get sent. Otherwise the math should help sober you up a little, enough perhaps, to prevent you from sending that bad email.

Thanks guys! I’m ashamed to admit that I have been guilty of drunk mailing in the past.

Upload any bitmap image (one that’s made with pixels) and this tool will do it’s best to create a vector version one that’s made with mathematical instructions) for you.