Make spores…
Very fun processing app – Drawing toy that produces parameterized organisms. Procedural animation allows the organisms to swim around in a virtual fluid environment interacting with each other. The project now interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on stroke length, speed, and pressure. While not exactly gesture recognition, it was a quick and dirty solution to what otherwise might have been a nightmare to develop (gesture recognition). [via] Link.
Nice hack for duping slides- I started this because I have about 2000 35mm slides and nearly that many color negatives I’d like to convert to digital images, and many of them are 30 years old or more and starting to deteriorate. My first attempt involved purchasing a slide scanner from the-store-that-must-not-be-named, but it took like 3 to 4 minutes to prescan and then scan to file, and then it usually botched the exposure or the color balance. I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life scanning slides in this manner, so I started thinking about other solutions…[
Hmm, I’d like to learn how to make these. These pencils don’t consist of any wood. Instead they are made out of 20-33% recycled blue denin jeans that have been ground up. The rest is the recycled post-consumer paper. To complete the blue theme, they have a blue eraser and a pewter blue ferrule. For something…greener, you can also get pencils made out of “old money” or recycled U.S. dollar bills. A pack of 12 costs $6. 
This site is about a project to try to answer the question: How much does a hamster run in a treadmill? The site includes lots of pictures, online statistics, RSS feed, Webcam etc. I really love this site- this might be the most documented hamster on the planet, the latest stat is: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 – day 69 – current treadmill total: 179,648.12 meters! (17:20). There is also a lot of HOW TO / design type content for those wanting to Truman show their rodent. 
Rip your DVDs, save out some bitmaps, and stitch ’em together with some free software. Instant movietastic panorama! Just use the PT GUI — which happens to be a GUI for Panorama Tools. For info on Panorama Tools, just visit PTFAQ.org. Then head over to PTGUI.com to download the tools, and be sure to check out the site’s tutorial for how-to examples. 
