Thing 6 - Mashups & Trading Cards

Definitely a fun exercise! I found myself wondering: who has the time to work on all these wonderful creations? I guess young people have both time and expertise for such things. It's an interesting way of expressing yourself while sharing the wealth, as it were.

Mappr wasn't working the day I tried it, but it's a neat idea to display information geographically. I bet it helps spark relationships across the world based on, at times, your whims that day. The Color Pickr was astonishingly cool. As an avid photographer, I was impressed that it allowed you to not only choose photos by color but also by luminosity (the relative brightness and intensity of a color) when using the slider.

I did manage to whip up a trading card from one of my quirky rock photos. I could see using this for lots of other applications.

Here's the original photo the from which the trading card was made.

On to Thing 8!

Things 5 & 7- Flickr Burning Man 2007, Tech Talk

I saw this cool retro wooden telescope while checking out pix on Flickr. I've always enjoyed seeing what people come up with out in the desert during this celebration, and I've always been an avid starwatcher, so this caught my eye.

It reminded me of something I saw recently on a tech site called Tom's Hardware Guide (THG), where they had a competition for building the most outrageous custom computer modification (called "modding"). There were some really cool ones made with wooden cases. I think it would be just perfect as an adjunct to this scope!

Here are a couple of examples:

The Sangaku Japanese Style Wooden PC Case Mod by Nicholas Falzone, featured as the finest Wooden PC Case Mod Ever.


The website these photos came from, http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/62/1/, said of this rig: The most spectacular example of a complete wooden desktop setup we've come across was created by Russian master carpenters in Moscow. The case, monitor, mouse, and keyboard were all hand crafted. And they'll do one for you too but “To be honest we do not have the cheapest masters in Moscow,” so be ready for the a fairly high estimate.

I bet!!! I love the look of these, they remind me of TVs in the "old days".