I bought my girlfriend a birthday present. Then I put the present into a box, then I put that box inside of another box... well, it's important to say that in the end I did NOT smash it with a hammer. However, I did use Adobe Illustrator's LiveTrace ability to turn some iconic images from The Emperor's New Groove into thematically-appropriate wrapping paper. An Illustrator-compatible PDF is linked here, for your vector-printing pleasure.
Read MoreA stage - empty but for a spotlight and a stradivarius violin: one of the world's finest.
Onto that stage walks Joshua Bell, arguably one of the world's finest violinists. He picks up the instrument, and begins to play...
Read MoreOn Monday, Ahmed brought a homemade clock to school as an engineering project. School administrators claimed that the clock was “bomblike”. Ahmed was arrested. Like, actually-put-in-cuffs arrested.
Read MoreI’m often at a loss on how to explain to people the thorny social issues which arise from our complex contemporary technology. Much of the time, in order to even begin discussing the implications of a particular topic, you have to explain all sorts of complicated underlying concepts to your audience.
Read MoreUnder the law court buildings in downtown Vancouver, there's a minimalist sculpture of a red spring. Taking a photo through it from either end produces a tableau effect quite reminiscent of a mid-20th century Warner Brothers cartoon title card. I made a quick template in Photoshop to add the appropriate lettering. Sadly, I can't distribute the fonts used, but you might be able to find something with a quick googling...
Read MoreThe other day, our office building's property manager arrived with a Christmas gift basket. If you work in an office building, this is one of those little perks that come with your tenancy. As my co-workers and I begin to pick the basket apart, I eagerly pull out a small box of chocolates, wrapped in red paper. That's the point where I get weird.
Read MoreDid you know that I almost drowned once?
Many years ago, as a music composition student at UBC, I took the electro-acoustic music course. Our mid-term project required us to record environmental noises and manipulate them to create a composition. A longtime Metro-Vancouverite, I've always liked the sounds the Skytrain made, so I recorded some of them. This was made many years ago using C-Sound.
Read MoreI didn't design this, of course. But variants of this logo, and the other departments of Starfleet, have been floating around for a while. A few people have made high-res versions in Illustrator, but no one has made the vector art available for download. So, here's mine, in PDF format.
Read MoreI used an old RaQ Cobalt server case, a LaCie SATA-to-ThunderBolt hub, an Adafruit LCD, and lots of ingenuity to create a custom drive enclosure and jukebox that I continue to use to this day. The project got a lot of positive feedback and made it onto the main pages of both Hack-a-Day and Instructables (where the project is detailed).
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