I like to draw. Last week I bought a few pens from Dick Blick and I found one in particular that I like a lot. The Pilot Fineliner is like a marker but the tip is super fine and it doesn’t bleed. The price of the fineliner is about $1.50 so I ended up going back and buying more. I also picked up some Faber-Castell pens. They are really nice drawing pens too, but there not so cheap. If you like to draw you should try the Pilot Fineliner. I started using them for everything even taking notes in my FORTRAN class.

If you like 8bit music or techno you should take a look at 8bitPeoples.com. I never really paid attention to any of the music from the old games I used to play. 8bitPeoples is mashing everything up using the old game sounds to make some fun strange music.

Here are a few of the songs I liked:
On Target
Boss Man
MEGAblaST
moduless

Fun times…

I don’t usually pay too much attention to favicons but, I found an awesome one last week. Favicons are special icons used by web sites in order to display a logo in the header bar of web browsers. The favicon that caught my attention was made by Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri. He made a favicon that is actually a 16×16 pixle game made by making javascript continuously update the favicon on the fly. Check out his awesome favicon at:

http://www.p01.org/releases/DHTML_contests/files/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

The directions for how to play this game are on the page that the above link goes to. The favicon is the game.

Back in June of this year I made a fish-eye lens for my Cannon Powershot camera. I made it using a piece of PVC pipe, a peephole for a door, and some foam tape (used to wrap around water pipes).

Here is a picture of it along with some pictures that I took while using it.

Since the peephole is a small tube there is a lot of black space around the picture that needed to be cropped out. The pictures are a lot smaller than the pictures I would get using a store bought fish-eye lens, but a store bought lens would cost over $1,000.

This lens also works for taking video. I found that the black space can be easily cropped out using a program called VirtualDub. VirtualDub is OpenSource so its free and there is a portable version that can be downloaded from www.portableapps.com.