Here’s a link for Tom: a kit for the Weird Sound Generator. Unlike many of these things, I actually found the variety and quality of sounds produced by this thing to actually be pretty darned interesting. It might be fun to build one of these and work on your own soundtrack for Return to the Forbidden Planet. Check it out:
Weird Sound Generator
Here’s an MP3 of the example sounds you can make with this gadget.
Haven’t had much of this lately for Tom, so here’s an amusing musical interlude.
For the Lego fans out there, check out K’s Legobrot: 3D Lego Fractals. I ran across it while looking for something completely different.  The program itself is rather unremarkable, but I still thought it was kind of cute.
[tags]Lego,Fractal,Mandelbrot,PostScript[/tags]
Want some cute animal pictures? Try checking out this minor gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood from Project Gutenberg.  It’s got lots of really strange pictures that look like conventional animal pictures cut up and then clothing drawn around them. Strange stuff, but oddly kind of fun too, might be fun for a kid’s craft project, and heck: they are in the public domain.
[tags]Cute Clip Art,Project Gutenberg[/tags]
It’s a strange fact that any two words (or interests) that you might have will eventually find a webpage that illustrates them both. Of course, every geek in the universe likes Legos, and a couple of years back I made an aborted stab at learning something about Mayan hieroglyphics.  I didn’t think I’d find a webpage that harmonizes the two, but check out Dunechaser’s Blocklog for his Aztec Minifigs.
Addendum:Â Wikipedia on Mayan hieroglyphics, PDF of Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs by Kuttunet and Helmke, or How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs by John Montgomery.
[tags]Maya,Lego[/tags]
Courtesy of Bill Gurstelle’s Technology Underground, check out the U.S. Navy’s collection of paintings of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Very cool stuff.
[tags]Nuclear Explosion, Art, Navy, Bikini Atoll[/tags]
Addendum: I bet I would have gotten more traffic to my website if I used the tag Bikini instead of Bikini Atoll.
This is just a strange project that I can’t help but pass along: Knit Your Own Digestive System
[tags]Knitting,Crafts,Bizarre Bazaar[/tags]
My neighbor picked me up this very cute print of a cat when he was in Taiwan to thank me for taking care of his cats while he was away.
Very cute.
The gents at Forever Geek were saddened to think that they didn’t have one of those little 80×15 buttons to link to their site, so they used a button maker to generate one. So did I.
Feel free to download it, and use it to link back to me. 
Another cool project linked from Make: HOW TO make DVD Panoramas. The idea is simple: find a DVD that has some panning panoramic shot, dump bitmaps of a bunch of shots, and stitch them together with your favorite panorama software.
I particularly liked this one.
Grunka lunka dunkity-gredient
You should not ask about the secret ingredient!
Grunka lunka dunkity darn guards…
Need a kooky craft project for geeks? Look no further than Project Cryo, a spiffy mod to your mouse to… well… go have a look.
Courtesy Cory at BoingBoing (who got it via the Make blog) here is a cool set of haunted papercraft toys that you can make yourself. It includes a spooky variation of the illusion I blogged about here, where a static paper sculpture seems to move in response to your motion, and track you with its eyes.
I’ll have to make one during my lunch break today.
Those guys on worth1000.com have truly amazing Photoshop contents, and this contest themed “Escher Blowout” has some incredibly cool stuff. Check it out.
I was searching for a program that I only vaguely recall (which I didn’t find) but I did find Ed Halley’s GIMP Tutorial on Using Multiple Exposures which has many cool ideas on creating translucency (ghost) effects, removing moving cars from highways, creating crowds, and blending exposures. Bookmarked for future ideas.
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here’s a link to a site which contains site with PDF files you can print to make all different kinds of graph paper.
Useful!
