Year: 2019

Remember those website visitor counters in the late 90s and early 2000s? Man those were so cool. They clearly demonstrated two things: Many, many people are looking at the same thing as you. It’s not the webpage you are visiting…

Hot Wheels has produced some crazy crossovers. Toaster trucks, GoPro cars, and Hot Dog racers may be totally cool; but the coolest car ever has got to be the Bubble Matic™. Bubble Matic™ Today while shopping at Target, I could…

Google Fonts is amazing collection of free fonts. 916 font families just waiting for you. You can download them all in one zip file totalling 407 MB. I haven’t updated my Google Fonts collection since 2015. Today I added the…

My method of learning new words in another language: repetition This is how I’m thinking of doing it: Method #1: repetition Have Google Translate translate an English word into another language. In this case, Google translated “great” into the Estonian…

The audio in Google Translate is so helpful. If you click the audio icon, you can hear the word spoken. Didn’t hear the word the first time? Click the button again. And again. And again. That’s what I do. Each…

Two of my favorite things have crossed roads. The Chicago Picasso and Estonia. While walking to work on a Monday morning, a giant photo Arvo Pärt (the Estonian composer) greeted me right by the Chicago Picasso. Wow! What is this?!…

Imagine a typewriter where instead of letters and numbers, all the keys are emoji characters. Each key is its own emoji. The result would be a black and white line art emoji. That would mean someone would have to forge…

With spring comes the bright colors. Flowers bloom from the dark ground, butterflies emerge from gray chrysalides. Today, the colorful state flags arise on white flagpoles at Chicago’s Aon Center. All winter long the flags were gone. My window faces…

A floor-to-ceiling shelf holding hundreds of books. Makes a beautiful backdrop. But you can’t read the books. You can’t even touch them. It’s a work of art. Oooook. I need to investigate this artwork further. During lunch I breezed through…

If your printer at work has an automatic stapler, give it a try. Automatic staplers are so wonderful. 1) You don’t have to do the manual job of stapling your sheets Machines. Let the machines do the work for you.…

For a design comp, I quickly selected a Google font, Encode Sans. Because it comes in lots of weights thin, extra light, light, regular, medium, semi-bold, bold, extra-bold, and black. WONDERFUL! Such glorious options. And then quadruple over these options…

Some key commands are easy to remember. Command-c for copy. But what about obscure ones like Indesign’s command-option-j for underlining text? (In Indesign that’s called a paragraph rule). What does the letter j have to do with underlining text? Maybe…

Whenever I call customer support for something, I like to imagine they have a customer profile on each customer. This profile would have informal notes on what type of person the customer is. Maybe there would be profiles that say…

Want an easy way of looking through thousands of baby names on your phone? I tried to find a PDF online with girl baby names, but I couldn’t find anything. So I made my own. And now you can use…

Almost all of Google Streetview’s images come from the daytime. Makes sense—that’s when you can see things the best. Today, I came across some nighttime shots on Google Streetview. The noise in the photos is fascinating. Almost like some sort…

I love keeping the envelopes from mailed Christmas cards. Handwriting What did so-and-so’s handwriting look like? Nowadays the only time we see someone’s handwriting is on the envelope of a Christmas card. Is it messy? Neat? While spring cleaning in…

I was just sitting on a bench in part of Millennium Park that is normally occupied by a giant family tent. Over the winter, the tent is removed, leaving a huge empty plaza. The tiles on this plaza match the…

Get a new painting every day as your browser’s homescreen. I love the Chrome add-on, Google Arts & Culture. They display quite a range of artwork from famous artists to lesser-known artists. And if you don’t like the particular artwork…

Drip lines are drawn down the base of the Picasso sculpture. As the snow melts, remnant salt lines are left behind. These vertical lines look like a drawing. Whose drawing? Perhaps Paul Klee? Is Paul Klee drawing on a Picasso?…

Happy little snowflakes softly land on the cold hard metal of the Picasso sculpture. Such a beautiful scene: the contrast of the white snowflake against the dark, aged corten steel. I find this two-minute, 46-second video very calming. Nothing “happens”…

You know what I like to do when I’m on the Metra? I like to sew. I repair gloves. I’ve had these gloves since college, making them at least twenty years old. My Aunt Grace and Uncle Jerry gave them…

Every morning I walk by the Chicago Picasso. Not just by it, but I walk right up next to it, so I can run my hand along the base. With all the snow we’ve been getting, it’s been fun seeing…

Ever see something cool along your commute, but you don’t stop to take the photo? I bet it happens to thousands of people every day. It almost happened to me today. Along my commute, I pass by the giant Picasso…

If you type your last name into Google, what auto-complete suggestions do you get? Here’s mine: maldred lord of allerdale is an interesting one. No relation. Also curious is the bottom of the list, mal dress. What is a mal…

Just for kicks, I typed in twitter.com/twitttttttter to see if anyone has the account. Someone does. Of course. But only three followers. Three! What about all the various letter lengths with the repeated? Is any of them really popular? Here…

Does anyone get a weird numb feeling on the backside of your dominant hand? For the past couple weeks mine has this unusual feeling. Not so much numbness. Not really a pain. Just a feeling like something is inside my…

This year both NFL conference championship games ended with controversies. The New Orleans Saints lost to the Los Angeles Rams in overtime. Some say the Saints should have won due to some officiating mistake. The Kansas City Chiefs lost to…

Those goofy cardboard sleeves around takeout coffee cups. What are they called? Today I learned they are called a Zarf. What an wonderful word. Zarf. How in the world is it such a cool word? Is that for real? Yes,…

Ever want to have the unrelentless energy of a hyper Ewok? Those little creatures on the Moon of Endor constantly hop around chitter-chattering a million words per minute. Now you can wield the power of the Ewok! Drink the rare…

I nearly made the post office worker cry (tears of joy) Do you have a favorite Post Office? I bet many people can list their least favorite post offices. We’ve all waited in long lines at understaffed post offices. Let…

  “Jewelry for Gentlemen” is a book recently published by Thames & Hudson. “A dazzling overview of the overlooked art of male jewelry, an increasingly popular requisite of the well-dressed man.” This book features some bad-ass jewelry. A skull with…