Ever wish you could have a digital version of a book, but there is no kindle or PDF version available? One in book in particular I’d love to have on my phone at all times: Keri Smith’s “How to be…
Have you ever used the interjection “BOOM!” when you think you are right, but actually you aren’t? If someone corrects your BOOM, they boomeranged you. Last weekend, I was explaining something to my three-year-old daughter. At the end of the…
Mailing birth announcements today reminds me how much I love mailing things to people. Today I have a whole stack of love to share! I love how the postal mail is like the internet. Today I dropped off letters to…
While I was walking through the Art Institute of Chicago today, I was thinking about how this artwork is the artwork that I have the most immediate physical access to. I work two blocks north from this grand museum. If…
Stand right in front of a Degas pastel drawing, and try photographing a 360-degree photograph with multiple-stitching. You get some fun results with how the application auto-stitches the exposures together. Normally, 360-degree panorama apps like this are meant to photograph…
Can Jackson Pollock paintings be displayed any which way? Upside-down, sideways? Sure, why not? Especially when the paintings are reproduced into two-inch magnets. The Art Institute of Chicago takes some of their most famous art, reprints it into tiny two-inch…
The arch-enemy of G.I.Joe, Cobra Commander, is bent on world domination. And now there is a pencil sharpener in the shape of his helmet. X-ACTO, the manufacturer of sharp blades, produces a pencil sharpener that looks JUST like Cobra Commander.…
Go to images.google.com and search for: art. That’s it—just one word: art. What do you think you would get? Images of the Mona Lisa or other famous paintings? Google gave me images of splashy colorful art. What results did you…
When I look at my 63 art projects, it seems like a lot. Lots of art across a variety of things. Yup, I just shared my complete list of art projects—both projects that are public, and the projects that are…
Every week Spotify makes a custom playlist of 30 songs just for you—based on what you listen to. It’s sort of like a close friend making a very personal playlist for you. In fact, it’s even more personal in a…
The screenshot tool is so incredibly handy tool. (also known as screen capture on Windows). With the Mac, if you hit command-shift-4, you get a crosshairs to click and drag the area you want to capture. Today I accidentally dragged…
Amusing to see “The Unicorn Song” in my Spotify “Discover Weekly”. This cute song starts with a little child saying “Unicorns da dumm. Unicorns da dumm”. It sounds like she is saying something about unicorns, but I can’t make it…
What’s shinier than the 110-ton Chicago Bean? Why a Hot Wheels Heavy Tanker Truck! With its reflective chrome tank, this Hot Wheels is quite the photogenic truck. Sheer power with eight exhaust pipes rising up behind the stout cab. Oversized…
My wonderful wife wrote a gracious message on my Facebook wall for Father’s day. In her message she mentioned, “joie de vivre.” Not knowing what this phrase means, I headed over to one of my favorite resources on the internet,…
It’s pretty funny that for a long time, my website was one of the references for the 2 Legit 2 Quit Wikipedia page. Oh snap. It still is a reference! THAT’S…TOO LEGIT Interesting. The reference has only been since 2015.…
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…
