Welcome to the future, where you no longer have to actually measure anything by hand! Amy Hurst and Marty McGuire got tired of having to pull out a ruler any time they wanted to print a perfectly-sized moustache ring, so they created the program Nickel for Scale. Written in a weekend during the Baltimore Hackathon, it allows you to snap a photo of something that you want to measure along with a nickel, then automatically identifies the nickel and uses it to give a scale to the image.
Their current implementation is a little silly, however they have a loftier goal in mind: the idea is to make it easier for people to print custom projects and assistive technologies to fit their bodies, instead of relying on generic, one-size-fits-all products.
