Paint your shoes and encourage others to paint theirs! The act itself is fun. You can be festive, gleeful, or ritualistic. It’s entirely up to you! Painting your shoes is a recognizably friendly act that means you know we are all artists of our own lives and not just passive consumers of commodities manufactured by others. Your painted shoes mean you aren’t afraid to be friendly toward strangers Link.

This case mod project was something I’ve been wanting to do for some time, ever since I started using a weather radar program called StormPredator in our radio station KPAY where I’m a meteorologist. The neat thing about the StormPredator program is that it has a “round” interface and looks like a real radar scope. It was just begging for some round display PC hardware to match but who makes round LCD panels or round color cathode ray tubes? By doing a case mod, I’ve created a “weather radar appliance” that automatically boots and performs a dedicated function – watching for storms. Link.

Another how to on rebuilding battery packs. Did you recently notice poor performance of your notebook Li-Ion battery?. Don’t be taken aback, this is happening even to the best battery! Now days Li-Ion batteries are widely used in portable devices due to there excellent energy to weight ratio and for the reason they are not suffering from “memory effect”. Link.

This is kinda cute. Find an older electronic item (toy, gadget, etc.) that makes a sound you like and think you could make even better. For ease try to find something from the late 80’s or early 90’s that is not too complicated. Also make sure that it can be battery powered when you are trying to modify it. Most importantly, make sure you are not too attached to this item as you may ruin it completely. Link.

This should get me in to most press conferences, or kicked out. Make your own (unofficial) flickr badge. Print it out, laminate it, wear flickr with pride! Show the world how truly photographically geeky you really are! Here’s the one I made, when I get back I’ll laminate it and throw it in my photo bag. Link.

I’ve been collecting how tos on Manga- Japanese style Anime (working on a tutorial of my own) Here’s a pretty good one- post up others in the comments. HEY KIDS!! Glad you could make it out to class today. I hope I can make your trip worthwhile. Located below are several tutorials that should help you either get started in Anime/Manga styled art or maybe help refine some skills. Manual drawing lessons to the left, Photoshop is to the right. Link.

I have made the game Tetris using a PIC16F84 running @ 12MHz. Tetris is an old Russian computer game where you should try to fit in block into a play-field, quite simple but really fun. All blocks are built from four bricks (the name Tetris is derived from the ancient greek word for four: “tetra”), there are seven combinations of the four bricks as seen here to the left. This version is using my PIC Game System as platform, generating a video signal in software. The only hardware used for the video generation is two resistors forming a 2-bit DA converter. Link.