Saturday, December 6, 2003

The donuts are watching you.... Donuts. 8:49:04 PM  pontificate

PixelBlocks PixelBlocks are a lego like toy, but with several key features (some of which legos used to have): - translucent and come in many colors. I like pretty colors... and things that light up are even better! - lock together in a variety of ways, but remain regularly repeatable - there is exactly one size/shape PixelBlocks. I would appreciate some variety, but Legos has nicely demonstrated how too much variety can lead to completely discouraging creativity. - Cheap. A 2800 piece assortment of PixelBlocks is $60 online. Cool stuff. Fortunately, my family just signed up for a year's membership at the San Jose Children's Museum (the new water room is awesome) and their gift store carries PixelBlocks. The PixelBlocks site has a Digital Stained Glass feature that allows you to upload a digital photo and turn it into a building plan using PixelBlocks. Effectively, the PixelBlocks become pixels to create a sort of stained glass effect. It will also fill your shopping cart with everything you need to build the plan. I tested it out with a random digital photo that I had lying around that was fairly high resolution. End result would have required about $13,422 worth of blocks-- 170,000 of the most common color. Most likely Digital Stained Glass is much more effective if you start with a photo that has a relatively centered and simple subject that can be cropped effectively. Very cool. 5:08:57 PM  pontificate