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While my wife is away and missing the unusual snowfall in Atlanta, I wanted to create an all-natural card to let her know that I was thinking about her.  I took some red liquid and attempted to make a heart-shaped hole in the snow but my first attempt failed badly.  The warmed-up Hawaiian Punch simply rolled off of the ice making it impossible to create any kind of intentional shape.  I was about to give up when I realized that I had some heart-shaped pancake forms in the kitchen!

My second go worked like a charm.  Using the heart-shaped die, I cut through the top layer of ice just enough to separate it from the rest and I poured a second batch of red liquid in the center.  The liquid turned the snow to a pinkish slush which was nice but not exactly what I was going for.  It eventually melted the snow and revealed some of the grass in the heart-shaped hole.  Finally, I picked some red holly berries from the bushes that line our apartment building sidewalk and I used them to fill up the heart.  And that was that--the ice heart is complete!

For the next Larvae video (and hopefully record,) I am working with a very specific theme.  About five or six years ago we produced a video that skinned the classic game Wolfenstein 3D to look like a Niketown store.  Instead of killing Nazis, the hero of the game looked like me and he went around dropping black circles over Nike logos in an attempt to "unbrand" the place.  People asked how we did it and the answer was pretty simple--those old games use basic pixel graphics for sprites and someone has spent the time to backwards engineer the games and to drop all of the elements into an editor so that you can make your own version.

I have a collection of several hundred action figures and I've always wanted some sort of apparatus that would allow me to take decent pictures of them.  Every time I fly, I see the $99 table top photo studio in the SkyMall magazine and I think that there really should be a way to make one at home.  I looked for some other examples of the DIY Photo Studio and found that other people had already figured this out, so I grabbed a cardboard box, a boxcutter, some paper, tape, and lamps and I went to town.

If you are looking for a web-based tool for picking colors to use in your design or CSS markup, this site has the answer:  http://www.colorpicker.com/ .  The interface is simple and it allows you to paste in a hex code for a color and then scroll around the color chart to find something slightly brighter, or slightly greener, or whatever.  It picks complimentary colors for you, helps you put together a whole scheme, and it gives you a place to save the colors you have picked in a little grid so that you can see the palette you are creating.  In a web-based world where you can create an entire site without ever opening up a traditional graphics application, this thing is pretty amazing.

My first attempt at poster printing using the YUDU machine was a mixed success.  I went through too many screens and the designs didn't quite fit the paper, but on the whole the short run of posters looked good.  The ratio of bad posters to keepers was higher than I would have liked, but I can chalk that up to the learning curve.