Design is Kinky is having their 2nd annual T-shirt design contest. You may enter as many works as you'd like, until early September. Four winners will receive a copy of each winning shirt design.

T-shirt design involves some interesting constraints - vector graphics and few colors. I don't have any experience with vector illustration, so I plan to work on a single submission up until the deadline. The central object will be an intentionally crude model of a military tank, coded vertex-by-vertex from specs and photos I downloaded today.

My next $50 will buy a Lomo Supersampler.

A new wallpaper is up - Cell01

I'm particularly happy with how it turned out. The molecule-lookin' structure was generated by the DLA algorithm I mentioned yesterday; although I updated my code to use sticky spheres instead of cubes. Ideal for Mr. Bubble parodies.

I've been working on a small program that builds 3D fractals using the Diffusion Limited Aggregation model. It's a simple recipe, but the output is stunning ... massive crystalline structures. You'll get a peek as soon as I've finished a design I'm happy with.

Check out this excellent demo for a better idea of how DLA works.

Blender is a comprehensive, free 3D modeling application that fits on a floppy disk. Available for Windows, BeOS, Sun, and *nix.

So, this is the new layout. By using a sidebar, I've been able to delete the various sections (and navigation) that once cluttered the page. Don't look under the hood, though; dangerously nested tables are inside.

A large subset of my CD collection is printed with the warning, "For promotional use only - resale prohibited." I have about 3 dozen of these discs, mostly from used record stores. Every single one shares three eerie properties: major labels, 1990-95, and $1.99.

The best thing about this music is that you can't be a fan of it; every group seems to have existed only long enough to fail commercially. Their posters and t-shirts, if ever they existed, are long forgotten.

This is music without any larger context; like the piped-in sounds of airports and elevators. It's an oasis in an age when your personality is defined by the products you prefer -- forced to choose between earnest consumption and manufactured camp.

Except that most of it is just bad.

LParser is an amazing toy for rainy days -- it generates organic-looking 3d models from simple instructions, using L-Systems. If you're willing to get down and dirty with the command line, LParser will do some amazing things.

I leave for Chicago tomorrow morning. It's a five hour drive, and the plans are sketchy ... but we always do it this way.

The day after the last post, my first laptop arrived. We've been on a honeymoon ever since. Not only can I stop programming on paper, I get unsolicited real-time design feedback from coffeehouse patrons. Bonus.

A new wallpaper is up.

Robotory has daily news on everything automated. The animation at Presstube blows my mind. Netstar makes dreamy fonts.