This is not just “one to watch,” it’s two to watch! Awesome.

“An end of the season Layer Tennis Playoff Fiasco! Two matches at once! Anything can happen. Chris Glass vs Shaun Inman with commentary by John Gruber plus at the very same time Jason Koxvold vs James Hutchinson with commentary by the Dean of Layer-By-Layer Commentary, Rosecrans Baldwin. Coin flips coming. We’re declaring tomorrow a holiday. In-office drinking commences if and when one of the matches reaches Layer 7.”

“The latest addition to the 100% portfolio is a lamp in shape of – you guessed it – a lamp. A wonderful idea that causes irritated looks followed by broad grinning. Born out of the fact that light bulbs have become a commodity product, that lead a pretty neglected life, only in our focus when it breaks and when we usually don’t have the correct replacement on hand. We are much more intrigued by the surrounding of the lightbulb, the shape of the shade or the way it is held, or the size… All of that casual usage of the common bulb will now change, and it will be displayed for what it is.”

“If you talk to any mother who no longer has school aged children, they will tell you how they long for the quiet, simple days, when their children used to give them works of art they created with their own tiny hands and a box of crayons… As time passed those works of art became misplaced, or even thrown out. Now there is a way to preserve these memories forever, with the permanence of sterling silver. Create a heirloom that can be passed from generation to generation, with your own Child Artwork Pin.”

“Squirl is the best way to catalog, organize and share your records, movies, books, comic books, stamps, coins, or practically anything else.”

“Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started.”

“I came across a link to Stefan Sagmeister’s presentation at TED more than once—and it lingered in a back tab of my browser waiting to be fired up. Usually this means I’ll get overwhelmed and just close everything down, but it took two reputable reads (Swiss Miss and Greg Storey) to force me to carve out the 15 minutes to watch it… The point is, I really enjoyed Stefan’s talk and I’m glad this material is available online. If you don’t have the time to watch it, here’s a list from Sagemeister’s diary: Complaining is silly. Either act or forget…”

Coudal rocks the swap: “Send us some of the stuff you made for yourselves, that you’re selling or giving away. You’re going to have to trust us on this, but we’ll  check out what you send and then send you back some  stuff of approximately equal value. That might be  stuff we received from someone else or some of our  stuff, or some combination of the two.”

Holy crap! “Behind the raging horseshoe falls of Niagara there lurks a dormant monster, a century old redbrick tunnel painstakingly laid. There is no recorded tally of its human cost but in 1906 it would be the biggest tunnel of its type in the world. Like the secret hideout of a supervillain it defies belief and comprehension, a stronghold behind the crashing waterfall.”

“The corruption process start by reading the binary of an image file [JPG or GIF], then some bytes are swaps [the number of replacement is a random value from 1 to 20]. The file is then “saved as” a new document. Depending on the number replacement and of the original compression, the image will have a completely different and unpredictable aesthetics.” NOTE: The system displays the last three uploaded images so here’s hoping none of them are NSFW… (Thanks 30gms!)

“While visiting the webernator, one gets a general impression of the people who are visiting a site by either the quality of the site itself or the comments that are left behind by other users. Using a set of complex algorithms and several neural networks, Newsicus would like to present what the average user of each of select websites is like in photographic form.” (Thanks Magnetbox!)

“People who are suffering from burnout tend to describe the sensation in metaphors of emptiness–they’re a dry teapot over a high flame, a drained battery that can no longer hold its charge. Thirteen years, three books, and dozens of papers into his profession, Barry Farber, a professor at Columbia Teachers College and trained psychotherapist, realized he was feeling this way. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted with the symptoms. He was a burnout researcher himself.”

When my oldest son was born in 2001 LEGO offered a cool online ‘Brick-o-lizer’ that would take an uploaded photo and turn it into a five-tone grayscale grid of 1×1 bricks from which you could create a wall-hanging mosaic. LEGO would send you the exact right amount of bricks in bulk. Putting it together was as easy as paint-by-numbers. I did this for him and for his little brother in 2003. My daughter was born a few weeks ago and so naturally I went back to the Brick-o-lizer to create her mosaic. Imagine my horror to find out that it isn’t available anymore. How could I deprive my baby girl of her LEGO mosaic? Well. Obviously. I couldn’t. So, here follows instructions for doing it manually…”

“My method is based on what I call the Twelve Principles–a set of precepts designed to lead you directly to any lost object. Like a bloodhound!”

“The place to share creative lists of every kind: wishlists, top tens, autobiographical, photo lists, favorites, to-do lists, and more!”

” Ever wanted to catch a snowflake and keep it forever? You can. This is a photograph of a snowflake that fell in January 1979, but it isn’t a 27-year-old photo. It is a recent shot of a snowflake that’s been sitting in chemist Tryggvi Emilsson’s desk for 27 years, locked in a drop of that miracle of modern chemistry we call superglue.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)