Orangeinks

Kerntype: A Kerning Game that Will Enhance your Design Skills

October 27th, 2011 | Comments Off | Posted in Design, Games

Here’s a short info about Kerning if you’re not familiar with it.

In typography, kerning, which is also known as mortising, is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font. This is usually done to achieve a visually pleasing result. Meaning the font placement on a particular design project should be readable and easy on the eyes. Kerning should always be considered when writing typography to maintain visual impact and readability function.

How to Play:

Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to typographer’s solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it.

You can view the typographer and your solution individually. This will enable you to spot the difference between your kern and the solution. You could also use shortcut keys to move the letters more accurately.

The game takes only a few minutes to finish. The objective of the game is to teach the users about kerning and help us understand the value of kerning.

[ KernType ]

Tags: Design, game, Kerning, Typography

The YouTube Insult Generator Makes Insults Searchable

October 26th, 2011 | Comments Off | Posted in Cool Sites

The YouTube Insult Generator doesn’t really generate insults for you out of thin air. It functions more like a search engine. What it does is look for insults found on Youtube based on the keyword that you’ve entered. It’ll then give you insults you can use against a person who doesn’t like that term.

It finds stuff only about 50% of the time, but it works surprisingly well when it does work. Try general terms (“car”) and pop culture (“michael jordan”, “i love lucy”). Each insult includes a link to its source YouTube video.

How does this work? It uses the YouTube API to search for the top 50 most relevant videos for your search term. For each of those videos, it grabs the latest 50 comments. Then it looks through all that for comments starting with a number followed by a word such as “people,” “youtubers” or “nincompoops.”

Some people may not approve of something like this being created but I for one welcome anything that can be used to improve an existing comments system structure. Besides, where’s the fun is reading comments if not for the “smart” insults?

Tags: Comments, Insult Generator, youtube

Child’s Own Studio Turns Children’s Drawings into Real Custom Toys

October 25th, 2011 | Comments Off | Posted in Cool Sites

Did you ever wish that you could have turned your childhood creations on paper into something real? – Something that you can actually hold? Some might have been lucky enough to hold the drawings that they made when they were a child. Now, you can actually make a child’s drawings into real toy with the help of an awesome company called Child’s Own Studio.

Child’s Own Studio started with a simple project, to make a recognizable comfort toy for a 4 year old boy based on his drawing. It was an idea that launched a home-based craft business. Since then, Child’s Own Studio has custom made over 200 personal softies, each one as unique as the child who drew it.

The details and color choices are reproduced as closely as possible so that the stuffed toy that arrives in the mail is immediately recognizable to the child who designed it. It’s a fun, rewarding process, and kids love seeing their drawings come alive. It’s a great gift of choice for kids who loves to draw and create imaginary characters on paper. The next time you think of a gift for your kids, check out Child’s Own Studio.

Tags: children, Soft Toys, Softies, Toys

A New Life for your Old PCs and Netbooks

October 24th, 2011 | Comments Off | Posted in Tips N Tricks

What do you do with an old laptop or netbook once it cannot handle the software upgrades that seriously make them crawl to their death? If you want to stick with your favorite operating system, then you should upgrade the hardware or buy a new one. Another thing that you can do is install an operating system that takes up little space and requires less RAM and Processor speed to run. If you’re asking where you can find such an OS, then you’re in luck. The guys at Ubuntu made this awesome Ubuntu variant called Lubuntu.

Lubuntu is a desktop project by Ubuntu. The main objective here is to create a lightweight operating system that’s less resource hungry and more energy-efficient. They made this happen by using light weight applications and a lightweight GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Lubuntu is targeted at “normal” PC and laptop users running on low-spec hardware. The minimum system hardware requirement for Lubuntu is a Pentium II or Celeron system with 128 MB of RAM. It’s probably a bottom-line configuration that may yield slow yet usable system with Lubuntu. It should be possible to install and run Lubuntu with less memory, but the result will likely not be suitable for practical use. This simply means that it’ll run great on computers from five years ago. Another great treat is that Lubuntu can be used by those who aren’t really familiar with Linux command line tools.

If you’ve been meaning to try out Linux but don’t have enough resources for full-featured mainstream distributions (distros), try out Lubuntu on your old computer and see how it works out for you. Who knows, you might find a suitable function for your old laptop that’s been lying around since your last upgrade.

Download Lubuntu

Tags: desktop, Laptop, linux, Lubuntu, Netbook, operating system, OS, ubuntu

The Birth of a Real-Life Hoverboard

October 23rd, 2011 | Comments Off | Posted in Technology

Speaking of Back to the Future, the scientists from Paris Diderot University successfully created a real-life working hoverboard. It’s not perfect, yet, but it looks very promising. Watch the video below.