Spamitect

Junk emails are rendered into art. Reminds me of that time some guy glued AOL CD's to a car. Of course, then he smashed the car to bits, but still, spam meets art. Great idea.

Color Me Beautiful

I'm hepped up on Hex coloring at the moment. I petitioned the all-knowing web world for a guide, a key, something to lead me to a knowledgeable place of understanding to just what those little FF's and #OO's meant. My hexly prayers were answered. Here is how my friend Ian describes the complexity that is Hexidecimal Color Display:

The general principle is that the six digits are in fact three hex values (as a pair, each), first a red pair, then a green pair, then a blue pair. The pair is because it's base sixteen - so the leftmost digit of a pair is the 'units' and the rightmost digit of each pair is the 'tens' - except it's not tens, it's sixteens, because it's hexadecimal, not decimal. Next thing to remember is that it's an additive light source, not subtractive, so unlike mixing paint or ink, where the more stuff you put in, the darker it gets (because ink or paint acts as a filter in front of the paper, causing selective filtering and the paper reflects back what's left over), with a video colour display, the more 'stuff' you tell it to display, the brighter of that colour it'll give you. Greater of all three colours together will veer towards white, lesser of all three goes towards black, so that FFFFFF is white, (ie, FF of red, FF of green, and FF of blue = white) and 000000 is black.(remember, FF is hex, and if it were decimal, it'd be 255, which is the most amount of bits you can cram into a byte, which is where the limits at each end of the scale come from - the '#' is often used to indicate hex).After a while, you can take a rough stab at numbers being more or less what colour you think it might end up being. Mid grey is 7F7F7F ('cos 7F is the halfway mark between 00 and FF, in the same way that 128 is between 0 and 255). So, 7F (oh, let's round it up to 80), 00, 00 is half-bright red, no brightness of green, no brightness of blue. Sort of a blood red. Push the red value up a bit, to 90, 00, 00, or even beyond into A00000, the red becomes brighter. Full red is FF0000, but if you want to go even lighter, say, pinky colours, you add white. How? By putting some of the other colours in equally - so that FFC0C0 would be full red, about three quarters(!) brightness of green and blue respectively. Less saturated red, but still far more red than either of blue or green for them to influence the colour in those directions. After a while, you get the knack.

Additional links of colorly funness provided by Steve DeGroof:

HTML color picker
Color scheme Generator (very fun!)
and a HEX converter