http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/C11N4qv9AR0/story01.htm

http://boingboing.net/?p=221643

Last week, we put up a post asking BB readers to tell us (and each other) about their projects. You-all upvoted your favorites, and herewith presented is a list of some of the coolest things you're up to (there's plenty that didn't make the cut but still fascinate -- have a look).

There's so much awesome here that I'm going to split this into a morning and evening post. Come back at 5PM Pacific to see the second half (or go read the totally awesome thread for yourself).

First up, Josh Zisson wrote:

I've made "the safest bike on the road." It's painted with a patented retroreflective coating, so the entire bike is reflective at night. When headlights hit it, it glows bright white. Check it out on my website. We're currently working with manufacturers to make this coating available on commuter bikes (and much more).

Next, Alison Jardine told us about her paintings:

I am using traditional oil-on-canvas techniques to render digitally distorted and filtered images of nature. Trees with pixel leaves, forests in infrared, pixel snowstorms across fractal branches...

I sometimes think of my process of creating art as scavenging from nature, a kind of ‘found art’ but where the object found is visual. I begin with a photograph that I take on my digital camera, and manipulate that image (now just a collection of pixels, after all) until I have a work on which I can base an oil painting.

When this painting is completed, I take a photograph of the painting, and digitally alter and manipulate it until, by both chance and planning, I create an image that will form the basis of the next painting. This feedback loop continues towards a gradual, entropic dispersal of color and light.

Here's lava, an architect, describing a catalog of modernist styles:

I'm an architect, and I've created a catalog of house designs in a modern style so that people who love modern design would have a source for plans to build modern houses.

I did this because I found that the majority of builder's in the US did not offer any modern designs, and that house plan catalogs rarely offered modern designs, and if they did it was something left over from years ago. And so people who liked modern design had no choice. They would either have to hire an architect at significant expense, or settle for an old fashioned looking house.

So although the diversity of taste for modern design is too broad for me to cover everything, people now have at least some basic and affordable options to take to a builder, and finally get the modern house they always dreamed of. My catalog page is here:

Grant Hamilton is trying to create a co-op brewpub in a derelict firehall:

The building was used continuously for 100 years as a firehall — from horse-drawn days to modern ladder and pumper trucks. Now the firefighters have moved on to a new building, and I'm trying to give the old one a fresh lease on life.

It'll be the first brewpub in the province of Manitoba, and one of the few co-op brewpubs on the continent. We are trying to arrange the financing Kickstarter style, with different rewards at different membership levels.

The site's a little out of date as we are knee- (neck?) deep in crunching numbers for an official submission to the city, which currently owns the building, but check it out at http://www.brewtinerie.ca/.