These Websites Are Sure To Turn Your Frown Upside-Down!
Lets face it – Life is hard. Between all the deadlines and presentations, meetings, shopping and pet walking, we rarely find some time for fun. While some people might prefer weekend getaways and others might go out and party, for those who find themselves stuck at home things might get a little depressing. But worry not, my home bound comrades – we have the perfect solution for you and it does not involve some elaborate setup to work. All you need is your laptop and some time to kill. Before that, let me promise that after you’ve been through these ideas, you will definitely be cheered up and ready to tackle the rigors of work and family with a beautiful smile and a spring in your step.
Inspirograph – Gears of Art
An enchanting website, created by US based software developer Nathan Friend – is actually based on the concept of rotating gears. Means? The site allows you to create truly incredible images in the blink of an eye, while also causing you to marvel the paradoxical simplicity of complex gear systems. Out of seemingly complicated and mechanical components emerge fascinating images and patterns that will keep you engrossed for hours.
As soon as you arrive on the web page, things might appear to be a little overwhelming, but fear not – it will take you less than five minutes to figure out how it works. A drawing page at the center displays two inter-connected gears – this is going to be your playing field. The left panel features two columns – one reading ‘Fixed’ and the other ‘Rotating’ which is quite self explanatory. Under these headings are a myriad number of gears, sorted in ascending order based on the number of teeth they have. Here, you can tinker endlessly and try out different combinations of gears to see what image you get – the permutations are infinite. From the right panel, you can choose the color of your pen and the background color. Also on the right, there are a number of buttons to help you save, share and download, erase, show/hide the gears and more.
After selecting the gear system and pen color, the actual fun starts. On the rotating gear, you will see a number of holes in a spiral pattern. Click on any one and then drag and move the gear to see your pen trace the path of the hole. Slowly you will see a beautiful pattern emerge and I can assure, it is going to be a delightful exercise. Below you can see one of my efforts on the Inspirograph.
Crumbles – Say What You Need To Say
Crumbles is straight up goofy and hilarious – lets you create rip-roaring GIFs when a maximum of twenty five words typed in a dialog box and then creates a GIF by using snatches of dialogues from famous Hollywood movies. It has limited dictionary, but it’s certainly comprehensive. There is a special Homer Simpson dictionary that features all character from ‘The Simpsons’. You can either get a link to your goofy GIF or simply tweet to share with your friends. Mindless? Yes. Hilarious? Most definitely!
Twenty Questions – Who You Talkin’ To?
A virtual version of the classic parlor game, Twenty Questions actually pits you against a neural network system – in other words, an artificially intelligent computer. So how does a computer read your mind? Once you’ve decided on a particular object, the computer will ask you a series of questions pertaining to that object and surprisingly, it does guess correctly quite often. The AI system constantly improves its performance by learning from its mistakes which means that every time you play a game, the computer gets smarter and more adept at reading your mind. Prepare to be spookily entertained by this amazing website.
So, there’s our list! If that doesn’t cheer you up, then I guess you should go on a holiday.