worldmapper.org is a cool way to compare different aspects of the various countries of the world. They do this by scaling the size of a country by the relative amount they have some property of interest. For example, the first thumbnail is the regular land area of each country. The second thumbnail is scaled to represent the number of new books published in each country. You can quickly see that Europe publishes a huge number of books relative to their relative land area while Africa publishes next to none. They have a large number of such maps, over 300, covering things such as net exports, voter turnout, number of elderly, and much more. I read about this site in Physics Today.

instructables.com: Do you want to super-charge your digital camera? Make crystal-clear ice? Build a Tesla turbine? Make a 25mm pneumatic sniper rifle? (OK, if you want to do this last one, maybe you should contact your local DoHS agent and let them know…) instructables.com has HOWTOs for a large number of esoteric as well as practical projects. It seems most of them don’t require too many supplies, at least not supplies that are overly expensive. And some have videos accompanying them, showing why you would want to do the project. The step-by-step instructions seem simple enough. I’ll be sure to try some of them as soon as I can.