deerstalker

Take these elephant and dinosaur toys from the dollar store and use them to make some fun photo holders to display on your desk, shelf or playroom. Add a dash of whimsy to any room. You’ll be surprised at the way these clever photo holders are constructed, so check out how easy it is to make this dinosaur photo frame craft!

Hi there! Katie here today from Punk Projects! I love using inexpensive items in my crafting. If it involves upcycling, I’m all for it! I took a trip to the Dollar Tree to get some inspiration for today’s post and I found these awesome plastic toys.

Supplies Needed:

Project estimate:

• Toy animals, $1
• Flat magnets, on hand or $1
• Super glue, on hand or $1
• Craft knife or box cutter, on hand

Total:  $1 and up

1. Decide on your animals. I loved the brontosaurus, and the elephant is for a friend.

2. Use a craft knife to cut through the animal. Most plastic animals have a seam where they were put together, cut on that seam and it will be easier. Just don’t cut yourself.

3. Once you have your animal cut in half, trace around him onto a magnet.

4. Cut out 2 magnets for each animal.

5. Go around the cut edge of your animal with super glue and glue your magnet to it.

6. Let it dry completely.

Once your magnets have been glued on and dried, slide a photo in between the animal piece and stand him back up! I love these little dinosaur photo frames!

What do you think? Would you make a dinosaur photo frame craft for yourself, or for a friend?

Pin the Dinosaur Photo Frame Craft:

I’m Katie, a lover of anything artsy. I doodle on everything I can get my hands on, however my favorite projects are scrapbooking, restyled/upcycled crafts and sewing. I write my blog, Punk Projects, where I post tutorials, inspiration and other fun things as well as designing custom shoes in my etsy shop.

You can also find me here on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The post Tutorial: Toy Animal Photo Holders appeared first on Dollar Store Crafts.

ICYMI, today is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. He's a bit of a hero amongst us geeks, having come up with the theory of evolution and all.

Researcher Janelle Shane, whose work with neural networks we’ve covered before, is at it again. This time, she tried to train a neural network to create its own candy heart messages. “I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find,” she explains at her website, “and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data—although its imitation is sometimes imperfect. The candy heart messages it produced … well, you be the judge.”

The results were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mixed. Some of the bot’s suggestions, like “LOVE BUN,” seemed pretty accurate, while others like “YOU ARE BABE” and “FANCY MY HERO” only managed to capture the sentiment of a candy heart. From there, of course, things got weird. From “I HONKER” to “TWEET UP BAT” to “U HACK,” the network’s next tries were decidedly less human-sounding. Still, I have to love the sound of the verb “honker.”

Below are just a few of my favorite selections. You can see the full list over at Shane’s website. As always, tag yourself. (I’m HOGSYEA.)

• AM GOOD
• BEAR WIG
• BOG LOVE
• DEAR ME
• FANCY MY HERO
• HOW U HOT
• I HONKER
• LICK
• LOVE 2000 HOGSYEA
• LOVE BOT
• LOVE BUN
• MY BEAR
• MY MY
• YOU ARE BABE
• PIN A FACE
• STANK LOVE
• TIME HUG
• TIME STAR
• TWEET UP BAT
• U HACK
• WIRLY OOT
• YOU A GOO
• YOU ARE BAG
• YOU ARE BOA

Shane later increased the size of her dataset. For the first batch, she writes, “I could only find about 360 existing messages total. So, when I decided to generate some more messages, I decided to add my favorite neural network-generated messages to the original dataset, increasing the total to almost 500. This is still really small for a neural network, but a noticeable upgrade.”

What did the network do with the enhanced dataset? “The first thing I noticed,” Shane said, “is the definite upswing in the number of messages involving bears.”

• BE MY BEAR
• LOVE BEAR
• LOOK BEAR
• WINK BEAR
• BEAR BEAR
• TIME BEAR

The other new suggestions included the below nonsense phrases, and you can see more in the full second list at Shane’s website.

• OOO
• BEST MANE
• IN A FAN
• MAGE LOVE
• WEAR ME
• SWEET BOG
• OY
• MEAT LOVE
• MY HAG
• LOVE BAG
• SWEET MEAT

Haven’t had enough yet? Shane writes that the neural network also generated some inappropriate suggestions, so you can request to view those via this form.

Shane’s previous neural network experiments include Dungeons & Dragons spells, guinea pig names, and cookbook recipes. If you have any questions about playing around with your own neural networks, she has a great FAQ at her site.

(via NPR and Nerdist; image: Flickr/Frank Guido under CC 2.0)

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Sooooo, bitcoins. Big thing, rapidly losing value, possibly a scam. Also, it seems that Iceland — a whole country, I’ll remind you — might well use more power making Bitcoins in 2018 than […]

The post Iceland Will Use More Power Mining Bitcoin than Powering Homes This Year appeared first on Geek.com.