Granted, someone will need to die before you can purchase this gift, however if you’re willing to wait than you too could brighten someone’s day with this pencil box full of pencils made out of human carbon. You also get the deceased’s name printed on the side of each pencil as you can see from the screenshot.

This is the brainchild of Nadine Jarvis who likes to create death inspired design work, or ‘work in post mortem’ if you prefer.

That’s not all though, you don’t just use these pencils until their gone, the box is designed so just one pencil can be removed at a time and are sharpened back into the box so it becomes an urn for the remains.

If you would like to be useful even after dying than perhaps this is the way to go.

TKexe is such a software that walks the user right through the process of creating a custom calendar. The user has the choice between four different types of calendars: Monthly calendars, Birthday calendars, Yearly calendars or Weekly calendars. The Monthly , Yearly and Weekly calendars differ only in the amount of paper sheets and photos while the Birthday calendar does not show day names and years obviously.

After selecting the type of calendar you have to select if you want to print the calendar locally or by using a print store instead. After that you select the period of the calendar. Instead of creating a calendar with 12 months you could create a 24 or 36 months calendar.

Finally, after configuring those settings you are asked to choose a template from ten for your custom calendar. The selected template will then be loaded and you are free to edit the images, add custom text below the image and add text to each day as well.

It is possible to change the font, text size and increase or decrease any element on the page. Everything is customizable making this the ideal software if you want to create a custom calendar.

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TKexe

I’m going to write about three computer programs / scripts that are going to help you create a great Christmas gift. I think that those methods work best for presents for people that you really care about: close relatives, partners and children for example. All you need besides those programs is some time, a printer and a picture or video of something that the recipient likes. Let us start..

• Create a Poster from an Image

You only need a picture that would make a great poster. Download PosteRazor and run it. Select the picture on your computer, specify the output size and a pdf file will be created that contains a number of pages that are the poster. Print those pages and you have a great personal gift. Use large images for best results. Available for Windows, Mac and as source code.

• Create huge rasterized images from any picture

PosteRazor is cute but has limitations. If you want huge, and I mean huge, outputs that can decorate a wall in complete width you need to use the online script Rasterbator. The output looks really incredible, please note that it is up to you if you want to define borders in the final picture. You may also download an offline version which does not have the size and resolution limitations of the online script.

• Create a Flipbook

Flipbooks are great gifts especially for children (and women). All you need is Flipbook Printer created by my friend mouser from donationcoder. You obviously need a movie for this to work. Just load the movie, define start and end and let the program do the rest. All that is left to do is to print the results and join the results together.

I would love to hear about your ideas and other programs or scripts that do something similar. So, if you know something please let me know.

Once you have uploaded an image to the online script you may crop it and select the output size of the rasterized image by simply moving a slider into the exact position you want it to be. An information will tell you how many sheets of paper you need for the size that you have selected. Once you are satisfied with the size you may further customize the results by adding a border to it, selecting the dot size and selecting whether you would like a black and white image, a custom color image or a multi color image.

Once that is done you are set to go. The image will be processed and a pdf file will be created. Make sure you follow the directions of the developer when you print the pdf:

When printing the image with Adobe Reader, choose Page scaling: Fit to Printer Margins at the options window that comes up (Fit to Paper in older versions). If you chose horizontal paper alignment, also make sure Auto-Rotate and Center is selected. Most printers cannot print to the margins of the paper – these settings ensure that all the images will be completely printed. 

Thanks to Hans for this nice tip.