Last win­ter, I saw a post by Twit­ter come­dian and voiceover per­former Scott Fletcher jok­ing about how awe­some a knuckle tat­too gen­er­a­tor would be. You know what I mean by knuckle tat­toos, right? Pic­ture the clas­sic love hate tat­toos, each let­ter on a dif­fer­ent knuckle.

Scott’s throw­away tweet made me chuckle. Pick two ran­dom four let­ter word, and tat­too them onto a pair of fists. Hilar­ity is bound to ensue. Well, I found myself bored one evening a few weeks ago and fig­ured I’d spent a cou­ple of hours cook­ing up just such a gen­er­a­tor. It didn’t take too long—the recipe was simple.

1. Crack out some basic PHP, and whisk together a quick script.
2. Add one lov­ingly pho­to­shopped image.
3. Layer the base with a suit­able open source font from The League of Move­able Type.
4. Add a dash of HTML struc­ture and CSS posi­tion­ing to hold the mix­ture firm.
5. Gen­tly fold a 2,000 word list into the mix­ture. Do this grad­u­ally, painstak­ingly refin­ing the list as you go to ensure it con­tains only the fun­ni­est four let­ter words.
6. Bake at 180°C for 2 hours, and allow to cool.

Voilà! You now have your very own knuckle tat­too gen­er­a­tor—I call mine Fist­bump.

If you fancy wast­ing a few min­utes, check it out and let me know what you think. Refresh the page or click the Ran­dom­ize link to get a new word combo, or use the Perma­link option to save your favourite phrase.

Of course, all credit for the idea goes to @MrScottFletcher.

Some of you may remem­ber (or may even have used!) my free tele­phone num­ber (and area code) to time­zone con­verter, Sun­dial. It’s a quick tool I threw together to solve a very par­tic­u­lar prob­lem: I make a lot of inter­na­tional calls at work to US clients and prospects and I want to con­vert tele­phone num­bers to time­zones quickly and easily.

Sun­dial was a very sim­ple web­ser­vice using a hacky Python script and a few CSVs. It did the job… and that was that. It had a fair num­ber of defects such as miss­ing DST sup­port and a clut­tered home­page, and I decided a few weeks ago that it was about time I addressed these issues.

I took the oppor­tu­nity to brush up on my Java, and I re-implemented the entire thing from scratch over the course of a cou­ple of evenings using Java servlets, JSON and the Google App Engine. (By the way, the App Engine is an excel­lent free plat­form for small tools and pro­to­types — check it out.)

As before, you can use dialti.me in a few dif­fer­ent ways. The sim­plest is to visit the dialti.me web­site and enter a US tele­phone num­ber that you would like to lookup. For­mat is unimportant—the num­ber will be extracted as nec­es­sary. And as before, the alter­na­tive way in which one can use dialti.me is to nav­i­gate directly to http://app.dialti.me/Mobile: (651) 342.2323 or sim­i­lar. It works well with Fire­fox key­words or as a Chrome cus­tom search engine, too.

Unlike Sun­dial, dialti.me might actu­ally see some fur­ther devel­op­ment such as sup­port for inter­na­tional num­bers. I’d love to hear any sug­ges­tions you might have, or feed­back on the design. Let me know how you get on in the com­ments, or drop me an email.