It's the default gift for nearly every occasion: the iPod. If you aren't buying one for someone for the holiday this year, you probably bought one last year. Or you bought one for Mother's or Father's Day, or someone's graduation, or for your dad on his 60th birthday, since he finally figured out how to rip his Elvis CD's. You can have them engraved, of course, but how else to personalize something that everyone has? That some of us have more than one of, even?
iPapercraft is a free online tool that allows you to upload an image and have it formatted to fit the iPod model of your choice, then have it generated as a .pdf that you can print out. Cut along the lines and fold it around your player, and you have a gift that's just a little more personal.
Playing around with it, I quickly discovered that image is everything--or image choice, in this case. A family photo resulted in a cover that would have decapitated us all had I taken the Exacto knife to it, but more artsy shots (sunsets, ocean waves) proved very adaptable to the form, and a picture of my husband's beloved vintage car was even better. But when you generate a cover using a scan or digital photo of your childrens' artwork, then you've got something worthy of a grandparent. And then you can explain to Mom exactly why it is, again, that she's going to love this iPod so much ("but Ma, we've already loaded it with Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits! And look: a picture of you that the baby drew, with a giant head!").
(via Boing Boing. Photo credit Ryan Stewart)
