I’m a bit of a drawing geek. I love to scratch away and make messes of people and places. And it’s all become a bit more portably digital. The Nintendo DS is a fantastic little machine, made all the more fantastic by the fact that it comes with a pressure sensitive drawing screen. Usually this is used for games like Zelda where you can use the stylus to move and fight. Instead, I can now hang out in a bar and draw with a palette of thousands of colours. I’m using the HomeBrew solution CycloDSevolution and Colors! freeware. The setup costs about as much as a DS ($120 for a MicroSD card and the Cyclo) but once you have the thing hacked, the DS suddenly becomes incredibly useful beyond gaming. You can play the drawing process as a movie file and e-mail the images via the built in wifi (which strangely generates a bigger image than I pull off the DS itself!)

Colors! And check out the galleries of other users as well.

The bad drawings are of the Rattlesnake Choir.

I have a question: Why is it that when I take the PNG image file directly from the memory card its 128kb and small. But when I e-mail it to myself through the Colors! site, it becomes a 786kb file that’s 200% bigger?