Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

Meet Michelle Khine, uber-geek and uber-geek-on-the-cheap. She’s one of this year’s “TR35” — MIT’s list of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. Why does MIT think she’s so clever? She figured out a way to make microfluidic chips using Shrinky Dinks.

What? Okay, in case you didn’t know, making a microfluidic device, or lab-on-a-chip, is dearly expensive because the equipment costs upwards of $100,000. Khine didn’t have an extra hundred thou laying around the lab and she was too impatient to wait for the next grant to materialize, so she improvised.

Shrinky Dinks are “space-age” sheets of plastic that shrink to one-third their original size and nine times their thickness. You might have used them as a kid to make all sorts of doo-dads from ornaments to pins to place cards. They were invented by a Wisconsin housewife and, according to the video on their website, Shrinky Dinks are enjoying quite the renaissance.

So for all you lab-less and grant-less inventors and innovators out there, don’t be discouraged. As the Shrinky Dinks video says, the things you can make are limited only by your imagination.

Michelle Khine has one helluva imagination.

Imagine taking a great photo on vacation and turning that photo into a postcard. Okay, you say, no problem — I can do that from home. But what about doing it while you’re still on vacation? What about doing it directly from your cell phone?

A new app, shoot it!, allows you to upload a photo from your phone and send it as a postcard. The downside? The app is only available for the iPhone (and iPod Touch even though, cruelly, you can’t take a photo with the Touch) and for the new BlackBerry Curve 8900, Bold and Tour. According to shoot it!, they’re working hard on expanding this list. Prices begin at $0.99 within the U.S. and rise to $1.49 to send to Western Europe. And if you’re an iPhone/Touch user, you’ll have to pay an initial additional $0.99 to buy the app from the Apple store.

Alternatively, if you don’t have a smartphone, which I don’t, you can do all this online through the U.S. Post Office at Premium Postcard. Who knew? Probably all those direct mailers, but not me. I visited my grandmother last weekend and used this service today to send her a postcard with a picture from our visit. It cost $1.25 and I know she’ll love it.

And for you letter writers, there’s Snailmailr. It costs $1 for 1-4 pages ($0.10 for each additional page) and you can include photos. They print on recycled paper and further reduce the carbon footprint of printed mail by investing in TerraPass carbon offset credits. But it’s the photo printing that charges me up. I have a decent-for-text printer that I got free with my computer, but I can’t print photos on it.

However, even the photo-printing argument didn’t convince my mother. “It must be your generation,” she said when I told her about Snailmailr. “How hard is it to put a letter in an envelope and stick on a stamp?” I had to laugh at how right she was.

Did you take a ton of pictures over Labor Day Weekend? Want to make a slideshow with a few bells and whistles? Go to Slide, a free slideshow maker with all sorts of options — music, themes, effects. You can even import your photos directly from Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and more. My favorite design is Drive In, where it looks as though the photo is flickering on a screen, sort of. Slide is quick and easy to use, and the results are decent.

But if you want a step up from a slideshow, check out Animoto. The free version (it requires you to create an account), allows you to make a short video — as opposed to a slideshow — by using photos. They’ve also just added the option of including your own video clip. So let’s say you have a dozen photos and a short video clip from your vacation, you can upload them to Animoto, add music, a title, and presto! you’ve got a video. (And I’ve been killing myself learning Flash.)

So take a few minutes and organize your glorious pics and vids into a little story. Your friends and family will love it.