It’s Envato’s seventh birthday and, to celebrate, we’ve created another fantastic Birthday Bundle! With $500 worth of items available for just $20, it’s worth getting excited about. Consider it our way of saying a huge thank you to all the authors and buyers who have been part of our journey over the past year!

The Birthday Bundle is Now on Sale

In the bundle, you’ll find over $500 worth of items compiled from across our marketplaces — all for $20! All the items in this bundle have been carefully chosen to represent the newest and fastest-moving categories of the past year, as acknowledgement of all our authors and buyers who have helped us grow over the last seven years.

Take a look at what’s included, and grab your copy. Be quick — the bundle ends at noon on the 3rd of September AEST!

Due to the exclusive nature of the Birthday Bundle, the Bundle items are purchased ‘as-is’, meaning no Bundle files are eligible for item support.

This Birthday Bundle will run from the 20th of August at 12pm AEST and ends at 12pm AEST on the 3rd of September. Buy now!

We’re Celebrating With a Free Course!

At Tuts+, we’re celebrating our 7th birthday with another free Tuts+ Course: jQuery UI 101: The Essentials.

Did you know that the jQuery team is responsible for far more just the library that we all know and love? One such example is their highly tested UI framework for rapidly generating everything from calendars, to sliders: jQuery UI.

In this course, Dan Wellman, a well-known author and front-end engineer at Skype, will review every single widget in jQuery UI. You’ll learn the APIs, how they function, and dive into common implementations. Watch it for free now!

Thanks for being part of the Envato community, and we hope to celebrate many more birthdays in the future with you.

Federal Work-Study (FWS)

A growing body of research shows how to use cloud storage synchronization services to get around firewalls.

Dropbox and similar services have exploded in popularity in recent years because users find it so convenient to simply drag files to an icon that puts that data in the cloud, shares it with others, and automatically syncs new versions across multiple devices.

Personal projects allow us the freedom to work on whatever we want, to experiment or to try something new. With no client demands and no set deadlines, the direction and final outcome is entirely down to you. In essence, personal projects give you the opportunity to do exactly the sort of work that you want to be doing. It can even lead to opportunities to do that sort of work on a professional level.

The tools available today make it easier than ever to share work online and thanks to social media your project could potentially reach thousands if not millions of people. The wonderful thing about that is that you just don’t know who will see it, whether it’s the Creative Director at an agency or the Founder of a start-up, and there’s no telling what opportunities could arise from it.

The stories below are prime examples of what can happen when you share your personal projects online:

James White’s experimental illustrations

After spending a year trying to break into the world of movie poster design, James White of Signalnoise was feeling frustrated. His latest project had been squashed at the last minute, which understandably put him in a bit of a funk. James worked his way out of it by experimenting with new illustration techniques and working on a series of self-initiated illustrations, which he shared via Instagram and Twitter. Amidst all of this he got a call from Canon Canada who hired him to develop a series of camera illustrations in celebration of their 40th anniversary.

Fred Nerby’s redesign of Facebook

Fred Nerby, a designer based in Brisbane, Australia, published an unsolicited redesign of Facebook on his Behance account at the beginning of this year and it become a huge hit. The project went viral and was featured by a number of very popular blogs and online magazines. On Behance alone the project has been viewed over 370,000 times. The success of Fred’s redesign lead to job offers from a number of companies, including Facebook themselves.

Ji Lee’s ‘The Bubble Project’

Troubled by the fact that once “public” places are being seized by corporations to post ads and propagate their messages, designer Ji Lee wanted to transform these annoying corporate monologues into open public dialogues. He did this by producing 30,000 stickers in the shape of speech bubbles and placing them on top of ads, inviting the public to write something on them — a project that would later be known as ‘The Bubble Project’. The project initially began to grow slowly but once it had been featured on boingboing.net, views of the project jumped from around 100 to over 50,000. A number of agencies keen to capture the imagination in the same way that Ji Lee had with ‘The Bubble Project’ then asked him whether he would consider freelancing for them.

These are just some examples of personal projects leading to professional opportunities, demonstrating the power of personal projects in the digital age. If you lack experience in certain areas, not only can you use personal projects to hone your skills but you can also use them to demonstrate what you can really do — you don’t need to wait around for a client to hire you to show off your sklls.

If you’re ever short on client projects, don’t just try and repeatedly sell your portfolio. Work on something new and put it out there, you never know what might come of it.

Have you worked on any personal projects recently? What was the response like? Let us know in the comments.

Professional and Beautiful PowerPoint & Keynote Presentations – 50% off!

Patricia Sawamura, graduate student in Physics, successfully defended her dissertation entitled "Retrieval of Optical and Microphysical Properties of Aerosols from a Hybrid Lidar Dataset".   Patricia's work is also being submitted to Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.  Lidar data from the DISCOVER-AQ experiment in Baltimore and Washington DC in 2011 provided a unique opportunity to that point to attempt a retrieval of the complex index of refraction, size, number and volume distribution, and single scatter albedo of an urban aerosol, in profiles.  While these parameters are retrieved from a multiwavelength inversion of AERONET sunphotometer data, the results are an average of an entire column of aerosol.   Using three lidar wavelengths from neodymium YAG lasers, the backscatter at the three wavelengths and the extinction at 355 and 532 nanometers is sufficient to attempt such a microphysical retrieval of these aerosol properties in confined layers above the surface.  This gives the opportunity to discern different aerosol properties of aerosols which may come from different sources.   To date, such an inversion has only been attempted with Raman Lidars (mostly in Europe) and all at night.   This is the first attempt to do a daytime retrieval where the results could be compared with AERONET.

Using the NASA Langley High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) for two of the wavelengths and the UMBC ground based lidars for 355nm and a 532nm confirmation of assumptions, Patricia retrieved properties of aerosols for 13 case studies during the DISCOVER-AQ experiment.  Her results were in agreement with AERONET for most of the cases, except where the aerosol was overlying smoke or depolarizing as in dust.  She also compared her results with profiles from the NASA P3-B aircraft sampling which was done in spirals near UMBC.

The techniques she used in her thesis are now part of the instrument processing suite for the NASA Langley HSRL system and Patricia has been offered a NASA Post-Doctoral Program fellowship to continue her research at Hampton Virginia.   Patricia is a native of Brazil and did her undergraduate studies with Eduardo Landulfo of the University of Sao Paolo.  Her mentor at UMBC was Ray Hoff.