my thoughts

Choosing the colour palette for a web page can sometimes be a difficult task. Here is a useful tool which can simplify the process.
www.themaninblue.com/experiment/Technicolor/

MoCoLoco is a journal of modern contemporary design & architecture, check out this more intelligent smoke detector, for example: mocoloco.com/archives/000258.php or this "pixellated" carpet, made of interlocking tiles: mocoloco.com/archives/000261.php#more
mocoloco.com/

I've recently been looking at whether it is possible to be more ecologically conscious with a car. Obviously the simplest solution is to use the car less: walk, use the bike or (heaven forbid) public transport. Another simple thing is to share a car (carpooling). Here are a few options for more environmentally aware drivers:

Use less fuel by driving more efficiently. Less fuel used means less exhaust:
www.whatprice.co.uk/tips/fuel-efficiency.html
www.shropshireonline.gov.uk/travelwise.nsf

Hybrid electric-petrol vehicles offer much higher fuel efficiency and therefore lower emissions through electrically assisted acceleration. The Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic (Saloon) are fairly normal cars that offer this. Honda also offer a very unusual car, the Insight, which gets something like 700 miles per gallon! It just looks strange
www.toyota.co.uk/
www.honda.co.uk/

LPG produces a lower volume of harmful emissions than petrol or diesel, and many cars are available pre-converted. It also seems readily available throughout the UK. It is also possible to buy smaller dual-fuel cars now, such as the Nissan Micra or the Vauxhall Corsa.

Grants are presently available for converting to cleaner fuels (LPG, Natural Gas, Electric & Hybrid, Fuel Cells & Biofuels) for your vehicle from the PowerShift scheme. The powershift scheme have an excellent & useful website:
www.powershift.org.uk/

Fuel cells are exciting, but a long way off. Apparently DaimlerChrysler, Ford and Ballard aim to make fuel cell cars commercially available by 2004. See the "New Electric Car (Necar)" project for more information.
www.automotive-technology.com/projects/necar4/

Finally: why do all-electric cars have to look so ugly? Rhetorical question. The most normal looking vehicle is the Think City which was recently produced in partnership with Ford (although this relationship has ceased).
www.thinkcar.com/
www.drivelectric.com/

If you look for long enough, you can find shapes in the most unexpected of places, even the London tube map. Animals on the underground is the result of someone staring at the tube map for too long. Very impressive results!
www.animalsontheunderground.com/

This short article: Wear your ethics with pride offers a summary of the real issues around the clothing industry. The author points out that we as consumers lack the information required to make an ethical purchase.
www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1153724,00.html

The Ethical Trading Initiative brings together companies, trade unions and NGOs. It is possible to see which retailers are on board and which are not.
www.eti.org.uk/

One way to speed up access to your data is to buy another drive and set up a RAID, if your motherboard supports it. I have one 36Gb Western Digital Raptor drive which is pretty fast anyway, but it is possible to add another in RAID 0 configuration (where data is "striped" across the disks) to obtain higher performance. RAID 0 gives the full capacity of both drives, at double the transfer rate, accessed as though they were a single volume.
www.wdc.com/en/products/WD360GD.asp

All about RAID
www.computing.co.uk/Features/1144195

Updated:
Obviously RAID-0 (two drives sharing the data with no redundancy) will halve the mean time to failure... I should have mentioned that Additionally, while synthetic benchmarks and theoretical models show significant performance gains it is quite a different story when tested in a real environment. Here's what Anandtech.com have to say about it:

"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."
www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

Prevent offsite direct linking to images in Apache (to conserve bandwidth):
www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/000988.php

The box model hack - the authoritative source:
tantek.com/CSS/Examples/boxmodelhack.html

More soon...

Here are some monospaced (fixed-width) bitmap programming fonts which have been optimised for code. I've been using the "ProggyClean" font for a few days now, mostly for PHP & HTML editing, plus some unix console work. It seems to be far clearer than any of the usual fonts used for displaying code. It is available for Windows and X as .fon and .pcf files.
www.tactile3d.com/tristan/

BrowserCam is an interesting service for web developers which allows you to see your website on most of the web browsers and operating systems currently in use. (Even the old ones). You can submit a URL and look at screenshots of it rendered on the various platforms. It might even work out cheaper than using Virtual PC or buying a mac for testing .
www.browsercam.com

Play Space Invaders, Pac Man, Tetris, Tic Tac Toe and loads more online. Cool. I do like the way the mouse distorts the page border!
www.neave.com/games/