Color

• Kuler: Adobe Labs has released an incredibly useful and well designed color palette creator that beats the rest.
• Contrast checker: evalute contrast between type and background
• Color Scheme Generator 2: My favorite color scheme generation tool for its control and variety of system generation.
• Color Blender: A good, simple color utility, which exports to Illustrator and Photoshop
• Colour Lovers: Color palette generation in a social setting
• Color Palette Creator: Give it a base color, it will give you a color palette
• The Man in Blue: Technicolor: Palette shown in context of a CSS layout
• 4096Color Wheel: A different approach to a color wheel
• Colr.org: Generate color systems from a photo or randomly
• Color Mixers: A staple in color generation systems

Type

• Typetester: Compare web type in various faces, sizes, etc. One of my all time favorites
• Veer: Wonderful selection of fonts
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
• Usable Type
• Identifont: Utility for identifying a font
• Type Navigator: Visual font search system
• Font Explorer: Mac font book application
• Font Agent Pro: OS X font book
• Character Encoding Chart

Photography

• Veer: Wonderful selection of stock photography
• iStock Photo
• Morgue File: Free!
• Stock Xchange
• Stock Vault
• iStock Pro
• Open Photo
• Getty Images
• Index Stock Imagery
• Absolute Vision

Icons

• Icon Buffet: Top notch icons for blogs, CMS, and more
• FamFamFam: A high qaulity, massive library of useful UI icons
• Icons: A good selection of icons
• Sanscons: Selection of icons with standard background color
• Tango Project: Open source icon project. High quality
• Mini Icons: Tiny UI icons
• Feed Icons: Get the standardized icons for RSS feeds
• Icons for Microformats

Testing

• Browser Cam: Amazing! Test your site in all browsers on all platforms at same time!
• iCapture: Test your site in a Safari emulator
• ieCapture: Test your site in an IE emulator
• Screen Size Tester: Test your site at various screen resolutions

Other Useful Things

• Online Tools: An amazing list of site building tools. A must see.
• Cheat Sheets: Reference pages for many web development languages
• Visio Wireframe Stencils: Stencils for drawing quick wireframes
• OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils: Stencils for drawing quick wireframes
• Greeking Machine: Generate Greeked text
• Rasterbator: Rasterizes any photo resulting in an intersting stylization
• Image to ASCII: Convert and image to an ASCII representation
• Vector Logos: Vector representations of many of the world’s top logos
• Logos of the World: Many logos from major companies
• Texture King: Many good textures for background design
• Printable graph paper PDFs

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) U.S. winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics

The world’s highest swing has been set up on an 1,100ft TV tower in China.

The swing is set on a 700ft high viewing platform on the tower in Harbin city, Heilongjiang province.

These are from test papers and essays submitted to science and health teachers by junior high, high school, and college students around the world.

“When you breath, you inspire. When you do not breath, you expire.”

“H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water”

“To collect fumes of sulphur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube”

“When you smell an oderless gas, it is probably carbon monoxide”

“Nitrogen is not found in Ireland because it is not found in a free state”

“Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.”

“Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes and caterpillars.”

“Blood flows down one leg and up the other.”

“Respiration is composed of two acts, first inspiration, and then expectoration.”

“The moon is a planet just like the earth, only it is even deader.”

“Artifical insemination is when the farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.”

“Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.”

“A super-saturated solution is one that holds more than it can hold.”

“Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.”

“The body consists of three parts- the brainium, the borax and the abominable cavity. The brainium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abominable cavity contains the bowls, of which there are five - a, e, i, o, and u.”

“The pistol of a flower is its only protections against insects.”

“The alimentary canal is located in the northern part of Indiana.”

“The skeleton is what is left after the insides have been taken out and the outsides have ben taken off. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch meat to.”

“A permanent set of teeth consists of eight canines, eight cuspids, two molars, and eight cuspidors.”

“The tides are a fight between the Earth and moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water in the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.”

“A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.”

“Many women belive that an alcoholic binge will have no ill effects on the unborn fetus, but that is a large misconception.”

“Equator: A managerie lion running around the Earth through Africa.”

“Germinate: To become a naturalized German.”

“Liter: A nest of young puppies.”

“Magnet: Something you find crawling all over a dead cat.”

“Momentum: What you give a person when they are going away.”

“Planet: A body of Earth surrounded by sky.”

“Rhubarb: A kind of celery gone bloodshot.”

“Vacumm: A large, empty space where the pope lives.”

“Before giving a blood transfusion, find out if the blood is affirmative or negative.”

“To remove dust from the eye, pull the eye down over the nose.”

“For a nosebleed: Put the nose much lower then the body until the heart stops.”

“For drowning: Climb on top of the person and move up and down to make artifical perspiration.”

“For fainting: Rub the person’s chest or, if a lady, rub her arm above the hand instead. Or put the head between the knees of the nearest medical doctor.”

“For dog bite: put the dog away for sevral days. If he has not recovered, then kill it.”

“For asphyxiation: Apply artificial respiration until the patient is dead.”

“To prevent contraception: wear a condominium.”

“For head cold: use an agonizer to spray the nose until it drops in your throat.”

“To keep milk from turning sour: Keep it in the cow.”

Singapore has announced a US$3.2 billion plan to make the city state more intelligent by 2015.:

Singapore has unveiled a 10-year, $3.2 billion Master Plan, titled Singapore Intelligent Nation iN2015, which seeks to integrate all the modern and Next Generation wireless and other infocomm technologies in every aspect of economy and social systems to retain its global competitiveness.
The iN2015 Plan, unveiled by Singapore’s Minister for Information, Communication and Arts, Dr Lee Boon Yong, during the launch of the annual imbX 2006 infocomm show here, is yet another manifestation of the government’s ability to strategize to catch the next wave of innovation and application to maintain its status as a global city.

Upon reading this I immediately felt a bit queasy. While AP feels that such developments should be led by the private sector rather than the state, that wasn’t the initial source of displeasure. No, I was bothered by the name given to the plan.

I won’t comment on whether this plan will likely make Singapore more intelligent, but is does immediately make the island seem dreadfully uncreative. The choice of iN2015 again illustrates the country’s terrible habit of adopting trendy branding that is already cliched and will only become even more dated. This is a problem that plagues both the state and private-sectors.

This would ordinarily not provoke a rant but I was further reminded of this unfortunate habit when he saw the below display today in a Shanghai shopping center. Witness the marketing genius of Singapore health-care product maker Osim.:

iSqueez massage boots? The uZap slimming belt? Even worse are some of the products on the Osim website: the iPamper massager, iCheck5000 blood pressure monitor and the iTango body toner. Would anyone in the market for a foot massager really spend S$700 on an iPoke?

Indo-Japanese joint venture Hero-Honda has launched a new ‘women-only’ scooter named The Pleasure. Like Neelakantan at Interim Thoughts, AsiaPundit also wonders, does this bike have any features that would appeal to women - the name indicates some possibilities.:

Hero Honda is not really known for innovation as much as sitting on its laurels. With the base of its bread and butter models the stage was set for the company to do something spectacular. Both Bajaj and TVS have done so on their own right, but HH to me, is a fuddy duddy. The launch of Pleasure does nothing to change this perception. Note that I write this without riding Pleasure. Whats the big idea in marketing a scooter to women? Especially when there is nothing “different” about it? The variomatic segment has a solid performer in Activa, stylish Dio, good looking Nova, youthful Scooty and now a women only Pleasure?

I think Pleasure has got its strategy wrong. By saying women (and only women), they are losing a good part of the market. Now, no young college lad will ever buy it (they do buy variomatics, it is not only women who drive variomatics). I am not saying marketing to women is wrong, but I would go the Scooty way with a Preity Zinta, subtle yet leaving the positioning as “youth”. Scooty does have some smart features too. Why will a girl buy Pleasure? Whats the compelling feature in it? There are many things that can be designed to appeal to women in a bike like this, but this is just hollow marketing.

Via the Acorn, a look at the way the Subcontinent’s nationalist sentiments play out in real time.:

Officially it was to save daylight. But the standardisation of time is just another way in which the countries of the subcontinent seek to assert their distinct national identities. Start with India, which in a style befitting the character of its polity, centralises its reference meridien by splitting the differences, ending up five and a half-hours ahead of UTC. That makes it inconvenient for many people, not least the makers and users of traditional world-time clocks and watches: Karachi and Dhaka are marked out as they are conveniently a whole number of hours ahead of UTC. That’s changing now with the proliferation of palmtop computers and mobile phones that can put up with Indian idiosyncracies much better.

Given its position almost bisecting India’s east-west expanse, it was natural for Sri Lanka and India to adopt the same standard time. But in 1986, Sri Lanka decided to move the clock forward one hour ahead and then, on second thoughts, back half-an-hour to, well, save daylight. But the Tamil Tigers cried foul, and refused to tweak their watches. The politics of standard time kicked in, as the difference no doubt helped set their own ‘nation’ apart. The Sri Lankan government finally gave in and has decided to set the clock back again, to five and half-hours ahead of UTC. Astrologers, airlines and Microsoft Windows users are among those who need to make necessary adjustments.