my thoughts

James Wilson has written a very handy lorem ipsum generator. You get good random pseudo-latin out and there's even some background on why we started using lorem ipsum in the first place.
lipsum.com/

I thought I'd check out some health websites given the recent news coverage about the rise in obesity in the UK.

The NHS have a section on healthy living which covers the basics:
Eating for health: www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/innerpage.asp?Area=37
Getting active: www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/innerpage.asp?Area=40

I'm doing my bit by eating plenty more fruit & vegetables (5 a day), fewer biscuits and by getting out on my bike more often. Cycling to work is a good thing, although my Southampton to Winchester commute is a 21 mile round trip!

The BBC's health section is very useful and covers a large range of topics in an accessible manner:
www.bbc.co.uk/health/

The BBC health section includes an easy to use Body Mass Index calculator, and perhaps more worryingly, a "life expectancy calculator" which asks you questions on topics shown to have associated health risks. Whether or not it is accurate is irrelevant as it prompts you to consider aspects of your lifestyle that could be improved! I am not sure from where they pluck the life expectancy figure though, it must be quite qualitative. These calculators are both available in a section called "cool tools":
www.bbc.co.uk/health/mens/cooltools.shtml

Slashdot reports that a group in New Zealand have made a parabolic reflector to boost 802.11 wifi signals by 17db. The interesting part is that they've got a line of sight range of 3-5km for around US $5 by using a cheap usb wifi adaptor and chinese cookery utensils (woks, mesh scoops etc..)!
Original site: www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Mirror: www.stanford.edu/~jstockdl/tmp/usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Slashdot story: slashdot.org/articles/04/05/25/229245.shtml?tid=137&tid=193&tid=215

The "Artchive" has a comprehensive gallery of paintings and illustrations, complete with summary texts about the artist. Significant works are available for download, which is why I now have Lucian Freud's "Two Plants" on my desktop.
artchive.com/ftp_site.htm

Two Plants, Lucian Freud:
www.artchive.com/artchive/F/freud/freud_plants.jpg.html

welie.com has compiled a useful resource which describes common situations in user experience design for the web, gui and mobile application. The examples are helpfully categorized and visually accessible. Worth a look.
» www.welie.com/patterns/

It is vaguely reminiscent of this handy reference site: user interface design patterns: (Now updated to match the O'Reilly book)
» designinginterfaces.com

Findability is another goal of Information Architecture, along with usability, accessibility, credibility and desirability. Usability and accessibility are two topics that have been particularly popular lately, but is good to see others promoting findability:
» www.findability.org

What you really want is faster PHP, and this very comprehensive article covers most of what you need to know to give your PHP websites a boost!
phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php

"It all began innocently enough when a user on a Mac help forum posted a picture of his cat, Frankie, contemplating the beauty of a flower. Shortly afterwards another user posted a picture of his cat, Sammy, bristling at the picture of the cat on the monitor." Mike Stanfill at privatehand.com decided this was too much fun and advanced the concept as The Infinite Cat Project....

He will be happy to post a picture of YOUR cat as long as it is shown looking at a monitor which bears the image of the LAST picture in this sequence."
www.privatehand.com/infinite/

Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,... (Update: the site has moved to a new location):
www.infinitecat.com/

Stat here:
www.infinitecat.com/infinite/cat1.html

"Do try this at home" is a concise article which describes 16 ways to save energy in the kitchen and to promote environmentally conscious buying & disposal of kitchen appliances. Top stuff!
www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1215343,00.html

Once you've read that, you may want to read about Leo Hickman's ethical kitchen makeover: in which a typical family kitchen is checked out by ethical auditors who also offer practical tips on how to sort out your kitchen!
www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1215342,00.html

The guardian have a section on ethical living:
money.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving

One of the security features present in later versions of Microsoft Outlook is the automatic blocking of certain attachment filetypes (.reg; .exe; etc.) such that when an e-mail message with one of these types is received, you will not be able to open or extract it from the message. You will see "Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments" in place of the offending file(s). So how do you get at the attachment, assuming that it is safe?

It is possible to manage the list of restricted filetypes yourself by changing a value in the registry. The following page explains how to do it in a simple manner:
www.slipstick.com/outlook/esecup/getexe.htm

Browser News from upsdell.com provide a summary table of user-agent (browser) statistics from 5 different sources. www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

Doctor-HTML.com have a helpful representative sample of the web browsers and operating systems that people are currently using. They claim that their sample is from a large cross-section of the web. "Each week represents around 13 million hits to large and small e-commerce sites, community sites, technical sites, and others."
www.doctor-html.com/agent_stats/

W3Schools.com also have a summary of browser information which also provides information on display resolution, colour depth and whether or not JavaScript is enabled. They do not mention from where the sample data is collected, which is a pity as I suppose that the majority of site visitors to w3schools are web developers of varying levels of technical proficiency and not "average" web users (whoever they are).
www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Thecounter.com, providers of those free "hit counter images", also make their statistics available. These are quite interesting as thecounter.com will get a record of the visit from any website which has a counter provided by them. If you can find the statistics and the navigation for them amongst the adverts (it's on the right) this will represent another useful cross-section of the web: people who visit smaller sites, homepages, etc.
www.thecounter.com/stats/