Open Web Design

http://www.openwebdesign.org/

From the site:

Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information.

Repair Pal - local automotive repair cost estimations made easy

http://repairpal.com/

Repair Pal is a pretty slick web 2.0-ish site that identifies local dealerships and mechanic shops that provide approximate price quotes for repair work. You enter your vehicle information and the type of repair required, and it displays the estimations, comparing the dealership and mechanic ranges and identifying their business names and locations.

Slashdot Quote

by fictionpuss

Ah, but what level of skepticism is healthy? Too little and you get the titanic, too much and you never reach the moon.

Plastic bags can be disolved in 3 months

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/11/anton_wylie_phages/

The Register has an article on a gentleman named Daniel Burd. He has isolated the bacteria that degrade plastic bags in existing landfills.

Now, if only they could identify a solution for Styrofoam.

Special Characters

Special characters are useful under a variety of circumstances. There are special characters for Microsoft Office products, for web designs, for ASCII art, etc. The maps, however, are sometimes harder to locate. Here are a few:

• UsefulShortcuts.com alt codes
• UsefulShortcuts.com direct PDF download
• Ted Montgomery’s map
• Oratory Tools map
• International Accent Marks and Diacriticals

Turn old laptop into digital picture frame

http://repair4laptop.org/notebook_picture_frame.html

Came across this link on /. today. This page links to other sites that have directions, dependent upon laptop manufacturer and model, for how to do it.

PC Club - game over

Apparently PC Club is laying everyone off and filing bankruptcy.

Not that many people use them much these days, what with newegg and amazon around…

But it *was* handy to have a local small shop with (occasionally) cheap prices on home-user hardware located (somewhat) close by.

Make a paper fortune teller (like when you were a kid)

http://fun.familyeducation.com/holidays/gifts/45260.html

If you went to public elementary school in the US within the past forty years, my bet is that you saw these things. Like me, you’ve probably completely forgotten about them, and didn’t have much interest in them to begin with.

However, you may either now have kids, or know people who have kids, and this is a cool origami-ish toy you can make to keep them entertained.

The cool part is that you can show them how to do it for themselves. Get their minds working and start moving them into an engineering mindset at an early age…

99Designs

http://99designs.com/

From the site:

Need something designed? Crowdsource it to our community of thousands of designers. Choose a winning design from hundreds of concepts created for you in under a week.

For you to post a bid request, it’ll cost you $39. Define your design requirements, enter the prize amount, and wait for the bids to roll in. The bidding ends after 7 days, and it looks like you *have* to select from one of the proposals, even if they don’t quite meet your expectations.

I guess that’s to ensure you don’t *claim* you don’t like anything submitted, and then run off to recreate it on your own to save the cash.

Coolspotters

http://coolspotters.com/

Do you care about what other people think? How about what they wear, or drive, or drink, or eat, or etc…

Not really?

What if we replace the words “other people” with the word “celebrities”?

If your answer suddenly switches from “No” to “Yes” like a Republican seeing your campaign hopes get hit by a bus during this voting season and deciding to vote Democrat instead, check out the site linked above…