Or, more strictly speaking, a single point in time snapshot of Wikipedia that you can download to your iPod

A Beginners CSS Tutorial from Enlighten Designs:

This guide will attempt to take you step by step, through the process of creating a fully functioning CSS layout. I will try my best to explain the concepts behind each step, but a lot of the time other people have already covered these things better than I can. Because of this there will sometimes be links to more information on external sites.

...via Digg

Interesting opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor (it's not new--printed in 2003--but still interesting) on the way the fashion industry treats creativity and copying and the way music and movie groups do:

The music and film industries continue to battle over the need to expand copyright protection, and to limit sharing and reuse of prior work. The fashion industry, driven by similar market interests, employs a modus operandi that accepts rather than rejects derivation and appropriation as creative tools.

The contrast is particularly fascinating, given the dependence of each of these industries on our shared cultural heritage, which we call the "commons." The music and film industries' resources are being sapped in ongoing battles about the scope of legal protection that their CDs and DVDs should enjoy and whether prior works may be freely reused. These industries are unusually possessive: Their attorneys have gone after consumers who played DVDs on non-Windows software ("piracy"), Girl Scouts who sang copyrighted songs around the campfire ("no performance license"), and kids who set up their own Harry Potter fan websites ("trademark violation").

By contrast, the fashion industry long has accepted that creativity is too large and fugitive an essence to be owned outright as property. Fashion is a massive industry that thrives in a competitive global environment despite minimal legal protections for its creative design. While many people dismiss fashion as trivial and ephemeral, its economic importance and cultural influence are enormous. US apparel sales alone were $180 billion a few years ago, supporting an estimated 80,000 garment factories, and fashion is a major force in music, entertainment, and other creative sectors.

...via Smart Mobs

On the British television show, The IT Crowd, the first question the IT guys ask when someone calls is, "Have you tried turning it off and on?" If that doesn't work, they ask, "Is it plugged in?" So far, they haven't gotten past those two questions.

There are lots of good tips in Mark Minasi's 'How to Troubleshoot Any Network Problem.' And two of them are:

Check: Is it Plugged in?

Check it twice...

Okay, seriously, again I mean no disrespect to users or anyone else. It's just so easy to overlook the things that we can easily take for granted. I mean, when someone falls to the floor, do you immediately whip out your oxygen sensing probe and check that there's a detectable amount of oxygen in the room? I know -- the fact that you didn't also fall down kind of negates the need. But you know what I mean; we take the mundane for granted. And we take the reliable for granted; in billions of connections around the world transmitting gazillions of bits, things are plugged in 99.9999-plus percent of the time.

This is where checklists can be of help for two reasons: first, to remind you to check even the unusual stuff, and, second, as an excuse for asking someone else what sounds like an insulting question. Asking someone if everything's plugged in can make someone who's already upset more upset and angry.....

And

Reboot!

I have made this comment with tongue-in-cheek for years, but it does bear some truth: "the two most effective tools in the Microsoft world are 'reboot' and 'reinstall.'" (I should mention, however, that XP's System Restore has drastically reduced the number of reinstalls that I've had to do to that product, and I can't wait to see System Restore come to Server in Longhorn.)

I remind you about rebooting because where once we just knew that anything more minor than changing the background color required a reboot, modern Windows can do an awful lot of things without needing a reboot. Consider that you can take a vanilla copy of Server and add DHCP, WINS, DNS, IIS, and the majority of patches delivered for XP and 2003 in the past year... all without a reboot.

...

Hardware often needs "rebooting" after being reconfigured. Routers, modems and the like won't always show the effects of reconfiguration until you actually power them off and on....

...or a Technological Manifesto

I don't agree with it all, but it's an interesting look at things IT needs to think about:

• Bad Technology is Your Fault
• Users aren't Born Stupid, You Train Them to be That Way
• You want to make your system easier to use than to not use.
• If the Solution Seems Too Simple, Use It
• Eliminate Jobs - Everywhere
• Make People Better

....

--via Digg

New Scientist reports on a robot powered by a slime mold:

They grew slime in a six-pointed star shape on top of a circuit and connected it remotely, via a computer, to the hexapod bot. Any light shone on sensors mounted on top of the robot were used to control light shone onto one of the six points of the circuit-mounted mould – each corresponding to a leg of the bot.

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould. Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely.

Zauner believes engineers will need to look towards this type of simple control mechanism, especially as components are scaled down. "On the nanoscale, we have to learn how to work with autonomous components," he says. "We have to let molecules do what they naturally do."

...via BoingBoing

From a Wired News article:

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

MIT and the city of Cambridge are collaborating to provide free wireless to city residents:

A collaboration with MIT researchers may provide Cambridge with a free, city-wide, wireless internet service as early as late summer. The project will rely on a mesh networking technology that allows individual computers to become new access points, projecting the reach of the network beyond its original antennas.

The main goal of the project is to provide internet access to Cantabrigians who live in public housing, said Cambridge Chief Information Officer Mary P. Hart, though the resulting infrastructure will have a far wider benefit for city residents.

...via Smart Mobs

A page that will show the links between any two entries on Wikipedia. For example, 'rottweiler' and 'Buddha' have three degrees of separation:

Rottweiler
1935
December 29
Buddha

You can also view the return trip.

From Dave Sifry at Technorati:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

From an article at Digital Media Europe:

There are over 400 cities worldwide currently planning to deploy municipal broadband networks, and that number will double in 2006, making community broadband initiatives a very real and significant trend, according to a report from market research firm Visiongain.

Despite legal opposition and intense lobbying from incumbent telcos and cable companies, municipal broadband is well on its way. As of the first quarter of 2006, there are over 100 city and regional wireless broadband networks operational worldwide, more than 40 of which are in the US.