design

Floor Planner helps to plan your pad

Whether you custom order a sleek, suede couch or drag in a ratty, plaid one found on Craigslist, planning where to put it can be a pain. Floor Planner can help. This site from Dutch designers enables you to arrange what you have in your own flat or conjure up a dream home.

Add your home's measurements, maybe a background picture, and topic tags to help other users find your plan (or keep it to yourself), and you're ready to drag and drop sofas, plants, tables, countertops, and so on into your rooms. You get one plan for … Read more

Oakland Crimespotting: Crime watch for the rest of us

Oakland Crimespotting is an amazing interactive map that provides comprehensive information about the latest crimes in the Oakland area. The presentation is fluid and seamless -- you can use the sliders to adjust the time span, zoom out to see a larger area, and select the crimes you want to see. You can even click on each crime to find out more information about it, like the date and time it was committed as well as the actual case number. There's also a way for you to set up crime alerts to be delivered to you via RSS or … Read more

Web Shirts: 20 rad T-shirt sites

Internet commerce is becoming the new pastime for many in my generation. Generation Yers like to buy interesting T-shirts online, and there's no shortage of sites out there that are putting out an absurd amount of user-generated designs. Here's a list of more than 20 quality sites that put cotton, and inspiration, on your back.

Readymade: These services sell shirts that are designed by users and professionals.

Threadless is one of the most popular shirtmakers out there. It started out with user votes to pick out which shirts would go on sale, and have since moved on to independent designers. When shirts sell out, they're typically not for sale again unless the demand becomes great. They're also set to open a retail store in Chicago next month.

Glarkware, a small Canadian shirt company, is based out of Toronto, Ontario, and has a fairly eccentric line of humor-related shirts. They've also got a line of T-shirts on the way for toddlers.

Shirt.Woot. From the same bunch that does good ol' Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com, is Shirt.Woot.com--a one-shirt-per-day service that rolls out a new design every night at midnight Central time. Every shirt is always $10 with free shipping, along with the option to get it delivered in two days for another five bucks. While a good deal of the shirts are designed by professionals, the service also runs a weekly "derby" with user-generated designs. The most popular design goes on sale, and the designer gets a cut of the profits.

Bountee is a hybrid service that offers both professionally designed T-shirts and a build-it-yourself solution. Bountee features a variety of "Web 2.0" features like tagging, user ratings, and commenting. It's also got a really slick, easy-to-use design.

Split The Atom is a U.K.-based T-shirt company that's pretty much exactly like Threadless, but with a smaller selection. It also takes user designs in return for a one-time cash prize.

Design by Humans has a very small collection of shirts, but offers some pretty decent prize money for winning designers with a daily, weekly, and monthly design contest. Each designer also gets their own profile page for listing any background information and to showcase some of their other works.

BustedTees and Defunker are two very different Net T-shirt services from the same company. Bustedtees is more about humor, while Defunker offers more designer solutions akin to Threadless. Both sites are really slick, but between the two, Defunker feels a bit snappier. There's also a pretty large price gap, with most Bustedtees topping out at around $16, and Defunker averaging in the high-$20s and mid-$30s.

T-ShirtHell. There's a reason this site has a warning page and a hellish name. These shirts are the kind that will get you stares in public, and usually not for a good reason. Definitely not for the faint of heart, or workplace.

The Cotton Factory doesn't actually make cotton, but they have a very solid selection of designer, and humor T-shirts. There's even a section of T-shirts less than 10 bucks. There's some real gems in this place, especially if you like "ninja" apparel.

… Read more

Desktoptopia is a cure for the common desktop background

For about the longest time, the background on my Mac had been fairly dull--a Manhattan cityscape plucked from the selection at DesktopNexus. I want my desktop patterns to look good, but I'm not one to put a whole lot of thinking power into it; there are better ways to waste energy.

This morning, however, I switched when I read about Desktoptopia, a new Mac-only downloadable app that lets you easily discover aesthetically pleasing "designer desktop" backgrounds created by innovative digital artists (no generic landscapes here) and switch them up either automatically or manually with a very simple … Read more

How many processors are in your PC?

These days, most new PCs have dual-core central processors (CPU). That's one chip with two complete microprocessors on it, both sharing one path to memory and peripherals.

If you have a high-end gaming PC or a workstation, you might have one or two processor chips with four cores each. An eight-core PC is a very powerful machine--in real terms, up to eight times faster than the best desktop PCs you could get in 2004. For many years, PC performance doubled roughly every 18 months; multicore technology has produced annual doubling for three years now.

But that's not really … Read more

The past, present, and future of tech design

This month's Living with Technology package on CNET.com is a must-see for anyone who values form over function, or function over form, or form that enhances function.

As you may have already gathered, the key word here is form. This month, Living with Technology is all about design: the good, the bad, the future, and the new philosophies that are budding in today's designers.

There's tons of good stuff to see: videos, slide shows, and good old text-based articles. Visit Living with Technology: Eye on design to get the full menu of goods, or just click … Read more

False big toes of the ancients?

Does the curse of the mummy begin with bunions?

Jacky Finch, a researcher at the University of Manchester's KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, is testing to see whether two large wooden toes from the era of the Pharaohs were ornamental or actual medical devices.

If the wooden toes turn out to be prosthetics, this will mean that the art of making fake body parts for practical is centuries older than believed. The oldest prosthesis yet discovered is an artificial leg dating from 300 B.C. The toes are from between 1,000 B.C. and 600 B.C.

One … Read more

'Green' dream plane mimics UFOs

The grand Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus a380 may usher in an era of more fuel-efficient air travel, but their bird-shaped designs could look downright primitive later in the century.

Dutch aerospace engineers are imagining aircraft that look less like today's big-nosed winged planes, which haven't changed much in shape since the 1950s, and more like flying saucers. So maybe you can rest assured that those UFOs you spotted aren't signs of spying aliens, but instead are just your great-great-great-grandchildren traveling home for the holidays from a future when both saucer planes and time travel exist. The … Read more

Business building owners strive to go green

Many of the nation's office and retail towers would use one-third less energy by 2012, if they meet goals set today by the Building Owners and Managers Association.

The group unveiled its plan at its annual conference in Manhattan to shrink the carbon emissions of some 9 billion square feet of commercial real estate, using the government's Energy Star benchmarks for energy and water usage. Green-building standards set by the nonprofit-run Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design are more stringent.

Still, this initiative, if successful, would significantly cut the $24 billion spent on energy each year by the … Read more