Here’s a quirky re-design of the Google homepage, it has the original first impression and colour scheme but is a lot more modern and sophisticated. It only works with google.com, this took me a while to get to as it kept redirecting me back to google.co.uk just to warn you. Here are some screenshots:

To get this simply paste the code below into the address bar while at google.com.

Code:

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while but have been mulling over it all the same. I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who uses ubuntu, has contributed to ubuntu in some way and to the top code developers behind it’s success. I work in a computer shop on weekends and on this weekend we had no end of problems with a previously stable windows machine because a virus got into it and evaded all scans. With had endless computers with actually decent spec but were running seriously shockingly rubbish. And then I came home from work and turned on my computer at home and it booted super speedy and just worked.

So I thank you as ubuntu users for my peace of mind.

Here are some html character entities which you may not know already, and may even become useful. If you’ve used on of these on your site, like on or what ever leave a comment below.

℃

Degrees Celcius Celsius

☀

Sun

A simple question, have you ever wanted to crop an image using CSS? Well here’s the answer, clip: rect(). It’s quite easy to do with jQuery and PHP but this is a great and easy option for all those little gallery thumbnails.

Demo:

Here are a few wallpapers I made to celebrate the release of Karmic Koala tomorrow. Feel free to take them, change them or distribute them as you wish.

Blue Mystery

1280×800 · 1440×900 · 2560×1024

I was surfing the net today when I came across this on Google Maps, does Google not support Chrome with Maps? I was using the ‘basic html’ version because our internet was slow, if you want to see this go to:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&t=h&output=html&mid=1254836062

http://local.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16532&topic=1499

I’ve been using this PHP login system for a while now, it’s called Quadodo and it’s completely free and open source under the GPL license. One of the many benefits I find with it is that it’s 100% customisable while still being secure.

It has many features, like the forgotten password page and the registration page. If you’re running a very small site but would like a login system for certain content, I would strongly recommend Quadodo.

Login

Here are some innocent tips and tricks to get your website to load faster behind the scenes. Most of them are either simply good practice or tools to help you out along the way. If you have any more ways to speed up your site leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

1. Valid Code

Valid code means that browser doesn’t have to make, create and merge your code to make it work. A page with the correct DOCTYPE and structure will render quicker within the browser, it also helps with browser compatibility.

XHTML and HTML Validator – http://validator.w3.org/

CSS Validator – http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

I downloaded version 4.0 of Google Chrome for Ubuntu a few days ago and found it brilliant. It’s available in 32bit and 64bit and best of all everything I tried worked, Flash, Chrome themes, downloads, fonts, extensions… The list is endless. It doesn’t use wine either which means that it looks a whole lot better.

Here is a good list of six gnome-terminal commands which you really wont need and you probably won’t ever use them unless out of curiosity (like I did). But sure tell me if you do use them and why in the comments at the bottom of the page.

1. Watching Star-Wars

No, no, no don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with watching Star-Wars but when you can watch a text based version of Episode VI IV New Hope from the terminal it gets a little ridiculous (but it is quite clever).