Sirharris.com

The Technium presents a quick summary of the spate of new era, new religions:

Exhibit A might be the Eastern Lightening church in China, who believe a plain-looking women from Henan is the third coming of God. She has tens of thousands of followers willing to go to jail to follow her.

While Dhammakaya is now four decades old, only in recent years has it scaled up to such spectacles — a two-week nationwide retreat culminated on Dec. 25, 2010, in what some likened to a Buddhist Woodstock

Read More: The Technium

Digital Photography School presents an excellent selection of high definition imagery:

One thing that gets on my nerves is when I see a post on some blog titled “50 Examples of Incredible HDR Photography.” It’s not the title that bugs me, but the content. So many of these list posts are full of poor examples of HDR photography.

Read more: Digital Photography School

Claim yourself 2GB of free online storage space that you can access anywhere:

Dropbox.com

One of my favourite blogs for finance trivia, over at Mint.com shows some of the interesting paper denominations that were, at least at one time, available in the world:

Mint Slideshow: Hyperinflation

No  matter how hard you work, someone is working harder (and likely doing a much better job).  Here’s a fantastic tribute to ten overburdened bikers:

10 Heavy Bicycle Loads

Well here’s a great little idea:

You’re in Word, you click Print, and instead of configuring perhaps the single option of “grayscale or color”, you are presented with the GreenPrint dialog.

From here you can quickly remove pointless pages you were about to print, turn images off, or set sections of the document as black and white rather than color.  It calculates your savings as you go, so you can enjoy your continual increments of green feel good points.

GreenPrint Software – Millions of Trees Can’t be Wrong..

I read the following this morning on The Simple Dollar which I thought really made a great deal of sense:

As an expert in whole-brain learning and good friend of mine, Steven Snyder, put it: “There are only two problems in life:

1. you know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it; and/or
2. you don’t know what you want.” If that’s true (and I think that it is) then there are only two solutions:

• Make it up
• Make it happen

In other words, if you don’t know what you want, it’s time for some soul-searching. A person without a goal is a person idling and not growing. Even if the things you want are mundane, they’re still goals. You can still focus on them, achieve them, and grow as a person.

On the other hand, if you know what you want and can’t figure out how to get there, start breaking that big thing you want down into smaller bites. Focus on nothing more than the absolute next step you ned to take to get there – something so small you can accomplish it in an hour.

The Simple Dollar » Getting Things Done: The Power of Outcome Focusing.

Here’s an interesting idea from EA – play an online trial version of a desktop game:

“The freedom of The Sims 3 will inspire you with endless creative possibilities and amuse you with unexpected moments of surprise and mischief!…”

“Register for the chance to enjoy a free, 60-minute instant online trial of The Sims 3 and see why over 5 million players are already addicted to this critically acclaimed game!”

via The Sims 3 Online Trial Pre-Registration.

Compassion have been doing a great series of mosaics themed around single colours, each a collection of photographs of sponsored children and families. Here are just a few examples, follow the links for lots more:

White Photos

Yellow Photos

Green Photos

“Google will kill off Google Wave, they told in a blog post. It was a technically very inspiring web app which, however, arrived without any particular and clear use case. ”

Google Ending Google Wave.

Well I have to agree somewhat with the writer, I think I spent the majority of my time on Google Wave trying to figure out exactly the way which way I was meant to be using it.  That’s one less thing to think about vanishing – although I expect some of you found it useful.