From time to time I'll highlight interesting or useful websites.
I'll start off with three sites that appeal to my interest in product design. And no, none of them are this one.
Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools blog isn't just about cool tools, although there are lots of those. It's also about books, videos, and websites that tell you how to do things. Anyone may contribute a recommendation; other contributors include Paul Saffo and Stewart Brand.
Dennis Palatov's dpcars.net is the most technically interesting automobile-related site I know of (although Autoblog is the most informative). Palatov has two great hobbies. The first is buying and driving high-performance automobiles and motorcycles. Sometimes he hangs onto them for just a short time before moving on to the next one.
The second hobby is building high-performance automobiles. He built a Westfield, a car based on the Lotus Seven, and documented the whole process.
Now he's writing about a track car he designed and built from scratch-- the dp1-- and an Ariel Atom built by Brammo Motorsports which Palatov is using to help develop the engine he intends to put into the dp1.
The engine itself is remarkable-- it's the Hartley H1, a 2.8-liter V8 engine about the size and weight of popular 4-cylinder engines. It weighs only 200 pounds and produces about 400 horsepower at an amazing 10,000 RPM.
The final site is my favorite gadget site, but hardly anything there qualifies as consumer electronics-- it's Medgadget.com. Medgadget does a great job of covering the rapid progress in medical electronics and related fields. It's well written, copiously illustrated, and interesting even for someone like me who has no particular ambitions in the medical industry.
Oh, okay. One more. Thomas Marban's popurls. This is a link aggregator that draws from some of the most popular aggregators, like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, news feeds from Google, Yahoo, and Wires, and a bunch of other sites I'd never heard of until I started visiting popurls. It has a nice clean layout that you can customize to some extent, and it shows short story previews for most feeds when you mouse over the links.
Add a comment with your favorite sites; if I add them to my own daily rounds of the Internet, I'll mention them here in a future blog entry. Thanks!