Ok, this is a Flash(tm) thing but it works very well and gives great results. Check out:

http://kuler.adobe.com/

When you go to the site, you will be prompted to update your Flash player to the latest version (there is a link right on the page), and you will need to shut down your browser while you do the update. Then you can take a look at the color editor. It’s basically a color wheel and a lightness slider, but you can also pick several options for the combinations such as “Analogous”, “Monochromatic”, “Complementary” and others. Then you can drag any or all of the points on the color wheel to any different postion and see the results in the color swatches below. Below the each of the swatches is a RGB slider to manipulate each color (want more red in your main color?). Then below each of the sliders are the HSV, RGB, CMYK, Lab, and Hex values for the color swatches.

You can also see color combinations that other people have put together or add your own. Go there and check it out. My words can’t do it justice.

I can think of a lot of aplications for this. I know a few people who are weavers and fibercrafters (one of the first combinations that someone else had made I saw was “My New Sweater”). Remodeling a room in your home? Designing costumes? The uses are endles. (I almost wrote “The ends are useless”, but that’s not right.)

On a personal note, I think I have solved a very large technical issue with my laptop and my internet connection at work. I’ve discovered the wonders of Open DNS (opendns.com). By changing my DNS settings on my laptop, I can now connect to the internet all the time. It would take more time than it’s worth to explain it here, but I could only browse the internet for a few minutes at a time (oddly enough I could stay on Skype all day). If you want further technical details, let me know. The practical upshot of all of this is that I can now read the blog (and maybe even post) a lot more often. Hooray!

My next planned post is on monitor calibration.

-Ghostrock