Below is the second half of a Vermont Agency of Natural Resources article.  You may want to read the first half of the article if you're interested in a bit of history on flourescent lights. 

Many people continue to believe that it takes significantly more electricity to turn on a
fluorescent lamp than to operate the lamp for long periods. Modern fluorescent lamps, however,
use little starting energy. Turning them off actually helps them last longer and lowers lighting
energy costs. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory have found that a
fluorescent lamp

Here's a fascinating blog post by "Ovid" on how he caught his ID thieves in only a couple of hours. They had racked up a few thousand dollars of charges on his credit card. Maybe Ovid should be a detective, although he did get a couple of lucky breaks. Of course, the credit card companies would never have held him responsible, but it must feel good to personally catch the bad guys. His story is also being discussed on this Slashdot thread.

The first generation of PPU cards are coming to market. Anandtech is reporting on the PhysX PPU card from AGEIA.
Just like GPU cards which added 2D graphics acceleration and later 3D, PPU cards will accelerate physics (no pun intended :-) calculations. Software developers can use the PPU cards to do much better physics simulations without running out of processing power in the CPU.

From a Seattle Times review of the Suunto X9:

Imagine, a GPS receiver that is smaller than some of the basic altimeter watches on the market today. Add in the fact that this GPS receiver also incorporates a magnetic compass and a highly accurate barometric altimeter, and you have a complete backcountry navigation tool. One that fits on your wrist and weighs just 2.5 ounces

If you do a google search for

inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

all the hits will be for remote-controlled web-cams. Almost all of them are for public places, and most are not password protected. I found out about this in the comments following up on a March 18 entry on Bruce Schneier's weblog.

Surprisingly easy.

http://www.audiovisualizers.com/madlab/lcd_proj.htm

Not sure if the time spent would be worth the savings, but if you've got a DIY itch you need to scracth…

Sandisk is releasing an SD card with built-in USB connectivity.

http://www.sandisk.com/pressrelease/20050219a.htm

It functions as a regular SD card in any device. But you can fold back part of the card to reveal a USB connector

I don't know if there is any "practical" use for this, but it's still pretty cool:

http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/zipdecode/

Once the java applet is running and the map is fully rendered, click
anywhere in the map (give it focus) and then start typing a zip code —
there isn't a text entry box, just start typing after clicking on the
map.

Nice overview of the differences between LCD, plasma, DLP, LCOS, D-ILA, and CRT.

http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/specsformats/displays_LCD_DLP_plasma1.html