changing colours etc (which i still don't fully understand, but after some playing around you get to grips with it, 00000=black and FFFFFF=white for instance, but how to get a specific colour is still beyond my comprehension. tried to scribble some letters and numbers and see what MC interperated it as)
This is something you get in computing quite often.
What you are seeing is a 24bit colour field.
Eight bits is assigned to each of the colours Red, Green, and Blue.
The first two digits represent the 8 bits for Red.
The second two digits represent the 8 bits for Green.
The final two digits represent the 8 bits for Blue.
Hence FF0000 would produce a pure Red
00FF00 a pure Green
0000FF a pure Blue
all of them together FFFFFF pure white
and 000000 black
Each digit represents a hexadecimal value.
0 through to F, where F is equal to 15 in decimal.
Most graphics packages will show you the value of a colour in this fashion.
F in binary is 1111 which is 4 bits
Hence
FF is 1111 1111 which is 8 bits
24 bits in total gives 16,777,216 possible colours.