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Written by Philip Proefrock
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Friday, 01 September 2006 |
Greenpeace has come up with a
Green Electronics Guide which ranks 14 technology manufacturers based on reduction of dangerous chemicals in their products and recycling policies.
Nokia, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard are at the top of the list, while Acer,
Motorola, and Lenovo are the bottom three.
The list concentrates primarily on companies reducing their use of PVC plastics
and brominated flame retardants (BFR). Corporate recycling and take-back was
also a part of this ranking.
If you need to purchase new electronics (and sometimes the greenest choice can
be not to buy, or to buy used), this list can give you some comparison
information.
via:
Slashdot
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Written by Hank Green
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
Quoting the introduction to the copy of Hamlet I just downloaded:
"This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on
library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a
project to make the world’s books discoverable online.
"It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book
to enter the public domain. ... Public
domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of
history, culture and knowledge that’s often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume
will appear in this file - a reminder of this book’s long journey from
the publisher to a library and finally to you."
It's really very simple, if you're looking at a public-domain book, a
download button loads with the page and tells you how large the file
is. Just click it and the PDF is downloaded. For an example, check out Pride and Prejudice or Origin of Species, depending on your tastes.
Unfortunately, these are just scanned images, not text. If you read any reports that these files would be instantly searcheable (as I did) those reports were false. However, the books are instantly searcheable
online, proving that Google does indeed have the ability to read and
convert these documents into text. Let's hope that's next on the
agenda.
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Written by Hank Green
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
Sharp has just announced the creation of the most efficient WLAN module
in the world. It is also the smallest. The 8.0 x 7.6 x 1.3
millimeter module can connect to a wireless network using less power
than any other device yet created. Less than a fifth of a watt is
consumed when receiving data and only 0.3 miliwatts are consumed in
idle mode.
These things will likely find homes in cell phones and PDA's first.
But as the $170 pricetag drops they'll find their way into laptops,
cameras and possibly even your household appliances. Connecting to the
internet without sucking a lot of juice is a big deal, not to mention
the benefits for low-power computing.
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Written by Hank Green
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
The war on paper continues! Yes, we can recycle it, yes we can make it
from rocks, but why use it at all? While high-res e-readers are
promising to allow us to read digital text comfortably, content
providers are revving up access to electronic books.
And, in this case, free books. Sometime today, Google will begin providing full PDF downloads of public-domain books. Though Google is
currently only offering books with expired copyrights, the system does
open the door to a pay-to-download service.
We've been suspecting such an expansion for Google Book Search for a
long time now, but we're excited to see this first step being made.
I'll update the post with a link once the service is up and running, so
check back.
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Written by Philip Proefrock
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
 California has a brand new law. Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill to increase the use of solar power in his state. The
"Million Solar Roofs" bill seeks to increase California's use of solar power,
especially at the residential level.
Grist
points out some of the provisions of this bill which include a requirement for
production homebuilders to offer solar systems as a standard option. It also
increases the amount of electricity that net-metered homes can sell back to the
utility at retail rates (getting only wholesale rate on your net metered
electricity is a disincentive for more people to participate).
Much of California, with its sunny climate, is the kind of place where
individual solar hot water systems and photovoltaics just makes sense. Especially as the price drops, and the costs of traditional power sources rise.
via: Grist
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Written by Hank Green
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Tuesday, 29 August 2006 |
 Traffic is pretty near the top of the list of the most evil things in
the world. Traffic makes people angry and unhappy. Traffic wastes a
colossal amount of fuel. Traffic encourages the construction of
massive, expensive and wasteful roadways. But there's no good
solution. Not yet anyways.
New research coming out of the University of Texas shows that there
might be a way to avoid all the anger and waste that traffic brings on
our society, and all they need is to put an RFID tag in your car.
Kara Kockelman has created a computer model that shows that per-mile
tolls for congested roads at high-traffic times of the day will
increase rush-hour traffic speeds by about 25 miles per hour.
The solution is an elegant one because it decreases traffic without
added infrastructure. It's inelegant because it raises all kinds of
freaky privacy issues and also the technology would make it possible
for the police to automatically give you a ticket if you ever drive
over the speed limit. And that would be lame.
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Written by Hank Green
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Tuesday, 29 August 2006 |
 Apitek's MyNote
digital clipboard is a simple and inexpensive device that lets you take
notes without the need for all that pesky paper but without all of the
frills and significant digits of a tablet PC.
The device, and it's 32 megs of internal flash memory, can store 130 pages of notes and can upload to any Windows PC via USB. It's battery powered, and not directly rechargeable, so you'll want to by five NiMH batteries along with it and it should go about 20 hours on a charge. Try that with a tablet PC. You can get one now in Germany for USD 130, no word on a US release.
It'd be perfect for the back-to-school EcoGeek. Save yourself all the piles of unorganized papers and just make a file for notes on your computer.
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Written by Hank Green
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Tuesday, 29 August 2006 |
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 So far, all we've seen of the Readius is some static shots that, for all we knew, were CG. But the video below finally shows the Readius in action.
Cool things about the Readius: Extremely high resolution, low-power, E-Ink display; has a display that is actually bigger than the device; wants to be the iPod for print.
Not so cool things: It won't be around 'till 2007, the display is black and white, the refresh rate of E-Ink is still a miserably slow 1-2 seconds. Nevertheless, I want one.
The Readius' five inch display is bigger than anything a device this size has ever seen, but it's smaller than Sony's Reader, a paperback-book-sized device that was supposed to go on sale at Borders book stores months ago, but has been repeatedly delayed by unknown factors.
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Written by Philip Proefrock
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Monday, 28 August 2006 |
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Emissions-free flight could be a possibility in the future, as Boeing is working to develop a light plane that is powered by fuel cells and an electric motor instead of fossil fuels in 12 month's time. The only emissions from such a plane would be water vapor.
At this point, the plane would be a small craft, and might have a top speed of only 70 miles per hour. It's not going to be a replacement for commercial passenger craft any time soon. But it's certainly another avenue for research and development toward what might some day be cleaner, greener air travel.
Via: EcoFriend
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Written by Philip Proefrock
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Monday, 28 August 2006 |
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Here's something even less sexy than low-emissions cows.
Fluorescent lights are wonderful things, especially compared to their 5-times-more-heat-than-light-generating, power-sucking brethern. But they have their disadvantages as well. Particularly, they contain small amounts of mercury, which is 1. Toxic, and 2. Requires mining.
Some manufacturers are producing low-mercury fluorescent lamps and we applaud them. But we've been hoping that someone was going to see all this wasted mercury as the opportunity it is.
Mercury Waste Solutions provides prepaid shipping containers (FedEx and UPS) for the safe collection and shipping of fluorescent tubes, batteries, and other mercury containing objects for recycling. They claim to be able to recover 99.99% of the mercury with their processing of the waste.
Unfortunately, this is currently corporate-, and institutional-level stuff. The shipping containers are for large numbers of lamps (dozens or more) and are not exactly inexpensive. On your own, you wouldn't fill one up for a very long time. But your neighborhood might be able to, and certainly city-wide recycling programs could be created. We just love to see how quickly solutions can be created after a problem is recognized.
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Written by Philip Proefrock
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Monday, 28 August 2006 |
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So you've decided that you need to add some solar power to your life. But where, you ask yourself, can I find someone who will install my new system?
A new website called FindSolar.com has a large database of solar/alternative energy professionals, an extensive FAQ section to help you gather more information about solar power alternatives, and a Solar Estimator that will help you evaluate solar power options, in terms of cost, payback period, etc.
via: EC&M Magazine
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Written by Hank Green
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Friday, 25 August 2006 |
NanoSolar has just announced that it will be building a 430 MW / year
production facility. That's equivalent to about 200 million solar
cells per year. The best thing about Nanosolar is that they don't use
silicon. Traditional solar cells require the use of expensive and environmentally costly to produce silicon wafers. The solar industry,
if you can believe it, actually uses more silicon than the
microprocessor industry. And silicon is nasty stuff.
So Nanosolar's thin-film, printable, copper-indium-gallium-selenium
cells are very desirable. They're thin, flexible, durable and cheap.
Depending on how much efficiency they can squeeze out of these cells
and how cheap they can ultimately make them, solar might soon become
cheaper than conventional power sources in much of the country. All
thanks to Nanosolar (and that $25 million in seed funding from the
founders of Google.)
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LED
lamps have been around for a while. But new products keep coming out
that allow high-efficiency LEDs to replace more incandescent bulbs and
drastically reduce energy use
at the same time.
