Whether you're a bustling urbanite or a happy camper (or both) your portable devices need to be charged. The New York City based company Voltaic provides the solution in the form of bags that double as mobile power generators. Three solar panels grace the bags and generate up to 4 watts of power, allowing you to recharge most small electronic devices including: cell phones, cameras, two way radios, PDA's, and MP3s. Unfortunately the bags won't charge your laptop.

 

The award winning bags come with eleven standard adaptors for common cell phones and other devices and a full range of optional adaptors are available on the website. Best of all, is the battery pack containing a 2,200mAh Lithium Ion battery, a voltage converter, built in LED torch and charge indicator. It clips inside the back pocket of the bag and allows you to save the juice for later. In case the forecast is really gray, the battery pack can also be charged using an AC travel charger or car charger (both included).

 

Currently Voltaic offers 4 different models, Backpack, Daypack, Pouch and Messenger and you can customize your bag by choosing the color of the solar panels – silver, orange, green or charcoal.  Regardless of which you choose, curious random strangers will stop you and ask "are those solar panels?" giving you an excellent opportunity to speak to the virtues of renewable energy sources.

 

 

The quirky Dutch design studio OOOMS has created a USB 2.0 flash stick housed inside of an...actual stick. While the odd juxtaposition between the computer and the natural stick is a nice way to declare to the world that you are an EcoGeek, there is nothing really environmentally friendly about the product.

Via coolhunting.com

Make: makes our hearts warm.  And Make: writer Gavin Harper can make a fuel cell out of a couple of bandaids .  So, listen up, all you need is two bandaids (the kind you would put on a nice big knee scrape,) some steel screen (the kind you would put around your pool in Florida,) some methanol (which, alas, you probably shouldn't have lying around the house) and an MEA (Membrane Electrode Assembly, which you should probably buy, rather than Make.)

 

Follow the simple instructions and, voila, a fuel cell.  Just plop a couple drops of methanol on your creation and, voila, .25 volts.  Enough to power, well, not much.  But still, your very own fuel cell.

 

 

Some countries actually use mass transit.  Especially countries where urban centers are as densely packed as they are in Japan.  East Japan Railway Company servers some 16 million passengers every day.  When your citizens use mass transit, it becomes important to make that transit efficient and non-polluting.  JR East is working on alternative fuels for it's train system.  We've already mentioned their hybrid train technology, but now they're taking another step with a plan to introduce a fuel cell powered train. 

Right now they're still in the planning stages, of course.  The first trial would have a one-car train pushing 65 mph and emitting only water as its waste.  The train will also be 'hybrid' in that electric batteries will also power the train and charge when the train breaks.

 

The biggest obstacle to the introduction of hydrogen vehicles has always been lack of infrastructure.  How many gas stations have you seen with hydrogen pumps?  This is less of an obstacle for trains, because there are fewer fueling stations and the fuel cell trains will follow specific lines, but creating the infrastructure will still be a challenge.

 

Circumnavigating the globe in a biodiesel powered, ultra-efficient trimaran is one thing. Adding one liter of biodiesel extracted from your own ass is something else.

Pete Bethune is circumnavigating the globe for two reasons. First, to beat the speed record for circumnavigation. That will take about 65 days, besting the current record by ten days. Then Pete and his team will tour around the world for 18 months to raise awareness for renewable resource use.

And, yes, Pete had a pound of fat removed from his butt to be mixed with the fuel of his craft. A sacrifice, I suppose, he was willing to make.

Check out Earthrace.net for more info 

We might all be plenty happy to ogle over the next gigahertz revolution, but CNet recently pointed out that rating processor performance alone is becoming a useless measure. We can make the processors fast, the quesiton is, can we do it without burning through the mother board (and the electric bill).

Unfortunately, the MPG of a CPU (theoretically measured in performance per watt) is not a simple thing to calculate. The measure of hertz, meaning processes per second, is now pretty much ignored. There's no perfect way to measure the performance of a CPU, and there is really no way at all to accurately measure performance per watt.

Sure, you could hold a thermometer to your CPU and run a billion calculations and divide one by the other, but AMD and Intel are going to start advertising these numbers, so they're going to have to figure out some industry standards.

Unfortunately the performance per watt of a processor tends to vary significantly as the processor is used more or less. Intel is measuring it's processors at full load, something very rarely seen by a processor, with encouraging results. AMD, on the other hand, says a more natural system for measuring performance should be tried.

Already the battle has begun, Intel claiming that its new server processor, Woodcrest, has overtaken AMD in terms of performance per watt, but AMD disagrees.

All of this, if you can believe it, is a big deal for IT industry power consumption. Fifteen percent of money spent in the operation of data centers goes to power and cooling down all of the hotness the processors create. And the fight over performance per watt is a good one for the industry, the customers and the environment.

Let's just hope they can agree on how to measure it.

Note: Since this article got Dugg there's been a bit of discussion about the lack of real, hearty, technical information here.  Let me just say that I wrote this mostly as a redirect to the CNet article, which does have a lot of great information on it, and that I didn't expect this to get on Digg.  It was nice surprise though.  Thanks to everyone who's visiting EcoGeek for the first time, and check out the CNet article if you want more details.

 

Live in a windy place? Need an extra 1000 watts? It's certainly enough to power your laptop, and probably also a microwave oven at the same time. What else could a guy want?

The folks at instructables are creating a step by step guide to creating your own 1000 watt wind turbine – from scratch. Sadly, the tutorial isn't finished yet, so, if you start now, you might be spending a lot of time staring at your wire coil disk waiting for them to write the chapter on creating the turbine blades. Nonetheless, the complex stuff (DIY power generator) is all finished, so it's worth a look.

Well, we've been keeping our eyes open for more information on this 'stellar battery' that we blogged about last week. Twice as efficient as a solar panel, operates in darkness and low light, cheaper than a solar panel. Lacking details, we were skeptical.

Well, the Russian scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) have given us some more information. They're claiming a 54% efficiency in converting visual light to electricity. They're claiming a system of storing that energy that does not use acid batteries, and they're claiming a 31% efficiency at converting low-light and infrared light to electricity. And, finally, they've actually given us a glimpse of how, exactly, this is supposed to work. Of course, they told the world in Russian, and we don't speak Russian, but we're happy to try and translate the translation / explaination we found at PESN.

Summary:
The Russians said: We have a revolutionary new 'star battery' that is made of heteroelectric matter.

The Russians meant to say: We made an ultra-capacitor and an ultra-efficient photoelement out of a metamaterial.

Now, this might not strike you as a huge difference. But we can actually figure out what they're talking about in the second sentence, while, if you google “heteroelectric” you find only articles talking about the star battery.

Read all about it after the jump: 

Only the most foolhardy among us continue to be in denial about Global Warming. Experts agree - it's happening. Problem is, nailing the specifics is tricky. The vast number of variables involved makes for complex models requiring processing power that makes Deep Blue look like a sissy.

The BBC Climate Change Experiment hopes to predict the future climate of our planet by harnessing the power of distributed computing (remember SETI@Home). You can join in by downloading a small program that will connect your computer to the experiment. The application doubles as a screensaver, and uses your computer's excess processing power to crunch away at the Met Office climate model .

An open source platform for distributed computing called Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is being used to run the experiment. Developed specifically for individuals to donate their computing power to scientific projects, BOINC harnesses processing power that would otherwise be wasted. The more people who participate in the experiment, the more complete predictions about the future climate will be.

More Specifics After the Jump

Lets start by saying that this isn't cold fusion, and it's not even producing more energy than is going into it. But...the Chinese did build a fusion reactor, and apparently no one knew about it.

The reactor is a smaller version of the 10 billion Euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) just begun in France (and not scheduled for completion for 10 years). China and the United States are both partners in the ITER project, having contributed 10% of the cost of construction.

So this Chinese thing is quite a surprise, though, given their desire to usher a billion people into the middle class, we probably should have expected that they'd be working on something like this. It's not like they're afraid of large projects (see Three Gorges Dam).

I mean, coal is evil, oil is evil, nuclear is evil. Fusion is what we've been waiting for, that is, if the Chinese agree to share the technology with us.

Spotted at Hugg - via PhysOrg 

You might not have noticed, but in the last year or so, Intel has been totally smashed by AMD. Their processors have not met the efficiency of AMD and, as a result, Intel has lost a lot of market shared and big clients (including Dell).

Intel, has always focused on performance.  How many Gigahertz can they squeeze out of a chip.  The result has been extremely fast chips that run hot and suck power.  So fast, in fact, that no one needs them anymore, and so dealers aren't buying them. 

 Intel's new game plan follows the wisdome of AMD: Pay less attention to speed, and more to efficiency. Oh if only car manufacturers would see that light as well! The true goal of efficient processors lies in battery life of portable computers, but we can't help but see the conservation angle.

Intel is fighting the battle for efficiency on a lot of fronts. Most interestingly by increasing the number of processing cores per CPU.  This allows each core to operate at a much lower clock speed without losing overall speed. This step alone is making the new Core 2 Duo (which we at EcoGeek are hoping to own fairly soon) six times more efficient. This means longer lasting portables, cooler desktops and, most importantly, more efficient households.

OK, there are an awful lot of cathode ray tube monitors headed towards landfills, and though this doodlepost article on how to turn a CRT into a trashcan doesn't really solve the problem of all the heavy metals inside the tube itself, it does elegantly turn trash into a receptacle for trash.  And, in general, is very humorous.  What better way to display your EcoGeekyness than by turning that monitor collecting dust in your basement into a dustbin for your office.  Plus, it's a perfect size for a plastic grocery bag to line it.  

But be careful, this definitely falls into the category of an extreme activity. You will, for example, be asked to decompress a vacuum tube with a shovel.

Via: DoodlePost