Using energy from the gym efficiently

via Treehugger

Add comment December 30th, 2008 Alex

Carbon Offsetting from SFO

Starting in the Spring, San Francisco International Airport will have kiosks where flyers will be able to purchase carbon offsets. This will be the first of its kind and sounds like an interesting idea. Since people are usually bored waiting for their flights, a kiosk will intrigue people to do some minor splurge spending to help the environment. The offsets are not tax deductable and are provided by 3Degrees, a San Francisco firm that sells renewable energy and carbon reduction investments. As you can see from the chart above, the offest price is minimal and 3Degrees gets 30% of it while the rest goes to carbon reduction projects.

via SFGate

Add comment December 24th, 2008 Alex

Mini E test drive

TreeHugger took the Mini E for a drive. The battery sits where the rear passenger seats would be and the engine compartment looks pretty neat too. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these but at $850/month lease for one year is a little unreasonable.

Add comment December 12th, 2008 Alex

Real christmas tree vs artificial fake christmas tree

So now that it is Chrstmas time, I am sure many people wonder whether to get a real tree or to stick to a fake one. Since more people are eco conscious now, many people probably wonder which one is more green and environmentally friendly.

The best answer is to get a live tree cut from a tree farm so that there is no need to deliver the tree anywhere. It can also be fun for the family as well. Getting a real tree anywhere else is still better than getting a fake one though. It may be cheaper as well but of course it creates CO2 to get the tree to the store.

Last time we got a tree, we got it from a tree farm. For my tree this year, we went to look at the local tree lots but found the price to be pretty high. Target and Home Depot have good trees and are a lot cheaper so we ended up getting one from Target. Even though it is better to support the local businesses, we couldnt justify the price difference.

Getting a fake tree, is the most economical since you can buy one tree and use the same tree for years. But when you eventually get rid of the tree, it is not as easy to dispose of the tree as it is not biodegradable. Getting a real tree is better for the environment than getting a fake tree because fake trees are made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which causes pollution when produced and is also hard to recycle. Lead can also be found in PVC so it may not be good to have this exposure for children.

Real trees are good for the environment because trees absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen and they can be recycled afterwards into mulch. Once the tree is cut, another tree is planted in its place and is ready again in a couple of years. There is also the option of getting a live tree and planting it but that is a little extreme and unrealistic and you might as well not get a tree at all if you want to be completely green.

via Yahoo Green, Treehugger, and Grist

Add comment December 12th, 2008 Alex

Most affordable and greenest desktop PC

Cherrypal is a new company that has created the world’s most affordable, easiest to use and greenest desktop computer. It only uses 2 watts of power, lasts 10 years, and has 80% fewer parts. There is no software updates and operating system to deal with and has free 24/7 support. The company is based in Mountain View and the system costs onyl $249 and is suppose to have started shipping already. The C114 desktop comes with a Firefox browser, OpenOffice, Mplayer, Instant Messenger (Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN, and Skype). The system is a small black rectangular box about the size of a book measuring 1.3″ x 5.8″ x 4.2″.

It uses a Freescale’s MPC5121e mobileGT processor, 800 MIPS (400 MHz) processor with 256 MB of DDR2 DRAM and 8GB NAND Flash based solid state hard drive. It should be sufficient for basic web usage and email and with a solid state drive, performance should be pretty good. With 8GB of space, however, dont expect to be able to save music or movies onto it.

The desktop is suppose to last 10 years which is probably meant to show how reliable it is but how many people actually use the same desktop for more than five years. If you think about it, ten years ago, Microsoft’s OS was Windows 98. Since then there are about five newer versions of Windows not including the numerous service packs.

Another thing that it mentioned was that there were no software updates necessary which surprised me because software updates are always crucial, but then I found out why. The CherryPal Hypercloud technology uses a single software layer technology as opposed to the standard three combining the operating system and browser. The reason no software updates were necessary was because the CherryPal system actually gets the updated programs and data from the web or the “CherryPalCloud” which gets updated at bootup. Cloud computing is the future of computing and CherryPal is taking advantage of the technology to simplify the traditional personal computer making software and operating system upgrades and issues all irrelevant to the user. It should also perform a lot faster without headaches and prevents viruses and hackers as the hardware is not exposed.

For commercial and educational usage, it can probably be a great desktop but I have not seen any reviews of it yet, so we will have to see how it performs. It almost sounds too good to be true.

Add comment December 5th, 2008 Alex