Posts Tagged ‘green’

In this short video, a young man who identifies himself as a 12-year-old named Jeremy approaches a Las Vegas Metro motorcycle cop who has illegally parked his motorcycle on a sidewalk, apparently in order to get a soft drink. The young man politely asks the cop if he had any emergency reason to park, and        

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12-year-old calls out cop for illegal parking, cop refuses to provide badge number

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again

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The best writing of the week, April 14

Nerval’s Lobster writes “The Green Grid, which helped popularize metrics for minimizing wasted electricity in data centers, has developed a new method for cutting down on wasted electronics as old servers and other equipment reach their inevitable retirement. The Electronics Disposal Efficiency metric is designed to help minimize electronic waste, specifically servers and other enterprise hardware. It will take a cue from other organizations, including the Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) Initiative. The Green Grid is trying to build on established regulations that govern the disposal of consumer electronics such as televisions, including the rules governing Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) within the EU. The metric isn’t concerned with whether equipment has been reused or recycled, or where it’s broken down into component parts

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The Green Grid Publishes New Data Center Recycling Metric

Facebook currently hosts more than 240 billion user photos, but only a small percentage of them are accessed on a regular basis. With an additional 350 million photos uploaded every day, the site has been searching for more efficient ways to manage these data, including a “cold storage” system that would host older images on low-power servers. As the Oregonian reports, the social network is currently preparing to launch three new cold storage facilities at its Prineville, Oregon data centers, with the first scheduled to open this fall. Unlike Facebook’s traditional servers, which are always powered on and ready to deliver data, the servers at its cold storage facility would be put on standby, making them ideal for older images that… Continue reading…

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Facebook building ‘cold storage’ data centers for unloved photos

HTC and O2 will sell a new “flagship” smartphone without a charger in the near future. A Micro USB to USB cable will still be included with the handset, but the mains charger will be removed. O2 says it’s making the change to avoid adding to the population of 100 million chargers that go unused by consumers in the UK.

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O2 will sell HTC’s next smartphone without a charger

Toyota’s latest GT86 commercial depicts a man trapped inside a fake CGI city who waxes monotone about the pitiful life that he only just manages to suffer. As if the scenes were ripped from your favorite existential sci-fi movie (see The Matrix , Dark City , and Inception ), Toyota’s makes one thing clear: you’re leading a false and meaningless life, and the only way out is in the driver’s seat of a GT86. Who knew freedom from dystopia could be had with no money down and zero percent APR? Continue reading…

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Toyota ad says you can break out of ‘The Matrix’ by buying one of its sports cars

From its hardware to its d ata centers , Apple is known for touting its environmentally-friendly bona fides — but the company has modified that stance when it comes to its hardware. This past month Apple pulled its 39 products that were featured in the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registry, telling the organization that it would not be submitting future items for consideration. EPEAT evaluates how much a given product impacts the environment, taking into account its recyclability, upgradeability, manufacturing processes, and energy consumption. Apple had previously touted EPEAT certification as a high point, with the company’s most recent iMacs having received the organization’s highest rating, EPEAT Gold.

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Apple pulls its products from EPEAT ‘green’ certification registry

TV network Bravo has given the green light to a new reality show that will follow the exploits of various 20-somethings as they look to make it big in the tech-centric world of northern California. Tentatively titled “Silicon Valley,” the series will be produced by Randi Zuckerberg — Mark Zuckerberg’s sister and Facebook’s former marketing director. As VentureBeat notes , Bravo began casting for the series last year, putting out a call on Craigslist for “confident professionals with big personalities.” From the brief preview clip (which you can check out starting at the 1:19 mark of the video below), it’s fairly obvious that the network succeeded at finding these people, as it looks like the show is going to focus more on outlandish… Continue reading…

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Bravo looks to Silicon Valley and lolcats for new reality TV shows

A few days ago, AOL fired the staff developing AIM, its long-running instant messaging system. Having done this, it reset user accounts, locking them out of third-party IM clients until they confirmed and updated decade-old personal information. Having done so, I was displeased at such a shameless data mining ploy and tried to cancel AOL/AIM

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Trying to close your AOL account is suspicious activity

Enrique Dans is a professor at Spain’s IE Business School and a well-known blogger who has been a fierce critic of the entertainment industry. Last summer, Prof Dans wrote a blog post, Siete motivos por los que el caso SGAE es mucho más que la propia SGAE, which set out his view that Promusicae, the

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Spanish record industry cartel sues business prof who called their system an illegal cartel, claims "threatened honor"

Here’s an abridged translation of a Imagonem interview with Heikki Holmås, Norway’s new minister of International Development. Holmås is a lifelong D&D player and LARPer who won the Norwegian D&D championships in 1989 and was sent to GenCon in Milwaukee. Holmås recounts his favorite campaigns and describes how he things RPGs and LARPs can be

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Norway’s new Minister of International Development is a D&D champ who thinks LARPs can change the worlds

The golfers among you may have noticed that the MotoACTV activity tracking watch doesn’t have a golf mode — even after an update earlier this month that added support for 40 new sports and exercises . Now we know why Motorola has been holding back — the company has just announced the MotoACTV Golf Edition, which comes in at $299.99. The Android-powered watch will track your activity and location on up to 20,000 golf courses with distance readings to hazards as well as the back, center, and front of the green. Motorola says that the Golf Edition has a “virtual caddy” that will keep your scorecard, track your clubs, record “key statistics,” and mark down how many greens you hit in regulation

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MotoACTV Golf Edition tracks distance to the green and physical activity on 20,000 courses

When Spotify launched its first wave of apps in November 2011, it made clear its goal to become “the OS of music,” a place to find, browse, and listen to million of songs. The apps have thus far been a success, amassing over 13.1 million hours of usage since they launched. Today, Spotify is set to launch a second wave of apps to help users find music to listen to, such as TweetVine, Def Jam, Filtr, Matador Records, Domino, Classify, and a handful more. Each app provides a different take on music discovery and sharing, and some even let you dig deep into the history of storied record labels. TweetVine, for example, scrapes Twitter for every “#NowPlaying” mention so you can see what people you aren’t friends with are listening to

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Spotify announces 12 ‘next generation’ apps like TweetVine, Def Jam, Matador, and Domino

Four flights of seventy-two stairs were transformed into a giant game board using 1,200 feet of wire and 48 Internet-connected tin cans decorated with green and gold helium balloons at DIY: Physical Computing at Play. These were our targets. The customized game was conceived after we invited designers and web developers Michael J. Newman and

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Library staircase delightfully transformed into live interactive game board

After witnessing the effectiveness of consumer boycotts against The Rush Limbaugh Show, corporate America has announced it is pulling support of right-wing talk radio. Ninety-eight major corporations, such as Ford, GM, Allstate, and McDonald’s, have told Premiere Networks (which distributes Limbaugh and many other right-wing radio shows) that they want to advertise exclusively on “programs

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98 major advertisers say no to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and other right wing radio shows

Ian JQ spotted this airbrushed illustration on the tailgate of a pickup truck and was inspired to draw some additional illustrations of the model who posed for it. Oh my God. I have to Draw You

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Unusual airbrushed illustration inspires cartoonist

AllThingsD is reporting Square has received the go-ahead from New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for a pilot program that will outfit 30 NYC taxis with its mobile payment technology. An initial report from the New York Times revealed that Square was scheduled to make its official presentation to the commission today, so it would seem the company’s proposal got the stamp of approval rather promptly. Whereas that original article indicated that iPads would be involved in the test run, it turns out that Square will be sticking with the iPhone as its hardware of choice for the program. Apple’s handset will be attached directly to taxi meters, and cabbies will have access to a customized version of the payment software allowing…

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Square gets the green light to proceed with NYC taxi payment program

You may have your sights set on Nvidia’s next generation of mobile processor, the Tegra 3 , but the company has another little achievement to announce today: the first smartphone powered entirely by its chips. The Mimosa X from ZTE features the dual-core Tegra 2 of old plus an Icera 450 HSPA+ modem for the baseband and RF processing. Icera was a 2011 acquisition for Nvidia that is quickly being transformed into the green team’s modem design and development house — saving Nvidia the trouble of relying on competitors like Qualcomm for its connectivity needs. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has promised that we’ll see an integrated LTE chipset this year, one that combines the best of Tegra and Icera, and today’s news is the first step on that..

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ZTE Mimosa X announced with ICS for Q2 2012: first phone to combine Tegra SoC with Icera modem

Michael Geist sez, Tens of thousands of Canadians have spoken out against proposed copyright reform in recent days that could combine the US DMCA with SOPA to create restrictive digital lock rules along with targeting of legitimate websites and website blocking. Canadians recognize that the bill will have an impact on the legitimate activities of

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Canadians speak out en masse against pro-censorship, pro-DRM copyright proposal; government ignores them

We’ve seen urban cars with a single, windshield-mounted door and we’ve seen a baby stroller that can fold itself , but this is the first time we’ve seen the two combined. It’s called the Hiriko (Basque for “urban”), and a full-sized prototype of the folding electric car was unveiled in front of the European Union Commission chief in Brussels yesterday. The tiny vehicle isn’t just a Smart car: it can fold to minimize the amount of space it takes, and three of the vehicles can fit in a typical parking spot once folded. Continue reading…

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Hiriko electric car folds up to take one-third of a parking spot, pilot program to begin next year

QuNeo 3D is an open source USB (MIDI or OSC) controller from Keith McMillan Instruments . It features a number of sliders, pads, and rotary sensors — each of which pressure, velocity, and XY location output. If that isn’t enough for you, visual feedback is supplied by colored LEDs, so each pad, rotary controller, and slider changes color dependent on the state; for instance, sliding up on a volume bar will show the bar go into the green, yellow, and red.

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QuNeo 3D USB MIDI / OSC controller hands-on

Zinc-air batteries are lighter than Lithium-Ion, cheaper to produce, non-toxic, and environmentally friendly, but currently suffer from a major shortcoming — their charge depletes far quicker than competing technologies. Eos Energy, a Pennsylvania startup, claims to have overcome this problem by developing a new electrolyte — the conductive chemical within the battery. Because of these developments, the tech could be seen in wide use outside of hearing aid batteries, where it’s currently most commonly found. Unlike most zinc-air batteries in use today, Eos’s new tech can also be recharged, which has led the firm to target grander things. By next year, it hopes to be able to produce megawatt batteries for use by electricity companies…

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Eos Energy refines the zinc-air battery

NEC has an LED-backlit 24-inch eco-friendly monitor, called the MultiSync LCD-EA243WM, heading to Japan. Sure, it comes in black or white, has a 1080p, 250-nit display, DVI, VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort inputs, some USB ports, and plenty of swiveling action. Nothing too exciting there, we know .

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NEC offers eco-friendly LED-backlit display that monitors its carbon dioxide output

[Video Link] Last Night on What’s Trending our friend and Gweek guest David-Michel Davies, the Webbys’ Executive Director, presented a fantastic Webby Talk entitled, “Staying in to Go Out: Your computer as a café, bar, water cooler, classroom, tasting room, and concert hall.”

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David-Michel Davies on What’s Trending

Boing Boing’s Rob, Maggie, and Mark, and cartoonist Ruben Bolling gabbed excitedly for over an hour about books, games, TV shows, writing implements, comic books, and more! • Maggie talks about her book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, which comes out from Wiley & Sons on April

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Gweek 029: A grab bag of games, apps, books, and sex-farce comics we love