Green Tech Girl

Just what we need – another reason to upgrade our televisions and create more electronic waste! Though, at least this TV will save some space in the landfill once it’s thrown out. It’s the new LG super flat flatscreen. It is less than 7 millimeters thick. There’s no official name for it. Just think of it as the skinny jeans of the TV world:

So what is worse for the environment? Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader, which ends up creating e-waste when all is said and done? Or paper books, which obviously use up a heck of a lot of paper?

I’m not entirely certain an electronic book reader is all that much better than paper books environmentally speaking. I’m sure the statistics on book-making are staggering when it comes to trees and whatnot, but what about the batteries, electronic ink, plastic, and other toxic goodies that go into a Kindle? At least when you are done with a book, you can give it to someone else to read. When your Kindle is done, i.e., the thing has fried and no longer works, it’s off to the landfill, no easy way to recycle.

Mike Adams over at Natural News has another gripe with Kindle – Amazon.com can control the content and delete your books for whatever the reason. And you know, that is enough of a reason to have a hardbound copy of books that are truly important to you.

Mike’s solution to the problem, however, is to buy up books, rip them apart, scan them in, and create your own e-books. But really…this is not a good environmental move…just look at what’s involved:

I have a much better solution for consumers: Just buy the books at a local bookstore, chop off the binders, scan them and OCR them into text files. Then you can read them on any device (such as a Sony Reader, or your laptop, or whatever).

Of course, it’s a big operation: A good book binding chopper costs $1500 – $2000. A good double-sided scanning machine that can handle large books costs another $3000 or so. Decent OCR software costs another $300, and then you have to go through the song and dance of actually OCRing the files on a Windows computer somewhere. Not many people are willing to go through this trouble to read some books. But I am. Of course, I have other uses for the same equipment, so it’s easier for me to justify. Today, I have more than 1,500 books that I’ve scanned into text files. They all fit on an SD card that plugs right into a Sony Reader. (This is what I carry with me when I travel.)

OK, Mike, that is total overkill! You know, I don’t travel that much, but generally, one book or two is sufficient. Certainly not 1,500. Your mileage may vary.

I have seen Kindles in action and they do look pretty tempting though. If they can come up with one that’s not perpetually tethered to the mother company, I might be interested for certain types of books and other applications. Otherwise, I am happy with my old-fashioned hard-bound books, seeing as I’m not sure that going either way is environmentally “better.”

Nothing like hearing a review of an old Sony Walkman from a 13-year-old kid to make a Generation Xer feel realllllly old. After trying a Walkman for a week (in lieu of an iPod), the modern teenager conclusion is this:

Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realise that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player. You can almost imagine the excitement about the Walkman coming out 30 years ago, as it was the newest piece of technology at the time.

Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.

Personally, I’m relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

Having said all that, portable music is better than no music.

Geez oh pete. I’m a dinosaur! I still have a Walkman lying around as well as a portable CD player! And those CD players are actually bigger than the tape players.

I’ve kept a Walkman because I do have some cassettes I like to listen to once in a while. (At this point, mostly self-help things, as my audio as moved to MP3 for the most part.) The “Walkman” in question is actually a Panasonic cassette player, a “sports” version, in bright yellow with black rubber grips. It’s one of those you could throw into a pool and it would still work.

So I guess I have some nostalgia for those rugged Walkmans and clones that were designed to withstand places like the beach and your neighborhood pool. iPods are almost too slick and technological. I’ve dropped that darn Panasonic cassette player 50 times or more and it still plays 15 years later. I seriously doubt my iPod would survive such a beating.

So should we just chuck our old electronic portable devices out the window and fill up more landfills? Or gift them to our progeny, giving them a taste of electronics gone by?

As I’ll probably say here 100 times, it is much better to rescue an old computer and make it useful than to simply toss it out into the garbage. Linux makes this easy – er, well, kind of easy, depending on the distribution and your tolerance for troubleshooting. While more and more Linux versions are requiring more and more computing power, thankfully, not all of them suffer from the never ending quest for software progress.

Puppy Linux is one of the lean, mean Linux distributions specifically designed to work well on older as well as newer hardware. There’s an extremely small version without a lot of added software, and a more “bloated” version that includes Seamonkey browser and email suite.

I was looking for a new Linux distribution to try on my old Pentium III laptop. I had PCLinuxOS 2007 on it and it ran pretty well, but became concerned over the future usefulness of this distribution on my old hardware, due to KDE 4 looming as a potential future for PCLinuxOS. (Though, PCLinuxOS is actually sticking with KDE 3.5 I believe for the forseeable future.) I tried Linux Mint on my PIII, and it worked pretty well until it stopped recognizing my monitor resolution for some bizarre reason. Then it started to hang. Who knows why.

So I thought I’d give Puppy a try. Sure, there is “Damn Small Linux” but the Puppy logo is a lot cuter. OK, that wasn’t really the reason – I had just heard Puppy had a lot of fans and felt it was worth a shot. (more…)

Just a quick note to express my frustration that computers seem to have a clock that kills them just a little bit after the one-year warranty is up. Maybe that means more money for the computer makers, but it’s just soooo much electronic waste. I have an old Pentium II that was custom built 10 years ago and the darn thing still works. It’s been there as a backup of my backup computer, in case nothing works and I need email. I guess they don’t make them like they used to.

I have an old Sony Vaio laptop, a Pentium III. I had installed the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on it back in December. It was working OK but the computer was starting to freeze at odd moments. The breakdown would inevitably occur after a very ominous KACHUNG KACHUNG sound from the hard drive.

I wasn’t sure if it was the Linux distribution causing the problems. I had heard from a friend that PCLinuxOS was a very good Linux distribution that happened to run very fast, particularly on older computers. So I downloaded it (Linux is, after all, free) and installed it. No go. The computer was now worse off. (more…)

Another good quiz from the Sierra Club:

How Green is My PC?

The amazing “picture within a picture” photographs on Chris Jordan’s website show us in stark visuals how much waste we create on the planet on a daily, hourly and minute-by-minute basis. All the pictures are chilling, but the one that got me the most was the one depicting “426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.”

A half a million cellphones retired each and every day in the United States? Geez oh pete! What are people doing with these cellphones? Dropping them out of 10-story windows? I’ve had mine for a few years now. Let’s get over our constant upgrade addiction, shall we?

The Sierra Club has a quiz on the energy efficiency of various television technologies. You can take the quiz here. (I got a high score even though I guessed on many of the answers.)

I was interested to find out that my guess that it’s better to keep my old CRT than trade it in for a large widescreen was right – keeping the CRT is probably the more eco-thing to do. Why? (more…)

I just bought my first printer in nine years. Yes, that’s right, nine years. When I say I am anti-consumerism, I really mean that. If something works, I don’t just throw it out to get something new. I have a perfectly good 1994 HP LaserJet that still does the bulk of my printing. In 1999, I bought an Epson color inkjet. That was the last printer I purchased. I wasn’t using it that much, but it, along with an old printer/scanner combo a friend gave me, finally bit the dust.

So I went to Costco and got a new Canon all-in-one printer for around $100 with tax. This thing is amazing. It prints, it scans, it copies, and it faxes. And excuse me for sounding like an old fart here, but back in the day I used to own a printer, a copier, a fax machine and a scanner. Trying to find homes for these items in my then one-bedroom apartment was a challenge. My home copier was actually situated on the top of my fridge. (more…)