Thursday 25 January 2007

Firms helped to make PCs greener

Useful piece from BBC NEWS | Technology section on how firms can helped to make PCs greener.

The Green Advisory Service will help firms improve their environmental profile, hopes IT firm Computacenter.

Its research found that a single PC left on overnight and at weekends racks up an annual electricity bill of £53. In addition a typical PC left on for 24 hours a day, 220 days of the year, is responsible for up to a tonne of CO2 over a 3-year period.

Wednesday 24 January 2007

Embedding Videos from Google Video

Clients wanted to know how easy it was to embed video onto their own web site froom Google Video or You Tube. Picked this one at random and couldn't believe how great it was.

Basically its kids in wheelchairs taking over a skateboard park and pulling tricks - well worth waiting for the guy doing a backflip



Monday 22 January 2007

Flight ban for anti-Bush T-shirt

The BBC News site reports that a passenger was barred from a Qantas airlines flight for wearing a T-shirt depicting US President George Bush as a terrorist as he was considered a security risk.

Silly me, I thought terrorists were meant to blend in, not stand out

Google Granted New Similarity Patent

According to Bruce Clay, Google has filed a new patent that checks to see how similar web pages are on a site. If a page is deemed to be too similar, Google will choose not to index it.

So what does this mean? It should hopefully take out a lot of the spam search sites that contain thousands of pages which are virtually indentical. It also means that if implemented, sites will need to have plenty of unique content on every page.

Sunday 21 January 2007

Workers leave their green habits at home

Interesting story from the Guardian about workers who turn off lights and computers and adopt other green practices at home often fail to do the same in the office because they are put off by their employers' lack of action, a report said today.

You've got to wonder whether people are either too scared of their co-workers reactions or embarrased that they are being labelled a hippy to make a fuss about other people. That said, how much effort does it take to make sure your PC is switched off before you go home.

Storms will worsen, climate scientists admit

While the rest of the UK remains obsessed with Celebrity Big Brother, the Observer brings us even more bad news about global warming. According to the story...

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

Hopefully news that companies such as Tescos are going to show the amount of carbon used to produce each food and Marks and Spencers are labelling which foods have been flown in, will start to convince the British public to fly a little less, walk a little more and not leave everything on stand by