Your Electronic Life - April Gadget Cravings

I found a couple of items in the April 2008 Crave vlog to be of interest.

The Nokia N95 (first item on the vlog after the intro’s, about 40 seconds into the vlog - about 4:30 remaining) is about a neat little phone which, when running the Qik video streaming service software, can be used to do live video blogs (well, with a five-second delay), transmitted straight to your website. Talk about real-time vloging! Read more

Green Ink and Paper!

In the “I’m going Green” zone some new items have turned up that will be of ihnterest to our readers in the US. Briefly: Xerox have created a new paper which should be released in a few years. The paper has a photosensitive ink that fades within 24 hours leaving the paper reusable. Read more about this here.

This could really do a lot for recycling of fliers, posters, newsprint, concert tickets, short-term advertising messages, and others I can’t even think of because I haven’t had enough coffee yet.

Solar Energy is becoming more accessible to customers and cheaper to get solar power installed. Read more about this here. I will admit solar energy has more appeal to me than wind turbines for maintenance and visual and noise pollution reasons. Solar panels seem so much more unobtrusive and sunlight is a bit more dependable than wind.

Genocide in Us: How Creative Artists Depict the Armenian Genocide

On April 24, 1915 the Turkish government began to implement a policy that amounted to the genocide of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. On that date hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were forced from their homes, taken to Constantinople, and murdered. Read more

Green Power Generation Research

If you’re using a computer you’re most likely plugged into the national grid of your nation’s energy production company and paying a monthly bill to keep your connection alive. I’m starting to research the whole green idea and power is one of the biggies to address. I thought I’d head over to boycott-riaa.com as I haven’t visited in a while and see what they had to say and the first article I see is An Electrifying Situation by a guy who calls himself Dave. Could that be Dave Navarro? Well, I don’t know but let me tell you, he pointed out that hooking into an American Energy Company vs. an Electric Company is a much better idea and he explains why that is, and dammed if I can’t agree! So I do. Dave’s article points out that, at least in his state, surplus energy that you feed back into the national grid sets up a situation where you are paid by the Electric Company for adding to the available power supply. The calculations offered, if true, demonstrates a remarkable way to power the community and have a powerful green effect.

Closer to a Green Home

When I looked a little closer to home, I discovered that there is apparently some difficulty converting photovoltaic energy from solar cells into electical energy. Heat is pretty easy. but according to a Kiwi builder buddy, by name of Kevin, who has more than 52 years of experience in building and has built his own house to a design ahead of his time, you cannot get more than 12v DC out of a photocell - not enough to power a computer.

However, he tells me that a friend has a small wind turbine mounted on the roof of the garage at his lifestyle block and that this is generating enough power into batteries to power his computers pretty much every day. I’m going to be looking into that a bit more soon as I finish setting up establishing a legal library at Allforart.

Kevin’s house is ahead of its time in green design and accessibility. It has a wheelchair ramp and access, solar heating, a water tank that receives rain water off the roof - 3000 liters(!) on a beautiful rainy day, and a great vegetable garden which with a good compost heap coming along nicely and amply contributed to by the neighbors. Kevin designed the drainage before he built the house and laid the piping to ensure that water run-off would do the job of filling the tank. This tank cuts the water bill in half since it has been installed.

Now if he can harness the wind that blows reasonably steady up there on the ridge…free power! It’s that or find a lot of hamsters! I’m going to keep looking into this particular subject of wind-driven power generation and will let you know what I find out as it comes to light.

Exposing American Mythology

The word myth is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “a traditional story concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events; a widely held but false belief, a fictitious person or thing, an exaggerated or idealized conception of a person or thing.” Diana Secchiaroli of the Yale-New Haven Teacher’s Institute defines it as representing “a culture’s values and ideals and/or helps explain to people where they came from.” Read more