The Wall Street Journal recently opined that "the inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2," causing a greater number of scientists to question the science behind global warming. Whatever your opinion in the matter, it's certainly true that the world would be better off if we wasted less energy, which is what makes open-source Ecobot so useful.
Ecobot tracks your carbon footprint
(Credit: Taxi)While programs like Amee help businesses measure their carbon footprints, Ecobot offers a personal "carbon trainer" for Mac users.
Designed by Taxi, a Canadian corporation, Ecobot is derived from Taxi's participation in the "Green for Green" competition. The program "calculates your carbon footprint by measuring the fuel, power, and paper you use," and, importantly, does a lot of this data aggregation automatically. ("Automatically" is good - heck, if we weren't so lazy, we probably wouldn't need all these vehicles to power us from Point A to Point B.)
Not only does Ecobot keep track of how many pages you print from your laptop, but it also tracks the wireless networks to which you connect and works with you to figure out how you got from one to the other, and calculates the carbon emissions required to make the journey.
Pretty slick.
Even if you're not a tree-hugging, carbon-footprint-obsessed member of the Greenimati, Ecobot is an easy-to-use, unobtrusive way to monitor how much carbon your lifestyle requires. Of course, it only works if you're a Mac user.
Even so, despite Dell's insistence that Apple's Macs aren't as green as Apple claims, Ecobot lets you be as green as you want to be...and brag about it to anyone patient enough to listen to you.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But please consider the environment before printing out my 3,000-plus tweets.
Tesla Motors announced version 1.5 of the drive train for its $100,000 electric Roadster on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Fisker Automotive leader Henrik Fisker compares his company's upcoming Karma to the Apple iPhone.
What's going on here? Is the auto industry being taken over by Silicon Valley geek speak?
Marc Fleury, a geek's geek if there ever was one, opined on this very subject on Wednesday, as he reacted to the news of the upgraded Tesla drive train.
Fleury, a cashed-out entrepreneur who sold his company, JBoss, to Red Hat for more than $400 million two years ago, has a vested interest. He's No. 215 on the waiting list to receive a Roadster.
He knows that to get the coolest car on the block, he has to be an early adopter. But there's still something worrisome.
"Truth be told, when I visited their shop, I was a bit scared. It felt more like a Silicon Valley hacker den than a real car factory," Fleury wrote. "I wanted less U.S. hacker, more German engineer. I mean, after all, I am going to be driving this thing, and the fact that they call their drive train version 1.5 and a lot of the car is still 1.0 is enough to send a shiver down my software engineer spine."
Perhaps more troublesome is the delay: the delivery date has been pushed from February to December.
If there's one thing that following software and IT gadgets has made us all used to, it's overambitious product road maps.
As Fleury says, never mind the cool tech--I just want my car now.
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