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.
This week in London I remembered one of the remarkable things that Mac OS X and the Apple hardware provide: wireless access.
By this I'm not referring to the ability to access the Internet through the Mac's WiFi hardware, but rather, the ability to provide wireless access to others using one's Mac. I used it this week to get WiFi access on my iPhone while in my hotel room, so that I'd only have to pay for Internet access once (through my laptop), and avoid Apple's/AT&T's substantial roaming data charges.
For many Mac people, you already know how to do this. For the rest, well, pay attention. It's quite easy, and it can be a nice party trick for making you popular at conferences, company meetings, or other places where Ethernet access is in short supply.
Assuming you have Apple's Mac OS X 10.5, follow these instructions. (They're not much different for earlier versions of OS X.)
First, click on System Preferences. Next, click on Sharing, then Internet Sharing. You'll see a "Share your connection from" dialogue box, which I enable as "Built-in Ethernet" and then "To computers using AirPort." You can set security preferences here, as well, which is a good idea to keep unwanted lurkers off your connection...and computer.
This allows you to use your Ethernet connection to make a WiFi connection for other computers around you, Windows or Mac. It's a great solution if you happen to be in a conference room that has fewer Ethernet jacks then computers.
Is this the best reason to get a Mac? No. But it's a great utility that Apple provides through the Mac, and one that has made me very popular at conferences in the past. I even had a few Linux users shed a tear of envy that their hardware couldn't pull off the same feat. Priceless.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
When Apple's MacBook Air first came out, I was woefully unimpressed. Sure, it was plenty pretty, but it lacked the thing I needed most: a big hard drive.
Well, a funny thing has happened in the past year. I've stopped using my hard drive.
Yes, I still install applications, all of which require hard-drive space. And yes, I still use Handbrake to rip DVDs to my hard drive to watch on long flights.
But I've also started keeping all of my e-mail on my company's Zimbra server. But it's not just e-mail: I keep all of my files in my e-mail folders, too. I work with a file long enough to edit it and then immediately delete it from my hard drive once I know it's safe on my e-mail server.
In fact, as I upload photos and just about everything else to remote servers, it's becoming less and less clear why I need much of a hard drive at all.
Maybe I shouldn't be loading up my e-mail system like it's a file system. Back in early 2007 Jeff Nolan wrote about poor performance with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, quoting a Microsoft product manager who blamed the performance on people who were "misusing" an e-mail system as a file system.
As Nolan wrote, that product manager is completely wrong. Products, if their designers hope to have them endure, must live up to adoption patterns. At any rate, it's too late to go back: I like the freedom from my laptop that remote storage provides for me.
Or maybe I'll come to desire the security of my hard drive again. After watching a few friends struggle with dying hard drives, I'm not optimistic that this will happen.
So maybe, just maybe, I'm finally part of this whole "cloud" trend. I'm conservative and have never been very good at being trendy. This just happened to me. It started making more and more sense to store things remotely, because, well, they no longer felt all that remote.
You feeling the same?
Adobe announced today that Adobe AIR now runs on Linux. AIR is a cool cross-platform runtime that enables developers to create Rich Internet Applications that merge the desktop with the Web. Bringing it to Linux removes yet another roadblock to bringing disruptive applications to Linux.
This beta release of AIR for Linux isn't perfect--supported distributions only include Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8, OpenSuSE 10.3; and it lacks some other functionality--but it's a great, running start:
This Labs release of AIR has all features implemented for Linux, except support for DRM and badge installations. Major new features include support for system tray icons, keyboard shortcuts, localization, internationalized input (IME support), filetype registration, SWF and PDF in HTML, multi-monitor support, fullscreen mode, encrypted local storage, support for V4L2 cameras and printing.
Those interested can download AIR for Linux here. I've been using AIR applications for Twitter (Twhirl), word processing (Buzzword), and other uses, and love how it makes RIAs even richer by tying them in with desktop processing.
Give it a spin.
Adobe has traditionally been strong on Windows and the Mac and turned a relatively deaf ear to Linux. That's about to change, however, with Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime for delivering Rich Internet Applications to the desktop, set to move beyond its Windows and Mac OS X roots to Linux.
Better yet, Adobe is looking for Linux desktop users to serve as pre-beta testers of AIR on Linux.
I've been running a few AIR applications on my Macs and love the blend of fat client with cloud client. If we assume that this is the future of the desktop - a blend of fat and thin - then there's no reason the Linux desktop can't mount a serious competition to Mac OS X and Windows. Here's your chance to help out. Inquire within.
(Credit:
Apple)
Apple has put the "Wow" in computing, today announcing its MacBook Air. What had been rumored to be a MacBook with wireless broadband built in turned out to be nothing so pedestrian. Apple, the Arsenal of computing, surprised many with an insanely thin new MacBook Air
Intel and Apple started collaborating on the project a year ago and the result is nothing short of spectacular. Whether it's something that you'll actually want to buy is an entirely different question, however. At $1,799.00, it's not cheap, but no one buys excellence for pennies.
Here are some of the more incredible/interesting aspects of the design:
- Dimensions: 0.16" to 0.76". 13.3" screen. As demonstrated, it fits within an envelope. It is dramatically thinner than anything else on the market.
- The option of flash-based memory.
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In a sign of great things to come, we've now confirmed our first three Open Source Business Conference keynotes for 2008 (March 25-26, 2008, San Francisco). Given OSBC's increasing emphasis on IT buyers (and not merely vendor strategies), it's appropriate that all three come from successful enterprises:
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