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Review: Cyber Clean
Cyber Clean looks and feels like silly putty (and even comes in a similar small plastic pot), but it's the product's smell that gives it away - the faint whiff of (non-drinkable) alcohol means it must be a cleaning product.
In this case, it's a keyboard cleaner - any kind of keyboard, in theory, can be cleaned with this stuff. The way it works is that you remove it from the pot and press it flat and hard against the surface to be cleaned. Leave it there for a few seconds, then lift it away and with it will come all the dust and dirt that's built up between or under the keys.
We tried it on a variety of keyboards including several desktop and notebook models, as well as mobile and standard telephones. It worked reasonably well in that a certain amount of dust and particles were brought up each time. You can fold the substance over and use it again quite easily because the dust and dirt is absorbed into the material itself.
But it does feel a bit... funny, lifting away all that dirt and simply folding it into the putty, then using the same (now dirty-ish) putty again. But it continued to work and, the manufacturers claim, adds a layer of bacterial protection as well (obviously, it's harder to test that bit). It gets progressively murkier in colour the more it's used, and there's a handy colour chart on the side of the pot to tell you when it needs to be replaced.
The product still left a bit of dirt under most of our test keyboards, although on the very dustiest it got rid of a fair amount of the dust in the first couple of presses. This is a good alternative to the other easy cleaning option (using a compressed air spray to blast the dirt out), but it isn't as thorough as the best (dismantling the whole thing and putting it in the dishwasher). Clearly, it has its benefits in terms of time and effort, although at £20 for four pots, it isn't cheap.
What to do with old printer cartridges
I do my best to recycle old printer cartridges. That is to say, I have a big bag full of them that I will get round to giving to a recycle point someday. But I have occasionally wondered what happens to them. Many will no doubt be refilled and end up on a shop shelf again. This seems like a good idea; the intricacies of the modern cartridge seem far to high tech to throw away after just one use.
Well, it seems that there is another use for old cartridges that just can't print any more, making building material.
According to Ecogeek, Lexmark has been turning old cartridges into eLumber, a replacement for wood in buildings. Unfortunately it costs 20% more than ordinary wood, but it's a good idea. And building your house out it is perhaps the ultimate in dedication to technology.
Another reason to dislike malware writers
Fair enough there are precious few reasons to like them as it is, but as the McAfee Avert Labs points out, they may also be making a substantial contribution to global warming.
While I hope no one is printing spam out and wasting paper, the load placed on the internet in general sending and blocking spam uses a considerable amount of energy. In fact the writer even suggests that the amount of energy wasted by home computers infected by the most recent Storm outbreak would power his house for 8 years. And that's without considering the load on ISP servers and the like.
There's not much we can do about the writers themselves, but keeping a computer clean of viruses and the like is not just for personal benefit, but everyone's.
If you haven't already, take a look at:
Ebooks - not merely a novel idea
Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader may not have even been launched here in the UK yet, but it's produced a huge volume of press - much of it negative. A very readable case in point comes from the Guardian's Steven Poole - who, as a regular contributor to Edge magazine is certainly no Luddite - who has produced a list of "minimal list of features that any successful ebook device must eventually have".
Personally - and, I should point out, before having actually seen a Kindle in the flesh - I've got mixed feelings. It certainly has many disadvantages - including a slab-like design that seems not so much crafted as sliced from the wall of some underground electronics mine - but, be it the Kindle or the Sony Reader, I can't wait for a proper, usable ebook reader to take off.
The thing is, I really like books - and, sadly, not just reading them. For some unknown reason, books - like only Compact Discs - have some kind of unholy hold over my mind in that I find it impossible to dispose of them. Video games can be traded-in and unwanted items of consumer electronics can be ebay-ed, but books and CDs are doomed forever to lurk in huge, dusty piles on top of, to the sides of, underneath and around my poor, beleaguered, bending set of bookshelves. And on the table. And next to the microwave. And under the bed. It's ridiculous, but I just can't bring myself to get rid of books, and not just the good ones - even those novels that rather disappointed, and those that were so bizarrely fixated on tennis that I struggled to get past the first 100 pages are doomed to lurk around my flat for evermore.
And let's not forget that paper books, for all their many advantages, have many significant problems that can be overcome by electronics. For one, they're bulky - a deliberately pretentions copy of L'Etranger might slip nicely in a pocket, but others are completely impossible to read on, say, a train, a sofa, or anywhere else for more than the ten minutes it takes for your arms to go dead from supporting 400-odd sheets of dead tree. Books get wet and turn into a giant papier-mache paperweight. Books get damaged or abused by the people who inexplicably think that it's acceptable to turn the pages down as some form of iron-age substitute for the humble bookmark. Books fall apart over time as the spine glue disintegrates, leaving you with a pile of muddled, yellowing sheets. Books don't work terribly well in the dark, except perhaps as some sort of improvised weapon.
And then there's convenience. A few days ago I was facing the eternal dilemma of all air travellers - what to fit into an unfeasibly tiny hand luggage allowance. After half of the space was used up by items that I can't afford to entrust to the lunacies of international air baggage handling (laptop, camera, notebooks) I found myself stuck with a choice: do I pack one single novel, or an MP3 player containing 200 albums and a Nintendo DS? Faced with 11 hours to kill, the novel went in the hold. An ebook reader stacked with a couple of novels might have fared better.
So, here's my own, rather shorter list of demands. For me to buy an ebook reader, it'll need:
- To not be tied to any one bookshop or format.
- To be utterly clumsy-fool-proof. I'll drop it. Regularly. It needs to survive.
- 20-hour battery life with the screen illuminated.
- Display books in an OTF font of my choosing, not one that's fixed (in case the chosen font is vile)
- To hold 20 200-page novels, with an expansion card slot
- To cost less than £200
Wishful thinking this may be, but I have high hopes for 2008.
more efficient power supplies
One thing that sometimes gets forgotten when discussing power saving is efficiency. This is the idea behind power saving light bulbs. They convert more energy into light and less into heat than old style bulbs.
Ecogeek has covered this recently on the subject of computer power supplies. I was quite amazed to read that as much as 50% of the power consumed by the power supply goes into heat and not into the computer.
That may change as Energy Star, the organisation behind the stickers often seen on monitors are now requiring 80% efficient power supplies.
The catch, well apparantly they cost $20 more. Given the power savings, that would be made back quickly in reduced power bills.
New life for old computers, and their OS
So along come two green computing stories one after another, just like buses.
Microsoft has decided to add some new licences for companies wanting to sell off old computers with the introduction of the Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher program.
Anything Most things that make computers more accessible and cheaper is a good thing, and it's easiest by providing Windows.
Disposing of the computers while staying on the right side of the WEEE directive might add some complication to the situation though.
Solar powered Bluetooth headset
I haven't covered much on green issues for a while, so this caught my interest this morning, a solar powered Bluetooth headset.
It's a clever idea, although the spec list is silent as to how long it takes to charge, given the small panel size and the power requirements of Bluetooth.
Perhaps I'm missing the point. This looks like a good way to increase the battery life of the headset, and it sounds like it's been done without a dramatic increase in weight.
Then again, maybe it's a plot to force people to wear their headsets outdoors. The closest to that I've ever come is in the car, and even then I've wished for blacked out windows.
Recharge gadgets by breathing: Friday fun
If you don't mind a few wires peeking from under your jumper, this might be a cheap way to charge gadgets.
Made from old CDROM drives, it uses the motion of breathing to drive some gearing linked to a small generator.
The downside is that it doesn't actually generate that much electricity. According to Ecogeek, it will take around 24 hours to charge a mobile phone
Can Google be greener?
An interesting story did the rounds in the office a little while when a website suggested that if the background to the Google homepage was black it would reduce the amount of electricity used by monitors across the world.
Google has done some thinking and replied, saying that it wouldn't actually make any difference. Or, it may even increase the power consumption. Detailed results from the study are available if you want figures.
It makes sense for flat panel displays as the light behind the screen is always on, so the colour of the picture doesn't make much difference. Older CRT monitors might see some savings but the real savings come from tweaking the power saving options in Windows to put the computer into a low power mode sooner.
I've found the Local Cooling utility helpful for this. It has the added motivator of telling you how much energy you have saved since installing it. So far, I've saved 3.324 trees, 30.10 Gallons of oil or 62.KWh of power. It's surprising how quickly the savings mount up.
Do you shut your computer down at night?
One of the problems with the immediacy of email and instant messages is that there is the temptation to leave the computer on 'just in case'. Or, it's to avoid the frustration of waiting for Windows to start first thing in the morning.
The Code Project has the result of a survey asking this question and a little surprisingly only half of the voters turn their computer off.
Of course, if you are using Vista, you may not be turning the computer off when shutting down. Individually this probably doesn't use much power but when you consider the millions of computers in the world it quickly adds up.
My solution is somewhere in the middle. I do turn my computer off at night but I use hibernation rather than a complete shutdown. It's not a perfect solution for Windows XP as regular restarts still seem to be a good idea, but that's something I can do at lunchtime.
The only problem is that Hibernation is not always immediately obvious on a computer.
If you use Windows XP and have the shut down menu with icons for Standby, Turn Off and Restart, hold down shift to change Standby to Hibernate. That's after enabling Hibernation of course.
Left click on the Start button and then on Control Panel. Click on Classic view and then double click on Power Options. Click on the Hibernate tab and then in the box marked enable hibernation. There is a certain amount of hard disk space required but if you can't spare that much it's time to get a bigger hard disk or make some more space anyway.
