a bit of green

According to Wikipedia, “Guerrilla gardening is gardening on another person’s land without permission”. The term was coined in 1973 by the Green Guerilla group that was active in the Bowery Houston area of New York. The act itself, however, dates back to at least 1649 when Gerrard Winstanley and his group of Protestant agrarian communists called “the Diggers” was active in Surrey, England. The land that is guerrilla gardened (or bewildered as Australian gardener Bob Crombie likes to call it) is usually abandoned or neglected by its legal owner and the guerrilla gardeners take it over (“squat”) to grow plants. This gesture may or may not have a political flavor to it. In our case it doesn’t, at least not consciously.

_{Walking on Roman velvet green.}

We are proud to announce that we’re running on mobile!
Since Alex got a smartphone, it bugged us seeing how weird our site appeared on a mobile screen: the layout was all messed up! With a little research we found Mobify, a mobile web platform. Mobify has a kind of studio in which one can make websites mobile-friendly on any device and then launch them, using a custom domain. Of course, you need to sign up for an account and the mobile version of the page is hosted at mobify.me, but at least it’s free!

_{(C)lovers at the campus.}

We bought the Humble Indie Bundle #2 some days ago. It is the second of a series of packages containing 5 cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) indie games.

The bundle will be available for 3 more days so if you’re interested in some cheap and intriguing little games which are far from the philosophy of mainstream games (graphics-graphics-graphics aaaand more graphics), check it out. It’s a great opportunity to try to eliminate the middleman, a deprecated notion as far as the distribution of games (or any digital media for that matter) is concerned, due to the Internet. This particular package contains the following games:

Here’s a very nice project I stumbled upon, called Creating a Greener House. It’s about the restoration of a 1928 house where great attention was given to energy efficiency. The site contains details about insulation, energy efficient heating and cooling and ventilation. A heat reclamation device is also installed in the form of a shower heat recovery mechanism. Measurements of the actual energy savings have also been made.

Energy efficient heating is, in many countries, not as highly emphasized as it should be. The energy losses due to poor insulation and wrong heating choices can be huge. According to David MacKay’s excellent Sustainable Energy – without the hot air book, heating and cooling accounts for almost 20% of every developed country citizen’s energy consumption (37 kilowatt hours per day out of an estimated total of 195 kilowatt hours per day per person). Admittedly, this percentage is a mean number for the UK and in other areas more air conditioning would be needed, but in this areas less heating is also needed thus keeping things slightly balanced. As 20% is a rather big percentage and 37 kilowatt hours is a lot of energy, it is very reasonable to try to increase the efficiency of heating solutions (and air conditioning for warmer countries like the one I live in). This can be achieved by using more energy efficient heating devices, as well as improve insulation and using heating a bit more wisely.

Remember the post about window gardens? Well, we followed our advice and started our own window garden, our precious. Here are some preliminary results:

A glimpse of our tiny window garden; starring thyme and basil.

I’m sure you’ve heard that completely detaching your devices from the power network when they’re not turned on will save you some standby power. Having to kneel down to reach to that power socket or power button can be a bit frustrating though. iGo’s energy saving wall module with integrated iGo Green® Technology automatically reduces wasted standby power by up to 85%. You can plug in your computer and other devices to save power without the hassle of unplugging your devices, great!

You can buy it from Amazon for $27.02.

What green computing is not.

In this post we will not focus on specific energy saving tips but we will rather explain the more abstract notion of green computing. According to Wikipedia, it is “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems—efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment”. Many companies have recently embraced the idea of green computing, due to environmental sensitivity or, more likely, due to the cost savings involved. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: humanity’s carbon dioxide footprint on this planet is reduced and hazardous material disposal is reduced.