Got a window? Then you can grow your own food. A group of driven, DIY-types from around the world are helping to bring hydroponic systems home. In her TED talk “A Garden in My Apartment” (below), Britta Riley of Windowfarms — vertical food gardens, if you will — shows how a socially-driven community of 24,000 hydroponics buffs […]
Archives for November 2011
Up to 70 energy savings for smartphones by proxy
A network proxy, actually. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have devised a way to cut 3G smartphone power use by up to a staggering 74 percent. How? Rather than forcing phones to maintain a constant Internet connection, which can quickly deplete battery power, the tech uses a “bursty” approach via a specially configured network proxy. Between each of […]
Stuxnet fears hit home as Illinois water pump hack unfolds
Update, Dec. 1, 2011: False alarm! Well, at least in the Illinios water pump case. Read this Wired | Threat Level article for the real story. Still, no reason to let your guard down… This weekend, hackers made news for not only breaking into computer systems, but literally breaking a pump at a water plant in […]
Flickr re-materialized
24 hours worth, actually. Which makes the photo above that much more impressive. (Click through for more views, that picture only scratches the surface.) What you’re looking at is an installation by Erik Kessels currently at Foam in Amsterdam. It depicts 24 hours of pics uploaded to Flickr but in hard copy. “By printing all the images uploaded […]
NREL’s green data center saves $88K, improves security
We expect the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to operate efficiently. And indeed, the agency is making good on its mandate to achieve net-zero operations. According to this Energy.gov post, NREL saved $88,000 in its 2010 fiscal year by, in large part, taking a virtualization-heavy approach to IT. By consolidating servers and shifting to a […]
Google App Engine on ARM servers
HP got the industry buzzing this week when it announced plans to build server hardware based on low-power ARM processors. And while it will be a while before Project Moonshot’s tech hits data centers, that’s not stopping folks from dreaming up some big data implications. Better yet, some enterprising souls are already demonstrating what its […]
Five years of EPEAT
Underscoring how young the green computing movement is, Earth Techling has a great interview with EPEAT’s Director of Outreach and Communications, Sarah O’Brien, about the organization’s publication of its fifth annual report. O’Brien shares a nice anecdote about how far EPEAT’s come. Well, in our first year no products could meet the gold level. Leading companies like Apple, […]
HP’s ARM server ‘Moonshot’
Remember that report about Calxeda and HP teaming up for low-power ARM servers? Well, now it’s official and it even has a name: Project Moonshot. To get the industry used to the idea of computing on servers built around ARM processors, HP is laying the groundwork with a couple of initiatives. First is Project Pathfinder, which […]
SolidFire is the latest flash storage funding winner with $25M
Brisk VC activity surrounding makers of flash storage systems continues apace. The latest funding success is Solid Fire, which just added $25 million to its bank account. It’s not hard to see why it was able to pry open those checkbooks. The Boulder, Colo.-based startup combines two of the hottest trends in IT, SSDs (solid […]
