Archive for November, 2008

Nintendo not so green….

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Posted 26 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category News

You might have read my earlier post about Wii being the greenest console among the 3 big gaming consoles. Though that might be true in terms of power consumption, the company that manufactures Wii, Nintendo, scored pretty bad in eco friendly list produced by GreenPeace International. According to Greenpeace, Nintendo remains in last place with a pitiful 0.8 points out of 10,
scoring zero on all e-waste criteria. The company has banned phthalates
and is monitoring use of antimony and beryllium and although it is
endeavouring to eliminate the use of PVC, it has not set a timeline for
its phase out. Nintendo discloses carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from
its own operations and commits to cutting CO2 emissions and other
greenhouse gases by 2% over each previous year. However, Nintendo
admits that an increase in business led to a 6% rise in CO2 emissions
in 2006.

Microsoft is the next worst offender, though they are 2.1 ahead of Wii.

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Wii the greenest of 3 consoles

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Posted 24 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category News

I’m happy that I bought Wii instead of Playstation 3 or Xbox 360. Though the graphic quality of the games that came with Wii were not good, it’s much more enjoyable with the Wii remote than the other two. Now there is one more reason to be happy about Wii. If you are energy conscious, either due to budget problem or you want to be greener, Wii is the greenest of the 3 consoles. Ofcourse, not buying any does more good.

According to a study by Natural Resources Defense Council, Video game consoles nationwide use about as much electricity in a year as every home in San Diego combined. If you leave your Xbox 360 or Sony Play Station 3 on all the time, you can cut your electric bill by as much as $100 a year simply by turning it off when you are finished playing.

With more efficient devices and by utilizing existing power-saving features, consumers could save more than $1 billion a year on utility bills and reduce as much global warming pollution per year as the tailpipe emissions from all the cars in San Jose.

On average, the report found that Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 use large amounts of electricity – 150 Watts and 119 Watts respectively – including much more power than their prior generation of game consoles.
These two systems can each consume more than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year if left on all the time, which is equal to the annual energy use of two new refrigerators. The Nintendo Wii, however, uses significantly
less power when on – at less than 20 Watts – and actually uses slightly less power than the previous generation of their console.

The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 also operate as high-definition video players. When they are used this way, the consoles continue to operate at nearly peak energy levels, even after the movie ends, unless the
device is turned off. The Playstation 3 uses five times the power of a stand-alone Sony Blu-ray player to play the same movie.

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GMail themes

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Posted 21 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category General

You might have read all over the net about the new themes setting for GMail. It wasn’t rolled out to everyone. Google is rolling out the themes in stages. Some people got it yesterday. I got it today for my GMail account, but I haven’t got it in my Google Apps accounts. There was a message when I logged on to my GMail account that I can set the themes through the themes tab under Settings. There are around 31 themes available. GMail now looks different though I’m not sure if it looks better.

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OHUG website redesigned with Joomla

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Posted 21 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category Technology

I like Joomla, the open source content management system and I use it for the websites I create including my home page. I use Joomlapolis community builder for user management and Fireboard for forums. I got an email today from Oracle HCM Users Group (OHUG) (I’m a member of that group) that their website was redesigned and told me to reset my password. When I went to their website, the website design, user managerment and the new forum looked familiar. I then found out that they are using all 3 applications I mentioned earlier (Joomla, Community builder, Fireboard). The website looks nice and sleek and it’s better than the old one.

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Busy working on user access re…

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Posted 20 Nov 2008 — by misc
Category General

Busy working on user access restriction

Google Android Garage Door Opener

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Posted 19 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category Technology

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote in his blog that he got his Android phone to work as a garage door opener. He hooked a webserver to his garage door opener. He wrote an Android service which starts and stops wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for his house.

When his house is in range, it sends a HTTP request to his garage door opener’s webserver (HMAC-signed timestamped URL, for non-replayability/forgeability if sniffed) and opens his garage door. The source code is available for download here. Isn’t that cool?

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Fashion your Firefox

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Posted 18 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category Technology

Fashion Your Firefox is part of the Mozilla addon site, but it tries to simplify scrolling through the addons by picking popular addons and dividing them by category. Though it doesn’t have all the addons and it might miss some important or interesting ones, it makes it easier for end users to locate the addons they needed. Give it a try.

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Virus infects hospitals

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Posted 18 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category News

This is what happens if big institutions and hospitals run Windows for their mission critical and day to day activities.

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Bought a Wii finally

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Posted 18 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category Time Pass

I finally bought a Wii from Best Buy today for only $9. ;) I paid the rest using my credit card points. I’m eagerly waiting to go home and set it up tonight.

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For a change – 64 bit Flash player in Linux first

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Posted 17 Nov 2008 — by Arun
Category News

Adobe is planning to release an alpha version of 64-bit flash player today. It’s going to be initially released for Linux platform and will be made available for other OSes later. It’s nice to hear that a major application is going to be released for Linux first before it’s released for Windows or Mac. It’s good to know finally that 64-bit Linux is getting flash support. I tried 64 bit Ubuntu couple of years before and dropped it later. This was one of the reason.

Source: CNet.

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