5% of printed documents never collected

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I heard this thoroughly depressing stat at a HP briefing this morning: one in 20 office printouts are simply left in the printer’s output tray, never to be seen by the eyes of the thoughtless drone who pressed Ctrl + P in the first place. 

I’m not a tree-hugging, environmental doom monger, but even my green-weary soul was alarmed at the amount of wasted paper, ink and energy such needless printing consumes. Let alone the money. 

HP has a solution to curb the printer fly-tippers called Pool Printing, which ensures the document doesn’t actually print until the person physically goes to the machine to collect it. They have to swipe a card or punch in a pin number before the printer spews out the goods.

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The planet will shortly be saved. Thank you for listening.

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Spectacular news from the Verdiem corporation. It’s offering a free tool to help to save the planet!

“Today Verdiem is announcing the availability of Edison, a free energy monitoring  application that allows eco-conscious consumers to actively control their PC’s energy consumption. Verdiem helps Brits save money on their energy bills and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from homes across the UK.”

And how does this fabulous tool work? By, erm, changing your Windows power-management settings. It gives you a little slider that you can slide between ’save less’ and ’save more’. And it changes three – yes, three! – settings: display timeout, hard disk power-down, and suspend timeout.

It does offer one feature that Windows doesn’t – you can switch between work-time and non-work-time settings based on a schedule. But a moment’s thought will reveal that there’s no point. Set your computer to suspend after two hours and, well, it will suspend after two hours. And stay suspended all weekend. One lot of settings is all you need.

Before you can take advantage of the altruistic philanthropy of Verdiem, you’ll be needing to register so it can send you an activation email.

The cynic in you might think it was a data-gathering exercise rather than a gift bestowed upon the world by a concerned company. Who knows? Anyway, it’s quite pretty, it estimates how much energy you’re saving and some people might find it useful. You can download it from here.

Should regulators step in to “green” mobile phone industry

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

As PC Pro’s resident “Eco Warrior” – a term that’s used with more than a hint of sarcasm by the rest of the team – I was chosen to attend the recent Green IT conference in London.

All the speakers gave food for thought, but one stood out in particular; James Page has over a decade’s wireless engineering experience at Nokia, and is an active member of the Green Party, too. He was also speaking independently, so was probably free to be a little more forthcoming than those there under a corporate banner. (more…)

Going green – London Underground style

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Bustling through Victoria Tube station this morning, the ticket barriers seemed a little more crowded than usual. Which is to say, rammed to the rafters, rather than merely heaving. 

What caused this extra congestion? A bomb threat? Signal failure? No, London Underground has “decided to do its bit for the environment” by turning off “unnecessary” escalators to save energy.

The very same escalators that recently had their zero-watt poster slots replaced with dozens of energy-chomping LCD screens. Which lead down to the lobby containing another half dozen, six-foot LCD screens showing bigger versions of the same video adverts. Which leads to the platforms, with six newly-installed, ginormous projectors blasting video ads on to the platform walls.

If that’s London Underground “doing its bit”, Victoria’s going to be a seaside resort before we know it.  

Work out your carbon netprint

Friday, October 10th, 2008

IT accounts for a shocking 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – that’s the same as aviation. While your desktop might be relatively frugal, it’s just the tip of the slowly-melting iceberg. Right now I’m using GMail, Bloglines, my work email, a forum which lives on a server in London and Slashdot – I’m using power all over the world. Take into account all the networking gear sitting in the middle, and the true energy usage of my PC could be astronomical.

Maybe we need to start thinking about our carbon netprint (it seems like as good a phrase as any) when we look at our carbon footprint; do you really need that Facebook, MySpace or Bebo account? It’s not just actively using these services that consumes power; a MySpace account sitting idle, not accessed for months, still requires power to store – and more than you may think. (more…)

Baylis revolutionises wind-up media player

Monday, October 6th, 2008

On the right is Baylis’ original wind-up Eco Media Player, which we’ve reviewed before here on Pro. On the left is its replacement, the Eco Media Revolution, which we haven’t.

You may notice that they’re the same size, which is a bit of a disappointment; a self-proclaiming revolutionary update could do with taking up a bit less pocket space, I think. Nevertheless, it’s still perfectly portable – just not as much as my non wind-up MP3 player is.

The wind-up handle is also exactly the same, and we got a similar charge from using it: crank like crazy for five minutes and you will get the majority of the way through a short album, while you rest your aching hand.

The software, though, looks like it’s come on a long way, which is a relief, although it’s still infuriatingly complicated to use and in need of yet another dollop of refinement. Keep your eyes peeled for a full review coming soon…

The phone data that’s a nightmare to delete

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Roughly a quarter of all phones are discarded with enough personal data left in them to identify their owner, according to a new study. Given my recent experience, I’m surprised that figure isn’t somehere in the high nineties, because deleting data from a modern phone is like trying to clear sand off a beach with a pair of tweezers. 

My esteemed editor recently handed me the Nokia E71 he’d been testing. Because he’s a stickler for reviewing kit properly, it was stuffed full of his personal data, including his Exchange email, text messages and contacts.

Once I’d sent an email to our publisher with Tim’s recommendation of a huge pay rise for the hard-working, irreplaceable, online editor, I set about trying to wipe the data.  First, I formatted the memory card, but it seems all Tim’s personal files were stored on the phone’s internal memory and, oddly, there was no obvious way to format that.

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Flight of the rocket man

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

There’s nothing quite like strapping a jet-powered wing to your back and soaring over the majestic snow topped alps at 180mph. We at PC Pro do it every morning, in between our 12,000 push ups and warm-up half marathon. Or at least we would, if we didn’t eat quite so many pies and spend half our time lookng for minuscule David Bayon down the back of the settee.

However, there is hope for the jet-powered wing part of this dream thanks to Swiss daredevil Yves Rossy (no idea how you pronounce that), who intends on crossing from Calais to Dover on just such a device. No, rowdy English tourists for this chap, just the clear open skies, smell of jet fuel and the hope of not dying horribly when the wing bursts into flames and sends him plummeting into the icy depths of the English channel.

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A first look at the HTC Touch Pro

Friday, August 15th, 2008

If you keep close tabs on the smartphone scene – and PC Pro’s reviews section – you’ll know that we weren’t too impressed with HTC’s response the iPhone 3G, the Touch Diamond a couple of months ago.

We liked the fact that it buried most of Windows Mobile’s ugliness under an attractive, finger-friendly touchscreen interface, and we liked its fantastic VGA screen. We were also keen on its fantastic web browser – Opera Mobile 9.5.

But we hated its sluggish performance. The whole point of touchscreen interfaces is that they should be responsive, but this was anything but. Hit a control on screen and, like as not, you’d have to wait a second or so before anything actually happened. It was one of the most frustrating phones we’ve ever had the displeasure to use.

Would the same issues afflict its big brother – the Touch Pro, which arrived in the Labs today?

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The Virtual Finger

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

No not the middle finger… Those who are keen followers of the articles pages here might have seen my little refugee item-ette from a forthcoming PC Pro feature: for those who haven’t, I confess my fragile ego wants me toshow it to you. Not because I took the photos all on my own (though I did, with my Sony with the busted CF door sensor that drives me nuts) but because I’ve just been through a bodge cycle on the HP ML115 that gave me the giggles.

I now find out of course, that VMWare Server isn’t officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Beta 2.0 is but that’s a whole different world, and I need Bowie, Iggy and friends to run without hassle. Searching in the usual places produces a load of whingers who don’t see why it can’t work, and almost nobody who really has the inside track…

…and one completely crazy fix. The problem is, Windows Sever 2008 won’t run with unsigned drivers, unless you press F8 on startup and choose the option which – well, runs without checking driver signing. There is no way to automate this within Windows: you can automate the opposite, so it never runs an unsigned driver: but you can’t turn the check off.

Well, unless you use ReadyDriverPlus that is. It’s not so much the need for somethign like this: it’s how it does it. Registry patch? Nah. Group Policy template? uh-uh.

It stuffs the keyboard buffer in the pre-GUI startup phase, to push in an F8 and the required number of up-arrows (plus a return) to always start server 2008 in unsigned driver mode.

How mad is that?

(and it works too…)