Off you go… into the purple yonder!

This article is a very good read about power supply efficiency and what Google is trying to do to improve the quality of the average PC power supply. More power to them!
I’ve long wondered why we don’t have a centralized source of 12V or so in the average home. Electronics generally don’t require high voltage, [...]

Anders F Björklund’s “I am…” mashup is hilarious:

Intel has released powerTOP, a tool to help analyze which applications are using (too much) power. Particularly helpful if you have a laptop and want to extend battery life. Very nice.

The New York Times has an interesting article about how Norway is divesting some of its huge pension fund based on ethical considerations – in this particular case, Wal-mart’s turning a blind eye to child-labor at its suppliers, and its anti-union stance.
It’s refreshing to see a huge investor apply ethics deliberately. It’s also particularly [...]

20,000 pictures and roughly 5.5 years after I got my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 995, I’m ready to finally retire it in favor of a Coolpix S10. Both cameras are of course from Nikon’s famous ’swivel’ range – once you use a swivel camera, you don’t want to go back to an ordinary [...]

Ars technica published a story that exposes the reports by Reuters and AP earlier in the week about OLPC ’supporting’ Microsoft Windows as, well, a load of nonsense.
Says Walter Bender of OLPC:
“We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. [...]

So it’s official, Dell is going to start shipping machines with Ubuntu Feisty preloaded by the end of May. This is great news. Check out the vlog by Mark Shuttleworth (in Ogg Theora format!) for more background information.
The most important part of this announcement is this, in my opinion:
Dell updated its policy on driver support [...]

In an editorial on Economist.com, the case against DRM is made. Here’s a nice quote:

Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying [...]