Therefore, it was a happy surprise when one of the hosting companies I use (such as this blog), Dreamhost, announced they are carbon neutral. What this means is they’ve purchased certificates from a carbon offset provider. You can be carbon neutral by planting trees, using renewable energies, use carbon sequestration techniques, or the easy (yet effective) method of buying carbon offsets from an organization that will do this for you.

The internet, and computing usage, has a huge, and growing, impact on the environment. Companies create power stations just to power large internet companies and their hosting requirements. Therefore it is important to understand this impact and alleviate it through any of those means mentioned above.

In some ways, it is buying yourself the “Green” label, but in the end the effect is the same. You’re putting your money where the need is, saving the environment.

So the question you should all be asking yourselves: “Is my hosting provider carbon neutral?” If not, make them, or move to one that is.

Update: for the low-down on how carbon offsets reallythis informative-info-graphic from Salon. (thanks to Sean Gillies for being the sleuthy detective in finding this gem via Reddit).

Tags: environment, environmental, dreamhost, carbonneutral, carbonoffset, verdantconcepts,

In a project known as PigeonBlog, sensors in the backpacks collect data on toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, as the birds wing through city skies.

The information is then sent back to a central computer, which automatically posts a map of the pollutants’ concentration on the Internet.

The entire package costs just $250 USD and weighs 1.3oz. Not a bad size for distributing these to people to carry around as well. Apparently the sensor itself is a modified smoke detector.

Go check out PigeonBlog

Tags: pigeons, sensorweb, environment, monitoring, nationalgeographic, pigeonblog

In particular, it covers how GeoRSS can enable environment monitoring and notifications and is useful for more than (though in addition to) tracking your friends and travel photographs.

You should also see the NG article on Global Positioning Tech Inspires Do-It-Yourself Mapping Project, about OpenStreetMap.

Tags: georss, environment, nationalgeographic, geo, rajsingh, mikelmaron, timhibbard, openstreetmap, osm

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

You should also check out Sustainable Detroit, which is working to promote the idea of sustainable living. Power to them!

Technorati Tags: michigan, sustainable

I recently put together another project, the Forest Images Registry Project (or F.I.R.), for GreenerMagazine in conjunction with Dirty Greek and SustainaBlog. This project is a response to the recent US Government decision to approve the sale of US National Forest lands to raise money for rural buildings. See the recent Environmental News Network press release.

The FIR is to gather photographs and stories of visitors to these wonderful forests before they’re gone and to hopefully raise public awareness of the situation and contact their government representative with the citizen’s viewpoints.
If you would like to contribute images, check out the Forest Images Blog and join the Flickr! Group and triple-tag your images.

fir:forest=nameofforest
and/or
geo:lat=latitude
geo:lon=longitude
and/or
fir:state=statename

As a colophon, the Forest Images Registry Project site is written in Ruby on Rails (edge) and uses the Cartographer and rflickr plugins. The site is undergoing very active development, so stay tuned for some upcoming features.

Using all COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) parts, one can build a good, wifi-enabled, computer and VOIP station. Combine these computer specs with the free and distributable Wireless Networks in the Developing World, and you have very ubiquitous, low-barrier to entry, computing. (via Boing-Boing)

The total power is claimed to be:

• Computer: 10W
• Display: 10W
• Wifi: 3W
• VOIP SIP (phone) connection: 2-3W
• Total: 26W

Of course, the MacMini is purported to require only about 25W on idle, up to 40W working (without display or VOIP), and a Powerbook about 15W (30W on heavy usage).

For various reasons, they’re using Blogger to currently run their weblogs since it’s free, easy to setup, and easy to use for non-technical people.

The goal of GreenerEarth was to create a companion weblog that provided maps and locations to the various articles that will appear on GreenerEarth. The difficulty resides in the severe restrictions using an hosted blogging tool places on creating a dynamically generated maps. I wanted to allow the writers to easiliy create new posts, put in locations, and then just ‘post’. The actual page would handle parsing the post for the location data and then creating the resulting map.

The only access you have in Blogger (at least) is the main template page, and post templates. Therefore, the solution calls for a marked-up post with lots of tags, and heavy Javascripting of the DOM to dynamically create an array of locations and put these on a GoogleMap.

The result is the ability for any blog author to write a post using the template and the resulting post to have a map with the multiple (or single) locations and article body. As the user clicks on locations in the map, the detailed description shows itself and a bubble shows the summary and link to the site’s homepage.

The nitty-gritty

The post template looks like this:

The fields should be pretty self-explanatory. The GeoRSS microformat is still being standardized, and hasn’t yet been defined for marking up XHTML content. So I made an ad-hoc solution. A filled out post would then look like so:

Sustainable Diamaonds

  Diavik diamond mines are sustainable Mines
   located in the Northwest Territories.
  
homepage
Diavik diamond mine
Lac de Gras
Northwest Territories
Canada


  Some Interesting information
  about Diamond mines

If you have multiple locations, copy the template before the

“;

var marker = createMarker(locationPoints[locationPoints.length-1], i, html, mapLocation[i]);

map.addOverlay(marker);

}
map.addOverlay(new GPolyline(locationPoints));
map.centerAndZoom(locationPoints[0], 4);

}

Finally, the appropriate CSS markup also needs to be placed in the template. Modify it as you want to make it match the rest of your blog.

#map {
    float: left;
    text-color: black;
    font-size: 12px;
    }
#map .mapMarker{
  color: black;
  width: 250px;
}

#map .mapMarkerMore {
  text-align:right;
}
.location {
    font-size: 12px;
    border: 1px solid white;
    background-color: gray;
    padding-left: 5px;
    }
.location .summary {
    color: white;
    font-size: 16px;
    border-bottom: 1px solid white;
    background-color: #9ad;
    margin-left: -5px;
    padding-left: 5px;
    display:block;
    }
.location .detail {
	display: inline;
    }
.geo_name {
    font-size: 11px;
    border-bottom: 1px;
    }

.geo_city, .geo_region, .geo_country {
    display: inline;
    margin-top: 4px;
    padding-right: 3px;
    font-size: 9px;
    border-top: 1px solid white;
    text-align: right;
    }

.greenNav {
	display: inline;
	list-style-type: none;
	padding-right: 5px;
	margin: 0px;
    }
.greenNav li {
	display: inline;
	list-style-type: none;
	border-right: 1px solid gray;
	padding-right: 5px;
    }
.hidden {
    display: none;
     }