“Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gadget in your hand?”
Getting Green With Gadgets
By Joe Hutsko
Some tips on minimizing your impact on the planet while maximizing the green that stays in your wallet in your wallet.
Turn to pages 104 & 105 in Gravy | volume 1, issue 2 | Summer 2011
or
View the two-page PDF here: Getting Green With Gadgets | Joe Hutsko | Gravy | Summer 2011.
Smart apps, smarter you
By Joe Hutsko
Smartphones are called “smart” because they do so much more than ordinary cellphones. Besides making and receiving calls and text messages, or snapping pictures and videos, smartphones let you do things you typically do on your computer—albeit on a Lilliputian scale. Pocketing either of the two most popular mainstream smartphone platforms—iPhone or Android—can often liberate you from having to haul a notebook computer to accomplish everyday tasks using your smartphone’s suite of built-in applications, or apps.
Continue reading: Smart apps, smarter you | August 2011.
My first story for TechCrunch is up:
Forceful Prediction: Apple Sunlight-Friendly Displays Would Scare The Daylights Out Of Competition
With nary a peep on the possibility of Apple baking a seeable-in-sunlight transflective display into the rumored 11.6” MacBook Air that’s expected to come floating up from the Pulpit of Jobs at Apple’s “Back to the Mac” next week, I’d like to make a pretty safe prediction (read: offer unasked-for advice): An Apple-anything with such a display would make mobile-warriors’ and tree-huggers’ hearts flutter, and competitors’ hearts shudder…
Read the full story: TechCrunch | Forceful Prediction: Apple Sunlight-Friendly Displays Would Scare The Daylights Out Of Competition
Last night my friend (and Flip Video For Dummies co-author) Drew and I crashed out in front around my iPad to watch John Cassavettes’ brilliant film “Husbands” (1970). Both of us were fading to black before reaching The End so we opted to pause and finish watching another night.
Drew this morning was saying how it would be cool if the Netflix app was available for the iPhone too so he could finish watching on the train, and low and behold, that feature (plus iPhone touch streaming) was added to the app today.
Key features of the Netflix app include:
Download the Netflix app from the iTunes App Store here: Netflix.
September 30, 2009, 9:30 AM
NYTimes.com | Green Inc.: Apple Expands Environmental Disclosures
By JOE HUTSKO
Apple last week updated its Apple and the Environment Web site to include a life cycle impact section that, the company says, accounts for its total carbon footprint of 10.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
The emissions, organized by category, include those arising from manufacturing (38 percent); transportation (5 percent); product use (53 percent); facilities (3 percent); and recycling (1 percent).
“Because 53 percent of Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions are a result of the power our products consume, we design those products to be as energy-efficient as possible,” the company stated on its new Web site, adding that “Mac OS X even regulates processor activity between keystrokes, saving milliwatts of energy.”
A recent BusinessWeek article reported that carbon emissions for Hewlett-Packard and Dell were 8.4 million tons and 471,000 tons respectively. However, both companies “exclude product use and at least some manufacturing,” the article noted, and those companies “have said that including those factors would boost their carbon totals several-fold.”
Downloadable reports for all of Apple’s existing and recently retired products provide detailed breakdowns of each product’s environmental virtues (or shortcomings) — including whether it uses mercury-free LED displays or arsenic-free display glass. Also covered are the use of toxic substances like brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chlorides, which are noxious when burned.
Apple says that all of its handheld products — iPhones and iPods — are now “PVC-free,” and that the majority of circuit boards and internal cables in its plastic-housed MacBooks are free of BFRs and PVCs. It also describes its remaining desktop, notebook, display and server products as being “BFR-free” and having “PVC-free internal cables.”
Asked whether any other electronics manufacturers are reporting the CO2 life-cycle impact for entire product lines, Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International’s toxics campaigner, said, “Not the way Apple is.”
“Others are doing some interesting reporting of their supply-chain emissions,” he added, “and HP is doing a lot of work there.”
via Apple Expands Environmental Disclosures – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.
via gGadget » Blog Archive » Apple Expands Environmental Disclosures – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com .
While everyone’s following the blogs covering Apple’s announcements today, I checked iTunes to see if there might be an iPhone update available before the show’s over.
Low and behold, I’m downloading the iPhone OS 3.1 Software Update and installing it on my iPhone 3G as I write this.
Here is what appears in the dialog after you click Download, or Download and Install:
iPhone OS 3.1 Software Update
This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
iPhone
iPhone 3G
iPhone 3GS
The update completed just as I finished writing this post, and now when I check Settings > General > About I see Version 3.1 7C144) and Carrier AT&T 5.0. Stay tuned for more details.
It happens all the time: You’re using an iPhone app and you accidentally press the Home button, which takes you home whether you like it or not. Here’s an easy trick to undo an accidental Home key press:
Keep the Home button held down, then touch and hold on the screen for two seconds then let go of the Home button. You stay in the app rather than go home.
After accidentally knocking my original iPhone off my desk, which caused the glass screen to smash into a pretty spiderweb-like pattern that, thanks to my Invisible Shield screen protector, allowed me to continue using the smart phone as I stood in line to buy an iPhone 3G when it went on sale the next day, I decided it was time to surround the new one with a protective case.
Although I initially went with InCase’s leather-wrapped Slider Elan, I later chose the InCase black Slider (pictured on the left) as my iPhone 3G’s protective partner. The case’s tight fit adds minimal thickness to the 3G, and its lightly rubberized finish provides just enough grip to prevent accidental sleights of the hand, so to speak. I’ve also used Griffin’s Clarifi for iPhone 3G, but only on the couple of occasions when I needed to take a close up snapshot, thanks to the Clarifi’s built in lens, which corrects the iPhone camera’s farsightedness.
InCase recently sent me their new Bamboo Slider for iPhone 3G, and having just finished Green Gadgets For Dummies, I welcomed the new model’s reduced carbon footprint, thanks to the case’s composition of 40 percent recycled bamboo, 60 percent polycarbonate construction.
InCase says the bamboo pulp used to create the case comes from “reclaimed bamboo shards of materials such as construction scaffolding and chopsticks.”
In hand, the Bamboo Slider feels like plastic, though a deep whiff of the case’s backside betrays plywoody hints that evoke memories of under-construction new homes and lumberyards.
Bottom line: The inclusion of bamboo is an interesting novelty, but the case’s less grippy finish was reason enough for me to stick with the lightly rubberized Slider that’s served me well since acquiring my iPhone 3G.
Since every gadget site on earth already spread the news that the iPhone 2.1 firmware update is now available to download and install there’s nothing more to say on that front in general.
But I do have a weird 2.1 update quirk to share.
After downloading and installing the update and restarting my iPhone 3G, I received the message: ”This accessory is not made to work with iPhone.”
(Also weird: When powered on the first time my iPhone 3G’s speaker is mute when I tap my password into the “Enter Passcode” screen to unlock my iPhone.)
The only accessory attached is my iPhone 3G is the Apple iPhone Bluetooth headset travel cable, and I find it hard to believe that at least some of the testing engineers at Apple aren’t users of the headset themselves, which means they’d experience the same hiccup. What’s more, the battery icon showed that the iPhone 3G was getting juice to charge, yet the Bluetooth Headset icon was missing.
Then again, my the travel cable is plugged into a powered USB hub (by Belkin), so maybe that had something to do with the bug. After all, the powered hub on its own doesn’t even recharge my iPhone 3G unless I have it plugged into my MacBook, so maybe the hub was the culprit.
Guilty as charged?
First, I unplugged the iPhone 3G from the travel cable (still plugged into the hub) and plugged it in again, and this time I received no accessory incompatibility error (and the headset icon appeared).
I wondered if maybe the bug only occurs when powering on the iPhone for the first time. To find out, I powered off the iPhone, unplugged the cable from the USB hub and plugged it directly into my MacBooks spare USB port.
I powered on the iPhone 3G and once again I received the accessory incompatibility error.
And once again I unplugged the cable, plugged it back in, and as before received no error this time (and the headset icon appeared) – but still no sound when I typed in my passcode.
I powered off the iPhone, powered it on again, and I got the error again – yet this time there was sound whe I typed in my passcode.
Weird, right?
I’d be curious to hear from others about their own Weird iPhone 2.1 Update Tales.
UPDATE (10:51 AM): Further adventures in weirdness: When I power off my iPhone 3G and plug the Bluetooth Headset travel cable into the wall charger then power on the iPhone I still get no sound when I type in my passcode, and though I don’t get the accessory incompatibly error, the iPhone Bluetooth headset icon is absent until I unplug the iPhone then plug it back in.
One thing that bugs me about the iPhone’s email program is the inability to rearrange the order of email accounts to my liking.
Unfortunately there’s no “Edit” button like Phone Favorites to drag names up or down to reorder them.
But there is a way to reorder your email accounts to your satisfaction. Here’s how:
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