The International Telecommunication Union has approved a common cell-phone charger format, using what some of us already have — a mini-USB — as a global standard.
This standard means you don’t need a different charger for a new phone — changing phones frequently is a problem in its own right — so they needn’t be made, [...]
Trying to make household appliances last longer, to keep their plastic in active use and out of landfills. So when my old cordless phone’s battery wore out, I ordered one from an eBay vendor. Cheaper that way. (I care about low cost, too, to a point.)
Little would I guess la_tronics — whose appeal was free [...]
I’m not a terrible fan of plastic, unless I come up against a product that really is better made of plastic than an alternative. A toothbrush head comes to mind.
That, and the world is already filled with plastic waste. How might we make something of it?
OK, the RepRap (Replicating Rapid prototyper) is [...]
I still love the little Ubuntu Linux computer from Zareason I wrote about in December. So much that I’ll spill the beans and note that I didn’t get for myself, but for my employer. (Hi gang!)
And we’ve gotten more since.
What I didn’t mention then is that you only get the computer: no mouse, no [...]
You know how I approve of using Linux to make a computer last longer. And as I’ve said before, I’m cutting back on buying electronics to save the plastic in goods and packaging. But what if you need a new computer? This is a computer I bought for someone else, and could be a winner.
It [...]
As I mentioned in my answers to Beth Terry, I’ve given up gratuitous electronics purchases to reduce my plastic use. Not that I’m missing anything, except the expense. But since 2003, I’ve been using one version or another (the so-called “distributions”) of the Linux operating system to make the most of my home and work [...]
Rise Above Plastics already wrote about an SD flash memory card purchase at Costco, but that’s not what I was thinking about yesterday when I walked to Radio Shack to buy a 8gig SD card on sale. But it turns out that SanDisk product also was in less plastic packaging, though without the handy [...]
