Green internet?

I've been reading a lot lately about how the internet is going green. "Green"? I say. They'll put that green spin on anything to sell something. I remember when computers started being used in offices and people were starting to be able to afford them, and the promises that it would save paper and time. Well, frankly, that didn't pan out. As much as I try, I think there is more paper printed than ever before.

So I couldn't really understand how the internet wasn't green already, apart from the pile of paper that we waste trying to print something out.

Well, apparently when you think about it, our computers use quite a bit of energy. We are all switching to flat screen monitors that are meant to be energy efficient, and turn them off completely when we aren't using them, right? What about the servers that we connect to in order to see those gazillions of websites? Now that is where the energy is really being consumed.

How are they consuming so much energy? All of our banking, google searches are done through Data Centres. these are generally a facility used to house computer systems. A moderate sized data centre will consume about 1 megawatt of electricity, but many of the larger facilities like Google can require more than 20 megawatts to keep it running. That's enough to power 15,000 homes. These larger data centres have computer servers that are packed into warehouses. The servers heat up so need a large amount of electricity first of all just to cool them using air conditioning. Lighting will also use up electricity. And the busier these servers get, the more electricity that is needed as more heat is generated.

So a lot of these companies are trying to reduce their costs as well as trying to reduce their footprint. A company called Peer 1 is starting work on a new data centre in Scarborough that they say will be their largest facility and it's most efficient. And the way it will do it won't add much to their building costs. They'll pump in cold air from outside (this is Canada, after all) for most of the year to cool their servers. At the same time the heat from those servers will by recycled and vented to offices in the building that need heating, eliminating the need to pay for heating. They will construct barriers to keep the areas that need to be cool from those that need to be warm. They will also have a "cool roof", which is a roof made of light coloured material that will reflect the sun, rather than absorb it. They are also considering a rainwater collection system as a way to irrigate their surrounding property.

These sound like sensible ideas without a solar panel or wind turbine to be seen. It would be nice to see in the next decade or so, these ideas becoming the norm for regular properties, not just energy gobbling companies.

New Search er Decision Engine

There is a new "decision" engine out called Bing that is apparently a replacement for Live Search. It looks a lot like Google, only with a pretty picture in the background. I'm not sure if that changes every day, as I only found it. I did a quick search and it came up with what I wanted. So that's something. Robert X Cringely (I'm not sure if that is his real name, but he's pretty humorous)writes a pretty funny review of it.

He mentions another "decision engine" called Hunch that asks you a lot of questions in order to help you make a decision about something. Doesn't sound like the time it would take, and it could help them with selling your answers somewhere down the line.

Just ask your Mother, she's likely keen to tell you what to do anyway.

Canada falling behind

The OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) released a report that revealed that Canada has one of the slowest and most expensive consumer broadband networks in the developed world. Canada was compared with 29 other countries on a range of metrics. These included broadband availability, pricing, speed and bandwidth caps. At first our numbers don't seem so bad with Canada ranking 9th out of 30 countries for broadband penetration.

"Yet, the situation becomes far more troubling once the OECD delves deeper into Canadian pricing and speed.
Canada is relatively expensive by OECD standards, ranking 14th for monthly subscription costs at $45.54 (US) compared to $30.46 (Japan) and $30.63 (UK). This high price may explain why many Canadians with access to broadband are choosing not to subscribe." Michael Geist

Mixhael Geist has gone before the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to discuss the state of telecommunications in Canada. And his speech is posted here. As he says, "Canada was once a global leader, yet today the marketplace suffers from high prices, slow speeds, and throttled services that have led to a decline in comparison with peer countries."

When price and speed are compared, that is when Canada slides to the bottom of the list, ranking 28th out of 30 countries, only ahead of Mexico and Poland.

To read the OECD press release (but not necessarily understand it the first time round) click here.

More interesting websites

Finding out information on the internet is sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack. You have to be very good at searching, using the right keywords, very persistent, trying different combinations of words or phrases, and sometimes just lucky. It's nice to hear about sites from time to time that are handy, should you ever need them.

Under the category of "I wouldn't have even have thought of that" is a site dreamed up by a guy who saw an obscure comment on a site about secrets. From this he created a blog called I Found your Camera What a novel idea. If you find a SD card or an entire camera, and don't know who it belongs to, you can send a couple of photos from the camera to the blog and the designer will post the images and a little message about where you found it.

Gas Buddy is a site that you can go to if you want to find out what the prices are and whether or not they are going up soon. You can look for the cheapest gas in your area.

The last site is a new one with an awkward name. It's called Wolframalpha.com. It's a site where you can put in mathematical formulas and get the answer, put in your birthdate and find out what was happening on that day or how many days you've been around. It's no real competition for Google, but the maker of it claims to cut the haystack a bit and get to the information you want a bit faster. This site is interesting if you are into math and science, but the jury is out on whether the rest of us would find it useful.

Virus programs

I just wanted to mention that AVG and Adaware both have new FREE versions available. I've been to a few client's homes to find that they still have two versions back because they were directed to a page that wanted them to pay for a new version.

AVG is created by a company called Grisoft. But if you go to free.grisoft.com you will always be directed (within about four clicks, they don't make it easy!) to the download.com site where the free up to date version is located. Similarly, Adaware, a program for Malware, is created by lavasoft, and I go to lavasoftusa.com to be directed to their download.com page to download. AVG's current version is 8.5 and Ad-Aware currently is supporting their anniversary edition.

Don't be fooled though, once you get to the final download page, you have to read carefully where the download you want is. Sometimes a flashier, more colourful button will beckon you to download, and it isn't usually the program you thought you were downloading!

Don't forget please, to install any current versions of virus software before installing a new version. And restart your computer between the uninstall process and the new installation.

Be afraid, be very afraid

I have noticed that there is a lot of interest in the sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and it grows even bigger. I find it funny that even though I am computer savvy and enjoy my work, I can't drum up any interest it these social networking sites. It's hard to get excited with the idea that people you left behind in high school can now look you up and revisit your past. I have friends that are addicted to their Facebook pages to the detriment of the relationships in the here and now.

But the other thing I worry about is privacy. Especially since I appear to have a stalker. It's a bit sad, but this person seems to search the web looking for items about me. I'm not particularly interesting, nor am I famous, but it is scary to know that someone can find out information about you that you have thought was fairly private and safe.

And I am glad that I don't subscribe to Facebook, or Twitter to people about the boring details of my day. And if I want to find out what my friends are doing, I call them up and ask them!

That doesn't mean I don't like the technology that we have to keep in touch. Far from it. We are able to talk often to our relatives in Scotland and London easily and it is just like the cartoon family the Jetsons portrayed that we can view them smiling at the same time!

Just remember that everything you write on Facebook and sites that are similar are read by more people than you think. Students going for jobs have their sites looked at by more than their friends; a young man who was about to be sentenced and was portrayed as full of remorse for his drunk driving was pictured on his page, drunk and partying with his friends just prior to being sentenced! No remorse shown there, but who would have thought that a prosecuter would have been looking at that page!

Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunk driving case, the college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner, with the words 'jail bird' on his costume. Not surprisingly, his prosecutor was able to obtain photos of him at the party that were posted on Facebook, and claimed he was an 'unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital.' The photos were presented in a slideshow, with one of them showing Lipton holding a can of Red Bull in one hand, and an arm draped around a girl bearing sorority letters. The judge agreed with the prosecutor, and changed Lipton's sentence to two years in prison. The article also cites other instances of people getting harsher sentences from pictures of them posted online.

So apart from behaving yourself, which is always a good idea, it is best not to leave a trail of things you would rather people not know about you. It takes a long time for that information to disappear even after you have deleted it.

It is also likely a good idea to change your passwords on accounts you have such as email, banking etc. as well as being careful what you write in blogs such as this, and the social networking pages. You never know who is reading or looking over your shoulder.

Amazing world of the web

I'm constantly surprised and delighted with the cornucopia of resources that there is on the internet. Anything you want to know, track, find is there if you just search a little creatively. I thought I'd give a little list of the sites that I have found in the last little while, or knew about already, but may not have mentioned before.

I have a client that I maintain a charity website for. She was asking how she could put up one of those charity thermometers that you often see, that tracks donations for a specific fundraising event (such as a walk-a-thon). I knew what she meant, as I remember our local theatre had one outside the building. But a web based one? I googled "Fundraising Thermometers" and the first site (apart from the paid ones) was a site called Fundraising Insight and for free was a service where you put in information such as your target amount, and the amount you have raised so far, and it allows you to display a thermometer on your site! You just update the information from time to time and it automatically updates the level that you have collected. I've seen sites that allow you to track things before. There is a site called Ticker Factory. On this site you can track things like weight loss, count downs to holidays, due date of a baby, savings. And they have all these little images that you can use as your bar, and others to use as the place you are at now.

I have a few clients that find that an event calendar is a useful thing to have on their site. They usually don't want to pay anything extra for this, and I found a site called Spongecell Promote. It used to be called just Spongecell, but they seem to have improved their site and the calendars. You can use it for free, and imbed it into your site. And you access the calendar by signing into their website, so once you (or your web designer) have embedded it, anyone in your organisation can keep it up to date. There is a paid version that has more options, and it has functions that allow you to invite people on a mailing list.

For those of you who have lost faith in the now very commercial world of Ebay, there is kijiji.ca (for Canadians, of course) Here you can still advertise your business, but it's a great way to advertise your discarded goods for sale (or trade) in your own local area.

For the artist among you, and in these scary financial times, there is the site Etsy This is a US shop and sells in US Dollars, but for us Canadians selling, that only helps us, as the biggest market is in the States. It is for only home made items, no imported garbage is allowed. A lot of fun, quality art on this site.

Of course for those among you that are always wondering what the name of that actor was on the show you just watched, there is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). And it's a bit of a misnomer, because it has information about TV shows as well as movies. If you like music and are happy just to listen for free, and not to download it, you can go to Songza type in the name of an artist, and a list of songs will come up. It used to be a pretty simple site, but they've tarted it up now and often there are linked YouTube videos that you can watch while you are listening.

And a bit on just searching. Don't be shy with your search engine. I often find things by typing in searches in the form of a question, like "how do you create rounded corners in Photoshop". Or just the line of a song that I can remember "I'm just a jealous guy". I very rarely fail at finding what I was looking for.

You Send it

Here is another site that will send your larger files via the internet, rather than clogging up your email or a friend's. This is especially helpful when the file is larger than your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will allow.
Go to You Send It and follow the easy instructions. This one is slightly different from the previous one I mentioned, in that it sends the email to your recipient with instructions. It also worked pretty fast as well.

TV without borders

You can watch all sorts of television shows online nowadays. If you've missed an episode of Corner Gas, or ER, you can go to your television network's website and see if they offer it for you to watch there. And often it is. However if you want to watch something on NBC or another US channel and you happen to be Canadian, you will find that you get a message saying something similar to "this content is not available in your region". Which can be really annoying. After all, we are only miles from our American friends, why can't we see it too?

This practise is called Geo-blocking or geo-gating and networks restrict access to online videos outside the territories when they hold the rights. However there is a way around it, that is completely legal.

What you can do is download a "cloaking" program to your computer, and none of the sites you were previously blocked from viewing are suddenly unable to tell where you are located, and their content is now available. Not only that, but it may make your computer a bit more secure as well!

Go to anchorfree.com and download the program Hotspot Shield. It only takes a minute to install. And watch to your heart's content.

March 25 update - this worked really well the first time I used it, but since then I tried it again and it wouldn't work at all. Perhaps the stations have caught on and adapted with their own software. Also, I couldn't watch stations that are local when it was turned on! So it may not work any longer. The border guards are up again!

I'll Senduit!

I've been having some issues with some software that I've bought and I was asked to send a log file back to support so they could see what is going on in the background. I didn't take much notice of the size of the log file, so I attached to an email and tried to send it. Ten minutes later my Internet Explorer (which is tied to my hotmail) stopped responding. I tried to attach it to my gmail account and then finally got it to go with my regular email account tied to my ISP. That one finally went, but came back as the recipient wasn't allowed such a large file.

I emailed back the support and asked if there was a part of the log file I could copy and paste, as I had also tried to copy and paste the whole file and that also caused my gmail to crash.

She emailed me back and said to upload it using a site called Senduit. And I'm sure there are other sites like this but I just thought WOW.

You can pay for FTP (file transfer protocol) services that allow you to upload files and give a user name and password to your clients or friends, but this is a time related service that is free! (and I like free)

Here's how it works. You go to www.senduit.com and all that it really has is an upload button. You click on the upload button, navigate to the page where your file, image etc is, and select open. Then choose how long your recipient has to open it (from 30 minutes to 1 week) and then click "Upload". What comes back is a link to a website that you send to your recipient for them to download. When that page comes up, a message tells them that the file will immediately start to download and it does. Now it takes a bit of time depending on your own internet speed, and the size of the file, but it's a great service for those large files you need to send to someone from time to time. Regular email accounts just won't allow you to send them!

How long did my 14mb file take to upload? Twenty-eight minutes.