Boy, remember the good old days when Firefox was an awesome browser? Yeah, me neither, but lately it just sucks more and more all the time. Seems like once every couple of weeks on my install javascript just stops working for no apparent reason, which causes practically every website I visit to lose at least some element of critical functionality, and then it comes back to life a few days later as magically as it vanished. So whenever that happens, I find myself trying to use Safari as a fallback. But Safari sucks even more than Firefox, plus I have Firefox all tricked out with extensions and stuff, which Safari doesn’t do, so there’s another whole level of stuff that doesn’t work.
Back around Christmas, Google finally went ahead and made a beta version of Chrome available for Mac OS. But they call that shit “beta” for a reason, and quite frankly it was pretty weak sauce. The most egregious problem was a complete inability to import and manage bookmarks, but it also suffered from not being able to make use of the extensions that were already available on the Windows version of Chrome. I spent a couple of frustrating days with it, as apparently a bunch of other Mac users did, too, because before long there were articles on tech websites about the problems and a promise from Google to have all the worst kinks ironed out sometime in early 2010.
So, when Firefox predictably went south on me again this weekend, I decided to have another look at Chrome. They have indeed updated it, added the bookmark management, enabled extensions, and generally taken it from unusable to usable. There are some notable no-shows at the extensions table that will leave some gaps for my browsing experience: no in-browser FTP client like FireFTP, no inline media downloader like Down Them All, no Flash downloader like FlashGot, and no Greasemonkey (although I did just find this Lfiehacker post that says Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively…I’ll have to test that out). In other words, there’s still a lot more sizzle than steak about Chrome. BUT AT LEAST THE FRICKIN’ JAVASCRIPT WORKS RELIABLY, MOZILLA!
The Oatmeal tells it like it is.
I’ve had my MacBook for just about a year now and am fully into Phase 2, but I visit a lot of clients who have been relegated to the neverending hell of Phase 3 because they can’t (or, more often, won’t) spend $500 to put themselves out of that misery and go back to the unparalleled joy of Phase 1. Protip: if you bought your computer during the Clinton Administration, its time for a new one.
The British supermarket chain Tesco recently made news with the announcement that they had opened the “world’s first carbon-neutral supermarket”. The store, which was first announced in mid-2009, opened last month in the Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey. The building was constructed using a wooden frame built from sustainably-produced lumber, utilizes a 95% efficient combined-cycle heating and power plant, and has a built-in rainwater collection system to use for toilets and the store’s car wash. Tesco began making significant efforts toward reducing carbon emissions in their operations a couple of years ago, pledging to reduce their carbon emissions by 50% in some aspects of their business as soon as 2012.
On a much smaller scale than the massive retail presence of Tesco, a grocery in London called “Unpackaged” promises just that: no packaging of the goods sold in their shop. Their store is similar to the bulk food sections found in Whole Foods in the U.S.; customers are encouraged to bring their own refillable containers for dry goods, oils, and even cleaning products. Where packaging is unavoidable, they’ve made efforts to make sure that the packaging is recyclable, as you can see in the photo above. Needless to say, one little boutique grocery doesn’t make a huge impact the way a supermarket chain like Tesco does, but certainly retailers who can throw their weight around like Tesco or Wal-Mart could embrace this particular concept.
Over the last couple of years, many American supermarkets big and small have tried to get consumers to move away from one of the other scourges of landfills: plastic shopping bags. Just about every supermarket you go into now has reusable shopping bags featured prominently at the checkouts. The extent to which people actually use them is somewhat questionable; we must have at least a dozen reusable bags from all of the various supermarket chains in our area, and yet I’ll be damned if I can remember to bring them to the store with me when I go grocery shopping. Personally, I think the supermarkets could force the issue by charging a sufficiently painful fee for using plastic bags that would coerce the desired behavior, and probably nothing less than that will achieve the goal. But I digress. What I wanted to point out is that scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have developed a process for converting the HDPE and LDPE plastics used in those bags into…you guessed it…carbon nanotubes! YAY NANOTUBES!!! This “upcycling” process is not really ready for widespread application because it’s very energy inefficient, but if that issue can be solved, it could result in a very inexpensive process for reducing waste and providing a source of a fundamental material for many electronic devices.
Imagine being able to dip a piece of paper into a solution made up of nanotubes and microscopic wires and coming away with a super battery that can last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles. That’s the promise of Stanford University’s Yi Cui, who has developed the basic process and is ready to take it to commercial development. Being able to use ordinary paper as the substrate material for long-use batteries addresses many of the engineering limitations of current battery technologies for the automotive industry, among others. The batteries even work if the paper is crumpled or even soaked in acid. Paper has an advantage over other materials because of its ability to bond with the nanoparticles, but it’s also likely that other materials could be treated with the nano-ink and turned into batteries or supercapacitors.
Do you consider yourself technologically knowledgeable? Well maybe you’re a modern-day wirehead, but how much do you know about the basics of modern technologies — engines, fluid dynamics, flight, etc.? Take this quiz and find out if you were stranded on a tropical island with six random associates if you would be the guy making radio transmitters out of coconuts and palm fronds or the guy who falls out of his hammock every night.
(I got 7 out of 10 correct, which earned me the qualification of “useful”. Hey, there has to be a first for everything, right?)
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
