Happy Earth Day - Recycling Plastic?

This may not be related to computer technology, but I wanted to take a second and discuss recycling plastic. Millions of Americans recycle every week, and think they are doing their part. This is false. Recycling plastic costs taxpayer's money, leads to a waste of resources, pollutes our atmosphere, and ultimately leads to the recycled material being shipped back to us as items we throw away eventually anyway. When was the last time you used recycled materials and they didn't end up back in the trash? Let's discuss the recycling process.

The first step is consumption. You purchase plastic bottles because there is no alternative. Water, Gatorade, Pepsi, Coca-Cola: these items are consumed and thrown in the trash. Oh wait, you're green so you toss them into the recycling bin after wasting water to clean them out. The week continues, you add to the collection, and trash day comes. You haul out your recycled materials for them to be picked up the next day. The next day a 60 ton (29k - 33k lb) garbage truck that gets 2.8 MPG avg loads you and your neighbor's recycled plastic to be shipped off. This, of course assuming, you have someone who picks up recyclables in your neighborhood. If not, well I'm sure you can imagine the fuel cost of everyone driving to the landfill to recycle their plastic, and other materials.

Now depending on your area, recycling is handled in different ways. For some, the material is shipped off to China to be burned and reused for clothing because plastic cannot be used twice for food, or beverages. Clothes cannot be recycled; They can be passed around, and sold, but ultimately end up filling landfills anyway. In other areas plastic can be sent back to the manufacturer who do the same. Sending it to the manufacturer may cut down on the emissions of sending it oversea, but the process is still the same. Burn, baby burn.

In the late 80's we were told the landfills were going to be full. This was a scare tactic, partially feeding off the scares of the Mobro 4000 (trash barge) that went from place to place looking for a place to dump 3,168 tons of trash when no one would take it. Even if the landfills were filling up, how is recycling going to stop it? It would be delaying the inevitable with a pointless, resource wasting process.

My solution? Use less wasteful products. Use real dishes, and silverware! The world was fine without plastic, and you can be too. You may even feel good about it.

The Super Strength of POLLI-Bricks – Bricks Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles!

These recycled plastic bottle bricks are more affordable and durable than traditional bricks

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01
Photo from flickr

They’re transparent and translucent. They interlock together to form a honeycomb structure that’s extremely durable. They can be used to build anything from buildings and fences to roofs and walls of light. So what are “they” referring to? They’re called POLLI-Bricks, and they’re a genius example of recycled bottle architecture.

Although these plastic bricks may not be as cool as the Heineken beer bottle interlocking bricks from Joe Laur’s One Million Buddhist Beers on the Wall, One Million Buddhist Beers…. blog post, these are a pretty cool close second! Created by the folks at miniWiz, these amazing plastic bricks are lighter than regular bricks, and they each hold a small volume of air inside of them that allow for perfect thermal insulation.

Here’s a video of Brian Chee talking about POLLI-Bricks at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:



Oh, and did I mention how durable these bricks are? Well, here’s proof!



I love the fact that the bricks are solar-powered, and that they retain sunlight during the day to help illuminate them at night! Good looking, recycled and solar powered. POLLI-Bricks get a thumbs-up from me.

Four Music-Sharing Tricks on Windows 7

The other day, someone asked me, “So what’s the coolest feature in Windows 7?”

There are plenty of interesting or useful ones. But the feature that surprised me the most was the music-sharing feature of Windows Media Player 12.

Surprised me, because music collections are just the sort of thing that lawyers usually like to lock down at the behest of the record companies. But in Media Player 12, you can listen to your music collection on any PC in the house — even on any PC on the Internet! That’s right: while sitting at your office PC, you can listen to the songs that reside on your home PC, 50 miles away.

Here’s how it all goes.

Trick No. 1: Browse Collections — Homegroup Method

If all of your PC’s are running Windows 7, you can join them into what Microsoft calls a homegroup (a simple network for sharing files). To get started, create a homegroup. Type “homegroup” into the Start menu’s Search box, click “HomeGroup” in the results list and follow the instructions.

Once you’ve joined your home’s PCs into a homegroup, you’ll have a particularly effortless job of sharing other Media Player collections. You’ll have to do absolutely nothing.

Your other Media Player collections show up automatically at the bottom of the left-side list in Media Player. Just click the flippy triangle to expand the name of an account or a PC; click it to see the music it contains, and start playing.

Trick No. 2: Browse Collections — Manual Method

Not every PC can be part of a homegroup, because not every PC is running Windows 7. And you can’t be in a homegroup without Windows 7.

Fortunately, even if there’s no homegroup, you can still share music. The only difference is that all of your family members must explicitly turn on sharing for their own PC’s.

To do that on your computer, in Media Player, open the Stream menu and choose “Turn on media sharing;” in the dialog box, click “Turn on media sharing.” Now everybody else can see and play your Media Player collection.

It’s up to you to persuade them to turn on that feature on their machines (if you’re not seeing them already in your copy of Media Player).

Trick No. 3: “Play to”

In this scenario, you send music from your PC to another PC in the house.

Why? Because you probably keep most of your music on a single computer, and it can’t be everywhere. Suppose you’re planning to have a dinner party, but your music collection is on the PC in the attic office. Thanks to the “Play to” feature, you can line up enough background music for the whole evening, up there in the attic, and send it down to the laptop with the nice speakers in the kitchen. You won’t have to keep running back upstairs to choose more music. You can stay downstairs and enjoy the whole party, uninterrupted.

There’s one step of setup on the PC that will be receiving the playback (in this example, the laptop in the kitchen). Open Media Player. From the Stream menu, choose “Allow remote control of my Player.” In the resulting confirmation box, click — you guessed it — “Allow remote control on this network.”

Leave Media Player running (you can minimize it if you like).

Now go to the attic PC. In Media Player, on the Play tab, click the “Play to” icon. Its pop-up menu lists all the PCs in your house that have been prepared for remote controlling, including the kitchen laptop. Choose its name.

If all has gone well, the Play To window appears. It’s a waiting list of music that will play in sequence. Fill it up with albums, songs, and playlists. Drag songs and albums into it, rearrange their sequence by dragging, eliminate items by right-clicking and choosing “Remove from list”

When you click the big Play button in the Play To window, the music, amazingly enough, begins to play on the kitchen laptop. Go downstairs and start dancing.

Trick No. 4: Play Over the Internet

For its final stunt, Media Player lets you listen to your home music collection from anywhere in the world — across the Internet.

How does it know it’s you, and not some teenage software pirate who just wants free music? Because you have to sign in with your Windows Live ID at both ends. (If you don’t have a free Windows Live ID, you can get one at https://signup.live.com).

To set this up, open Media Player on your home computer. From the Stream menu, choose “Allow Internet access to home media.”

In the resulting dialog box, click “Link an online ID.” (If you see “Add an online ID provider” in the next box, click it; you go to a Web page where you can click either “Download for 32-bit” or “Download for 64-bit,” depending on your Windows 7 version. Complete the 417-step installation process.)

Now, next to where it says “WindowsLiveID, click “Link online ID.” Provide your Windows Live e-mail address and password.

Finally, you return to the first box; click “Allow Internet access to home media” (supply an administrator’s name and password if it’s requested). Click O.K. in the congratulations box.

Now, on any other PC that’s online and has Media Player 12 or later, repeat those steps. And presto: In the Other Libraries category of the left-side pane, your home music library shows up. It’s ready to examine and play, across the Internet. If that isn’t magic, what is?

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Google Takes Printing to the Cloud

When Google began discussing Chrome OS, its new approach to an operating system that places all applications in the cloud, one question that wasn’t answered was how the new OS would handle printing.
Where would the hundreds of printer drivers be that now sit inside your PC’s operating system? Yesterday, Google said it had an answer. It plans on creating a new way of printing, with all the necessary software needed to print jobs also stored in the cloud.
This new Google Cloud Print paradigm is needed, Google says, because with so many different kinds of devices (desktops, laptops, iPads, smartphones) now able to read documents, it’s impractical to create printer drivers for every one and every printer. Instead, under Google Cloud Print, your device will send a print command to the cloud, where print instructions will be downloaded to a new generation of cloud-aware printers. And if you don’t have a cloud-aware printer, which no one does yet, a piece of software on your device will take the cloud instructions and translate them to let you print.
What this concept gives users is the ability to print to any printer, anywhere in the world, even if that printer isn’t connected to a PC. While this sounds like a good idea, Google’s announcement on Thursday was greeted with derision by many in the developer community.
“This Google Cloud Print is a folly,” one reader said. “They can’t support printer drivers on Chrome OS because they don’t have the maturity of partnerships and OEM ecosystem that Microsoft has cultivated over the past 20 years. Not to mention Google just wants to turn everyone’s printers into another advertising outlet — like fax spam from the 80s and 90s.”
Another reader expressed concern over the possibility that one’s DSL connection would die in the middle of a print job just as instructions are being sent back and forth.
Do you think that Google’s initiative is simply another way for the company to feed its users ads? Do you have any privacy concerns if all your documents travel to the cloud before they get to your designated printer?

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Threat of Fake Antivirus Software Grows

Fake antivirus scams are growing as an online menace, Google says. And in a post on its security blog Wednesday, the company said that the people running them were aggressively using spam, online ads and schemes to manipulate search engine results to get a grip on Web users.

Researchers at the search company have concluded a 13-month study that they will present in full at a workshop on April 27.

The Google team studied 240 million malicious Web pages and found that more than 11,000 sites were used to distribute fake antivirus software, which it calls Fake AV. In these scams, victims who surf to a scammer's Web page get hit with pop-up messages warning that their computers are infected with something terrible that can be removed for a fee. The pop-ups often won't stop, essentially hijacking a victim's computer, until he installs the certainly useless, potentially malicious program and pays up.

"The Fake AV threat is rising in prevalence, both absolutely and relative to other forms of Web-based malware," Google researchers say on their site. Fake AV accounts for about 15 percent of all malware on the Web, they said.

Victims are typically lured to sites with the scams by clicking links to them in spam messages or in "poisoned" search results. Scammers are working aggressively to move their pages to the top of search results pages for keywords tied to things like celebrity foibles and big breaking news, to the point that results for "trending topics"  often include several malicious results. In fact, 60 percent of the malware Google found on sites embedding popular keywords was designed to distribute fraudulent antivirus programs.

Attackers are also use online ads to try to distribute fake security software via the sites of legitimate Web publishers. Fake antivirus scams are responsible for half of all malware delivered via ads, up fivefold from a year ago, Google said.

If you see one of these pop-ups, do not install it and do not pay. Scan your system with security software from a trusted company. Microsoft offers free scans through its Windows Live safety scanner.

If you did pay, monitor your credit card account or change your number, as it's now in questionable hands.