Remember the cheesy wall murals of the 80′s. here is your high tech gooky version-all powered by Apple. It is fantastic and I cannot wait to find a reason to use this in a retail center.
Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
Winscape
Saturday, April 17th, 2010 What is RSS? And what is a “reader”?
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010How do I follow a blog? What does “subscribe” mean? What is RSS? What is a reader? Why should I care? If you have asked yourself any of these questions, then read on. If you are more web savvy, then read on anyhow and add your two cents in the comments.
I am a member of a variety of groups and meet regularly with fellow bloggers, marketers, sustainability experts and more. Sometimes it is purely a social event over a few beers, and sometimes I get down and dirty with technical aspects of the net or green technologies. Whenever I mention our blog, I invariably get a few questions. If you have ever wanted to ask any of the above questions, then you are not alone. I thought I would answer some of these questions here and demystify some of the process for you.
How do I follow a blog? Let’s start here. A blog is like an online paper. It can range from a big service that reports daily news with lots of articles, to a crazy person who rants and raves on a variety of topics whenever they are so inclined. We strive to fall somewhere in the middle. With the rise of the internet and services like Blogspot, WordPress, and even Tumblr anyone with internet access can become a blogger and put their own thoughts out to the world. Following a blog means that you read their articles or posts whenever they put new information out. To follow a blog, you can bookmark their site and visit it on a regular basis. Some sites allow you to subscribe. Subscribe means that you get the information delivered to you. Just like getting a newspaper delivered to your front porch instead of picking it up at the newsstand, subscribing to a blog allows the information to come to you in a way that is easy for you. You can subscribe by email (if that option is available) and have an email of new posts delivered right to your email account. You can also subscribe to a blog in a reader.
What is a reader? A reader is a service that goes out onto the internet and looks for new articles for you. A reader goes to any blog thats that you have subscribed to and sees if there is any new articles or posts that you have not gotten yet. If there is, then they bring the content to you. Some email programs, like Outlook have a reader built right in. There are also plenty of other reader services out there on the web. With names like News Gator, Google Reader, Net Vibes and even My Yahoo, you can sign up and these services will put all new content together for you. A reader or reader service allows you to follow more than one blog at a time and makes it easy for you to read new content. When you subscribe to a variety of blogs, then these services will go out onto the web, find all new content for the blogs that you choose and put it all in one place for you. For example, after you subscribe to our blog and a few others, when you go to your reader you will find new articles from Great Lakes Green Pages, Green LA Girl, Tree Hugger, or whatever blogs you subscribe to all in that reader. You no longer have to go out to each individual site to read each of these blogs. If there is no new post since you checked last, then there will be nothing in your reader. Blogs do this by using RSS.
What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When a blog starts publishing on a regular basis, they generally add an RSS feed. This is like a newswire service (think UPI) for blogs. It sends tells where the blog is and what the latest content is. Blog readers use this feed to check for new content. When you subscribe to blogs using a reader, the reader adds these feed “addresses” to their list of places to check and checks for you to see if anything new has been published. When you see the symbol on the left you can generally click on it and subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed.
Why should you care? The world is a rapidly changing place. It used to be that one could get along just fine by reading the daily paper and watching the local and national news. Now to be really aware of what is happening, you have to use the internet. But sifting through all the content on the internet is a task all unto itself. Then there is interesting stuff going on that is never picked up by the news or ever put into print. I went to a great event last night called Eco Tuesday (which I will write about later) but there was no conventional press there. There were other people there who likely write blogs. When you subscribe to a blog like ours, you will be apprised of all the latest news and content that we write. In addition, you can subscribe to other blogs that you find interesting and have it all delivered together in one place. This is the future of news and information. Blogs and the internet have lead the way in breaking news and information. While CNN was reporting quiet elections in Iraq, twitter was abuzz with violence and protests that were happening in the streets. Conventional media is at the mercy of the advertisers, while bloggers are more free to produce content. So find your self a reader that you like, and start subscribing to this and a host of other blogs right now! I’ll make it easy. Click here.
My haircut is sustainable and your fax machine is not!
Friday, January 15th, 2010I am not big on resolutions or promises. I guess it stems from all the years that I quit smoking or started dieting at midnight on New Year’s eve in the hopes that the resolve of several cocktails would provide me all the courage and strength that i needed to follow through. Being older and wiser, I have stopped such nonsense. The real way to make a long term change is to set a goal and to work toward that goal. I have a goal to eat better. By better, I mean less meat and more local foods. To that end I am planning on seeing how much food I can grow myself this year and how I can preserve it to last through these cold winter months. While looking at ways to home can, dehydrate and freeze, I was struck by how much my life has turned into those of my mother and grandmother.
My grandmother recently passed away at the ripe old age of 101. I spent many hours reflecting on the changes that have happened in her lifetime. Born in 1908, she saw multiple wars (including both World Wars), the Great Depression, the sexual revolution, the technology revolution and the evolution of the internet. When she was a child, more people lived on farms and ate what they were able to produce. People who lived in cities, lived in dense urban neighborhoods, walked where they could, and took street cars to get to downtown. Most cut their own hair, owned few clothes and repaired them as they showed wear, bought in staples in large quantities and cooked their own foods. They used doilies and the like to protect furnature from dirt and grime, because when you bought a sofa it was pretty much yours for life.
Fast forward a hundred years, and here I am trying to live more like my grandmother did. Little did we know that progress was not all it was cracked up to be. Living a more sustainable life means living with a lighter footprint on the earth. Growing any portion of your own food, puts you more in touch with the things that you are eating and makes you appreciate the labor involved in producing what you consume. When you learn to drive less and walk more, you soon realize that buying in bulk makes sense because you want to make that trip as less often as possible. When you commit to buying less, you do more to make the things that you buy last longer and thus consume less materials in the life you live. That is why I call my haircut sustainable. I bought a good pair of clippers for $20. When it gets too long, I can trim it myself in a few minutes. In addition, I will use less hair care products. While no hair salons are going to shut their doors or turn off their lights an hour earlier because of me, I know that I am using less energy in the way I live my life.
On the other hand, the rise of the digital age has increased our need for electricity and high tech materials, but it allows us to reduce our consumption of many other resources. Email is rapidly replacing snail mail and spam is replacing junk mail. That means a lot less trees are bing cut down every year to send me my bills and offers to buy a new car. Less mail means less mail carriers driving less miles and less planes delivering less letters-that means less gas being burned. I was asked the other day for my fax number. Do people actually use such things anymore? If so, why? The fax machine is rapidly going the way of the dinosaur, the land line telephone, and the answering machine. A fax machine has to be on all the time to be effective. Not only is it drawing electricity all the time, waiting to be used, but when it is, it prints on paper. In this digital age, when everyone I know has an email address, why are we even sending things over fax machines. I haven’t entered a fax number in my contacts in years. Anything that needs a signature can easily be scanned and sent over the internet the way everything else is, so why are people even buying these big machines that use power, toner, ink, paper, and plunk it down next to their computer and internet line?
So in reflecting on the long life of Grandma Belle, I find that she lived a more sustainable life than most of us in the modern age. Who knew that real progress would mean going backward and not forward?
The future is here…
Monday, October 12th, 2009Gadgets are fun! Who doesn’t want to have the coolest new thing, that does all kinds of fun stuff. Thanks to my friends over at Mashable, I have seen the future. Now, when I was a kid, we expected that by this time we would all be driving cars that flew, eating meals in pill form, and using our wristwatches to talk to people. We still haven’t perfected cars that fly (and with the way people drive, that is not a bad thing), and meals in pills is not even a topic. We can however, use our wristwatch as our new multimedia phone device. Kempler & Strauss debuted their new W Phonewatch at a recent tech convention. I have embedded the video, but here is a synopsis. Imagine a watch that could function as a smartphone, take pictures and video, play MP3s and play games. As a person who hates to carry around too much junk, this is a dream come true! With a list price of only $199, the future is within reach…
here is the official video from the Kempler and Strauss website:
So this has nothing to do with sustainability, really, but it is just cool. I guess if you image that the smaller the devices are, the less e-waste we will have to deal with at the end of its life cycle.
A new Paradigm
Monday, September 14th, 2009If you do not know Michael DeAloia, then you should. Former Tech Czar for Cleveland, he is fascinating to talk to. He also has strong ideas for Cleveland and its future in the technology world. That is why I wanted to reprint part of the email that I got from him about his technology news magazine, Paradigm. Check it out and then start stalking him on Facebook, twitter, etc. You will become a techno guru in your own right, just by association.
Paradigm Magazine 4.0
I want to thank everyone who has signed up for Paradigm Magazine. This issue is going to rock! Past stories in Paradigm have focused on the history of technology in Northeast Ohio, stunning interviews with New Economy entrepreneurs and insightful commentary on new products being developed in Northeast Ohio. Paradigm Magazine is a celebration of all things cool in technology – the products, the software and more importantly the people making change in the Cleveland area. This year Paradigm Magazine is compiling stories about the hippest, coolest and clearly the most fascinating personalities involved in the technology community. And we want you to be a part of one of the most unique experiments in photo journalism in Northeast Ohio! Paradigm Magazine will be creating an entire magazine of the great personalities in the tech community in a series of creative photos along with provocative company profiles.
This year’s magazine will be a real showcase piece. And given its amazing reach for the reader – as it is inserted in both the November issues of Inside Business and Cleveland Magazine – this is unlike any other venue to be a sponsor of…so join us today as a sponsor of this ground-breaking magazine for year four. Please select one of the sponsorship packages detailed below and be a part of history for the technology community in Northeast Ohio. If you have any questions or comments, please feel welcome to contact me at mdealoia@lnegroup.com or at 216.212.4067.
If you want to advertise or be part of this exciting venture then give hime a call!
