What do you think of when you hear the term Energy Vampire?
A. Dracula trying to jump start his heart?
B. Negative people sapping your energy?
C. Electrical products in our homes and offices still sucking up energy after we put them to sleep for the night?

I immediately thought of example C the day I heard the term for the first time, although I dreamt of A later that night. Anyway, it made me think of the products in our homes and offices; the computers, displays, TVs & printers that remain active energy & money leaches, whilst farting Co2 through electricity production and also being a fire risk to homes. Their sleep mode should be as energy saving as ours, but unfortunately I’ve found a shocking truth:
It isn’t so long ago that European guidelines were made to put pressure on manufacturers to provide energy levels in user manuals to consumers, which then got them competitively producing products that have very low power consumptions during sleep mode. Unfortunately though there are still many slightly older products in use today consuming only slightly less power in their Sleep-mode as they do in normal On-mode. I know for instance that my 4 year old 32” LCD TV falls into this major Energy Vamp category.

But not everyone is able to measure the power consumption of their TV. It’s hard to be sure you haven’t got an E-Vamp in your home if you don’t have the product’s bible to guide you or specifications that have neglected the passage on Standby levels.
So what’s a person supposed to do when the ‘Hard Off’* button on products is becoming as hard to find as a blood donor these days.

Well, let me give you a simple way to drive a wooden stake into the heart of these suckers:
I’ve connected most of my appliances at both work and home (computer, display, printer, especially the TV, stereo and all number of players for this that and the other) to a Power Strip, which is a multi-socket extension lead with an integrated power switch. This way you can easily disconnect all the power to all the products with one easy flick of a switch. You can also get remote switches that you can switch off & on via a remote control.
Very easy, very effective & a safer home with No more Vampires, which means a better sleep mode for all!

Oh yeah!  If your answer was either B or C…don’t let them drain you! Instead try your best to turn them with your positivity or drive a stake through their heart! ;)
 
*Hard Off is a switch on a product that completely prevents the electricity from entering the product. As effective as pulling out the plug…a vampire’s teeth!

Last week I attended the US Flat Panel Display conference and much of the talk from industry leaders was how fast 3D will arrive on our doorsteps, in our stores an on our PCs. Add to this the blockbuster success of Avatar in 3D and the excitement is obvious. How about watching sports in 3D so it feels like you could reach out and grab the ball ? Or how about home shopping where you can almost feel the texture of the product you’re buying ? The core issue now is to make sure that quality content is available. But what about the total user experience  – beyond the “reach out and touch” feeling ?

It’s those glasses ! I’ve been thinking more about this, and to me it seems like for 3D to truly make an impact in a home TV environment, we need to look at the glasses issue. Think about watching a 3D movie in a theater – it’s dark, glasses are on and you’re in the “bubble”- huge screen, no outside distractions – let’s be quiet and watch the movie. It’s actually a very personal, individual experience.  TV is different. Many times when people are watching TV it’s with family or friends, it’s more interactive and it’s usually OK to have a conversation or other activities going on at the same time (well, at least it is in my house !!!) I can’t really imagine watching Wimbledon with my friends, with everyone in their private world of 3D glasses.

The good news is there are some technologies in the works that just might solve the problem, including display and TV solutions that alleviate the need for glasses all together.

Let’s see how this all develops. This is fast moving technology, so let’s see where we are in a few months.

In the meantime, send me your comments – just make them in 2D so I dont have to find the glasses

If a picture is to conclude the 2000 century it will neither be the crasched twin towers, nor the forests of bragging skyscrapers in Shanghai or Dubai. No, the symbol is the empty search field. We meet it daily in Google, Wikipedia, Spotify, Eniro, the Pirate Bay and everywhere on the web where we are looking for something: the persistently pocking marker. “What do you search for” it asks. “What do you do here?” “What do you want“?

Instead of moving about in the city, chasing along streets and buildings with our eyes, we are seated at our keyboard, staring at the search field. Instead of groping about in countless stores chasing for a good laptop we search for it on the web, cross referring among search engines and sites for price comparisions.

Smart architects have realized that the city space is changing in its margins and thus design and build houses in two dimensions, on our web browsers!  Zaha Hadid has reached the most advanced solutions in his Google Earth-architecture – the buildings look better from above than in street level.

Whith a huge investment on smart phones they create a constant presence in the streets. The building The Cloud,  proposed at the Olympic arena in 2012, is an internet time observation platform. It takes the observer on a strange sky trip which is full of information noise. This is the empty search field in a physical shape.  Because, when climbing up its twisted, windling  stairs, blinking and lost, we ask ourself:  why are we not at home watching the olympic games in our web browser?

Welcome also to Earth Hour 2010 Conference, organized by WWF, World Wide Found for Nature, on 23 March at 1.00 pm – 5.30 pm, in the Golden Hall, Stockholm City Hall. The conference will present a series of pioneering examples of how business, politics and public sectors together can solve the global climate challenge.

If you can read Swedish,  more on WWF site

For more information check also the official website for Earth Hour

So, as I promised you in my new years resolution a couple of weeks ago, let me give you a simple first aid guide on how to cut back your energy consumption, your energy cost & green house gas emissions in one easy move at the office….and please try this at home also.
Just use this link:
http://www.tcodevelopment.com/pls/nvp/Document.Show?CID=4146&MID=255
It will direct you to our web site and an easy step by step guide on how to set up the energy saving function on your computer.
This set up will place your computer and screen automatically in a standby/sleep mode when you are not using it and it automatically starts it up again when you touch the mouse or keyboard.

Savings: For example: for a 19” TCO certified monitor this will mean a drop in energy consumption from approx 20 Watts to less than 1 watt during an estimated 3 hours of a working day (these power levels are not guaranteed if you do not have a TCO marked product). A computer & screen that is always on may cause 7kg of CO2/week from electricity production. If an energy saving function is active on your computer however, that level will sink to as little as 0.8kg CO2/week.

A low hanging fruit like this is something we can all reach from the comfort of our chairs…so enjoy this double energy saving, since my next tempting apple in a couple of weeks may take a bit more effort to reach

Green guide, intitiated by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, is now avaliable  for IPhone users. You can choose between green products and in this way make your life a bit greener.

read more: http://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/gron-guide/gron-guide-i-mobilen/