Energy Saving Light Bulbs - A Bright Idea?

A lot has been written about Energy Saving Light bulbs recently.

In the UK, the government made the conscious decision to phase out the production of inefficient filament type bulbs by 2011, starting originally with bulbs over 100 Watts, then moving towards 60 Watts and below. Europe is following the same process, albeit at a slower speed. In the USA, the Obama Administration championed a number of Environmental Protection moves, although they have been widely attacked by Republicans.

The truth is that world-wide, the planet is in danger of being strangled by our own need for energy, its production methods, and the wide overuse and indeed misuse of electricity

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It has been claimed in the UK, that fitting a single energy saving bulb can save a household up to £3.00 per year. Multiply that out over all the light bulbs in your house and you could be saving at least £50.00 per year. This is possible because filament bulbs use only approximately 10% of their energy to produce light, which means that 100 Watts traditional can be replaced with 20 Watts Energy Efficient. Less electricity has to be produced, just to be wasted, so Green House Gas emissions and its associated problems such as Global Warming can be brought further under control.

Added to that, energy efficient bulbs, due to the way they work will last at least ten times longer than the standard filament type so replacement costs are far less.

If your company has a large office, it will have fluorescent strip lighting, down lighters, spot lighting and the usual modern luminaire associated with professional environments. There are many different types of Energy Efficient light bulbs on the market nowadays so these can all be changed to Energy Efficient devices. LED spotlights will last up to 5 years longer than traditional bulbs; will consume only 10% of the energy, and over a year pay for the replacement programme. Fluorescent Strip Lighting, rated for example at 85 Watts, can be replaced with an EE strip consuming 15 Watts.

This can be easily justified, on a corporate basis by the fact that by undertaking to phase out all old technology lighting, and replace with new Energy Efficient light bulbs, the project will recover its own cost in the first year, and become bottom line profit year on year after that. Add to this the increased longevity of these Energy Efficient Light bulbs, and a company will save money year on year. It is worth noting that various countries have introduced a Carbon Tax or Environmental Charge in some form or another over the last eighteen months. This ‘stealth tax’ penalises high users of electricity, irrespective of their reason for using it. This includes manufacturing plants, hospitals; large offices etc. so any money, and indeed energy that can be saved without a reduction in work force, a dropping in standard of service or a compromise on production quality is good news all round for shareholders and customers alike, especially during the current recession.

In this modern age, there are a lot of consumers, and business who champion environmental issues and prefer to do business with companies who can exhibit, sustainability and environmental awareness. By moving towards Energy Efficient Lighting you will not only increase the customer base and profitability of your organisation, or reduce household bills; you will also make a lasting contribution to the future of our energy supplies and the life of our planet.

Kindle Fire v iPad Mini

The first release of the Kindle Fire in 2011 was a success based on price, ease of use and the fact that was a well-known brand. Since 2012, Amazon has released two new Kindle devices, Google has the brilliant Nexus 7, however in my opinion the winner in the low end tablet stakes is the new Apple iPad Mini.

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OK so it costs almost $130 more than nearly all its competitors, but it will definitely give Amazon some cause for concern.
Like any purchase it depends entirely on what you want and how much you have to spend. If you want good software, superb design, or are already an Apple user, the iPad mini has to be worth the extra $130. If you buy a lot of Amazon content and want a sharper display, then you might be happy to compromise and save some money on the Kindle Fire HD.

Size is not necessarily everything. The iPad mini is far slimmer than the 7-inch Fire HD. Otherwise they look pretty much the same, but don’t expect the Kindle to have an OS that looks anything like IOS 6. The Kindles’ Android 4.0 OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, looks more like an Amazon store-front than a usual operating system, but it is easy to read Kindle books, watch Amazon Instant Videos, and surf the web.

Design quality is subjective but for my money, the iPad mini is the winner in this department. Its aluminium unibody design comes either in black/slate or white/silver just like the iPhone 5 and the larger iPad. The back of the Kindle Fire is plastic and rubber and whilst being relatively comfortable to grip lacks the iPad Mini’s robust looks. The iPad is slightly lighter

On the display front, the resolution gives an advantage for the Fire. It packs more pixels into a smaller display. Apple, in order to keep its software standard across the range uses the same resolution as its original two iPads, but the iPad mini does offer nearly an extra inch of screen area. For the maximum viewing area you want the iPad mini.

Each tablet runs a dual core chip that is starting to show its age but for most users either device will deliver decent performance. The iPad mini's RAM is unconfirmed, but in keeping with the iPad 2, I suggest it will have 512MB. The Kindle Fire's 1GB is a given, but if you want 64GB of flash memory, then the iPad mini is the only option for you.

The iPad mini is available both as Wi-Fi only or as a 3G/LTE model whereas the Kindle Fire HD is Wi-Fi only. If you want a Kindle Fire with cellular data, you will have to wait for the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD 4G

For battery life, we currently only have the manufacturers’ estimate so take it as you will, but as both companies are serious about maximising battery life you should be fine with either device.

The iPad mini has a front and rear facing camera just like the iPad whilst the Kindle Fire HD only has a front-facing camera. You decide if you need two, but you get it anyway with the iPad mini. I personally use Facetime extensively when travelling.

Is it worth paying an extra $130 for the iPad mini’s good looks, robust design and ubiquitous apps? Amazon has some good apps but is a long way behind. Any full-sized iPad app will run on the iPad mini which for along with the Apple comfort factor is all that matters to me and many customers

Boosting your laptop

The funny thing about computing equipment and laptops in particular is that their performance appears to decay after a period of time. What was a nice shiny, state of the art ‘go faster’ machine suddenly becomes clunky and slow for no apparent reason. Some users nod sagely and talk about planned obsolescence, and others just go out and buy the new latest faster, memory laden model to get more speed. However,  for most people this is unsustainable financially so they learn to live with a machine that takes forever to boot up , or load a word processing package.

In my world we call this the coffee break boot up. Switch on the laptop and go and have a coffee. With a bit of luck and a following wind, it may have loaded Windows™ and be ready to use when you get back from the coffee machine.

Help however is at hand. There is a number of routines that can be carried out as a laptop performance booster which are inexpensive, do not take up much time, and over the period will much improve the performance of your laptop.

Imagine it as de-cluttering at home. You do this to get extra space and to be rid of things you won’t use again. Taking this approach to technology is inexpensive, good practice  and will be an impressive laptop performance booster. Like everything in life, there are a number of routine housekeeping tasks that can be performed on a regular basis to keep the machine running smoothly.

When you first get a new laptop it will be pre-loaded with programmes that you may never use. Get rid of it straight away. It will probably come pre-loaded with Norton Anti-Virus free trial software. This really eats memory. Get rid of it and use something memory efficient such as AVG. If there are any Anti-Spyware programs installed remove and replace with AVG Anti Spyware. That’s your first major laptop performance booster task carried out.

With Windows™ one of the simplest things to do is to make sure that you don’t save everything to the desktop. This really slows down the boot-up of a laptop. Save them somewhere on the hard drive and put a shortcut on the desktop by all means. Another free and easy laptop performance booster!

Internet browsing is a major performance killer. The amount of temporary internet files left behind, especially if you use the machine mainly for browsing and surfing is quite eye-opening, and whilst these files are all very small in size, twelve thousands of them soon add up. New program packages also tend to leave installation files all over your machine. You will probably never use them again, and if you need to re-install a package you will mostly go straight to the original disk to do so. A couple of really good, free laptop performance booster packages that I use extensively are CC Cleaner and Defraggler by Piriform.

CC Cleaner finds those files that have been left behind by your internet browser, software installers and badly removed packages, decides if it is safe to delete them and gives you the option to do so. It also checks out the Registry and removes any old references that are hanging about and will remove them too, giving you the chance to back the registry up just in case something goes awry. On first use ion a machine, I tend to run the package roughly six times to allow it to find all the unneeded files on a machine. Another benefit of CC Cleaner is that it checks all the little applications that start-up when you boot the machine and lets you disable them. Some of them will be historic remainders from old programs that you may have installed, especially from magazine disks and downloads that seemed a great idea at the time.

Check your Downloads folder. If you download a lot of free applications from the ‘net and install them, the downloaded file remains in your folder. Delete it. You can always get it back again if you need it. I use AVG Anti-Virus software and found fourteen installation packages sitting in my folder, each one representing an upgrade. Now that your free laptop performance booster regime is underway you can run Defraggler. This quite simply checks your hard drive for health and files structure, tells you if it requires maintenance and if so, lets you send it off to move fragments of files into contiguous blocks, speeding up the access of these files.

Run these programs on a regular basis and see the difference it makes to the performance of your machine.

Other simple but effective ways that will definitely be a laptop performance booster are:

• Minimize windows when you are doing something else. This frees up memory

• Close down programmes that you are not using during a session. This can be done from Task Manager and shows you how much memory and CPU power is being used.

• Carefully select an Anti-Virus program. Norton, for example uses a lot of memory to perform its tasks.

• Use an external Hard Drive to hive off files that you will need, but don’t use all the time. You can open, edit and save as required.

• Have virtual memory on your laptop. This is slightly more technical, but there are many guides on how to achieve it on the ‘net and it does make a difference.

• Check the clearance around your laptop. Make sure that the ventilation holes are not blocked as this causes the machine to overheat, slow down, and eventually switch itself off.

• Use a different browser from Internet Explorer, such as Google Chrome. It is lighter, faster and cleans up after itself quite well.

These are just some simple, straightforward laptop performance booster methods that I use. There are many more laptop performance booster software packages such as Spark Trust Inspector, Wondershare 1-Click or PC Pitstop which is an online tool and a lot of good information available on the Web. Check them out before you trade in your machine for a new faster model. It may save you a lot of money,

The Future of Cell Phones ?

Computers, a new phenomenon….or are they. The Abacus was invented thousands of years ago by the Chinese. It allowed them to count large or small numbers by using a machine. 

Electronic computers have been around since the 1930’s. Indeed, in 1936 a smart German fellow called Konrad Zuse designed a device known fetchingly as the Z1, although it was 1941 and the Z3 before it was actually of any material use, driven on by the Nazi war effort. Alan Turing, a British Mathematician, Cryptanalyst and generally believed to be the father of Computing Science used his theories and postulations to help crack the Nazi Enigma Codes during the latter half of the Second World War.

Fast forward a number of decades plus a few billion dollars of research and development and we had many logical programming languages and Operating Systems, and a raft of platforms to run them on, mostly carrying out very high level mathematical functions, such as how many decimal points can Pi be taken to. This was probably Very Useful Stuff for some, but not really any good for making a shopping list.

By the ‘80’s IBM, Olivetti, Apple etc. were producing machines that for a few thousand dollars, you could sit on a table and do some work at home, as long as you understood, Binary, Hexadecimal Code or Assembler Language.

Nowadays computers are everywhere. Almost every school, home, library, car etc. has computers that allow you to manage your engine, carry out research, write, count and perform many tasks without an advanced degree in Computing Science.

One of the biggest uses of computer based technology is Cell Phones. Cell Phones are a ubiquitous device. Even my father has one, and he was one of the original Luddites! Cell Phones, nowadays, make and receive calls almost as a by-product of their reason for living. I remember the first SMS Text Message I ever sent. It took me 20 minutes to create, on a Nokia cell phone and as soon as I sent it I called the guy to see if he had received it. Unbridled joy followed when he said “yes”!

When you buy a Cell Phone these days you accept that it will make and receive calls. You want to know how many megapixels the camera has, will it take videos, how much music it can store, will it talk to other devices you may have, can it surf the ‘net at decent speeds. The list is endless.

I am a gadget man and proud of it. I have a collection of devices that over the years have cost me a figure roughly equivalent to the Gross National Debt of a small third-world country. Each one has been an improvement on its predecessor, either because it plays more music, takes better photographs, has better games or whatever. My current device of choice, an IPhone 5 has more processing power than NASA used to land Armstrong et al on the moon….and all this for a few bucks.

As an experiment I am penning this article on my iPhone, and whilst it is hard going on the thumbs, it saves me firing up a laptop. Energy Efficient as well!

There are a plethora of good Cell Phones on the market that carry out tasks hitherto unknown by a telephone. I remember the days, not too long ago, when my cell phone battery lasted about 20 minutes, and was only portable as long as I wasn’t taking it too far. Nowadays all this power is fitted into a handbag or pocket sized form factor, which weighs next to nothing. I can pretty much carry my life on my clever Cell Phone, and by using some of the Cloud-type facilities that are available, I can store and retrieve documents, music, applications and contacts as I need, and transport them from device to device. Oh, and I can make calls too.

Cell Phone technology will continue to improve over the next few years. More and more applications will become useful. Theater tickets, Fast Food, Grocery orders, TV Catch-Up are all available today.

I can even see where my daughters or at least their cell phones are using the tracking applications that are readily available, much to their disdain.

I see the ‘next big thing’ being the ability to control your household, i.e. TV Recordings, Central Heating, Home Security and Grocery Management from anywhere in the world via a Cell Phone. I can scan bar-codes with mine. In future I will get an alert to tell me that something is nearing its use by date, or that I am running out of coffee or whatever, and that as the external temperature is unseasonably warm, do I really want to switch on the central heating at 5pm.

Deep Thought, the computer in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy took seven and a half million years to come up with the ‘Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

The answer surprisingly was 42! My Cell Phone could give that answer in seconds nowadays.

iTunes - More than just a virtual Jukebox

This weekend I fulfilled a long standing obligation to give a talk and appear on a panel in Glasgow University, grandly entitled “New Media Technology and the Older Generation”. I was there to extol the virtues, and to some degree defend Apple products whilst there were aficionados of Kindle, Nokia, Blackberry etc. on the panel as well.

The session raised a couple of interesting questions, not least of which was “What constitutes the older generation”, especially when talking about New Media. As I looked out over the assembled audience it was clear that the age group ranged from forty something’s up to about late sixties early seventies, which was encouraging. I myself am fifty-five and according to my kids firmly ensconced in the older generation bracket. My mind is still young. I listen to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, play with technology watch all the new movies, but at times the body forgets and the hips hurt, the old knee folds under me at random moments, and I a’int gonna run the 100 metres in Olympic qualifying time again.

Another point, especially for the big guy in the second row is that I am not anti- Bill Gates and Microsoft. If you are reading this I am writing it on a Dell Laptop, running Windows 7 and MS Office 2010, so there.

A lot of the great questions and points that were raised focussed around iTunes and how good, bad or indifferent it was, peoples experiences with it, and sometimes distrust or fear of the software, and that got me to thinking about my personal experiences with it.

I first played with it back in late 2001 when it was only a music player and to be fair I hated it. It couldn’t even burn a CD, for which I used a product called Nero. Should point out that I didn’t have any i-devices at the time. I was living and working in Finland and the cost of a First Generation iPod equated pretty much to the debt of a small third world country.

My mother, whose experiences have graced my columns many times in the past, called me one day to say she had bought a new music player which turned out to be an iPod Classic. At this point I should slip in an apology to my mom. I refer to her as my 83 year old mother, but she pointed out to me in no uncertain terms recently that she is indeed, only 80 so I am sorry.

Over I went and showed her how to download the latest version of iTunes, which by that point had added a whole load of new functionality. She plugged in her new toy and I think she was quite impressed by the ease of which it recognised the device and carried out the initial set-up. I got her to put her favourite Eric Clapton CD into the PC and we worked out how to digitise it and sync it onto the iPod. It was interesting to see the amazement followed by the satisfaction at the ease with which this was all done. By the time I left for home she had burned 14 of her CD’s, backed up her library, was showing how it worked to my Dad, and after opening an account with the iTunes Store was searching for possible new downloads to add to her collection.

The next time I visited she had burned all of her CD collection into iTunes, had most of them on her iPod and was using the PC to play songs whilst she pottered about the house. I was impressed!  Nowadays, three years on she has an iPad and Apple TV and uses iTunes for everything. She gets her episodes of CSI:NY and Criminal Minds when she wants them and either streams them to the TV or watches on her iPad, she gets her ‘Woman’s Weekly’ magazine delivered via iTunes to her iPad, has used iTunes to buy a couple of talking books, and is now the font of iTunes knowledge to all the grandkids in that area of Scotland.

I wish I had invited her to the talk to explain her use of iTunes to the assembled masses. She is now looking at Podcasts and getting films via iTunes onto her iPad but that is for another day.

One of the main problems with iTunes is the name, and that came across at the discussion group quite clearly. It should really be called i-Media or something, but unfortunately Packard-Bell got that name for a range of PC’s.

Growing up in the sixties, my house was always full of music. We had an old Dansette Tempo record player and would alternate between Moms choice of Beatles, Elvis, Dylan and such like and Dad’s choice of Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, with a healthy sprinkling of jazz in between. Our house was full of Long Playing vinyl discs, cassette tapes and as I grew up video tapes, mini disks and CD’s.

She has now put them all in the attic. She gave me a great tour around her iTunes structure and it was an eye opener, especially when she started showing me the family photos that she had imported.  Nowadays I use Apple products across the board but have learned a few things from her about filing and finding my media using iTunes and how and when to sync with my various devices.

She tells me that her latest toy is a record player that converts vinyl to MP3, so she can get her old albums onto iTunes. Ella Fitzgerald will be heard in the house once again.

Yes we both agree that iTunes has some deficiencies. All software programmes do, and considering that iTunes is free most of the deficiencies are surmountable, and Apple work to improve it regularly. 

There are also a number of, usually free 3^rd party Apps that enhance the iTunes ‘usability’ for converting different media formats to work with iTunes, and the fact that you can only sync your device with one iTunes library can be difficult, especially when you upgrade or break your PC or Mac, but overall the experience is good and most importantly easy to learn, get to grips with and make work for you.

My eighty year old (yes mom I got it right this time) mother can’t be wrong!

New Blog for Over 50's

Welcome to my new and latest blog. Writing simple but hopefully effective notes for over 50's regarding technical stuff such as iPads,Phones and indeed anything else that takes mine, or your fancy.

The concept is simple. Keep it simple. I will discuss new products, how good they are, why you should buy them, or indeed why you shouldn't buy them.

There is a lot of stuff out there and while Apple have stolen a fair head on the competitors, there are a lot of companies rapidly catching up.

Whilst I am a conformed Apple guy, I do try and buy other products so I will include comparison articles over the period.

So hopefully you will read me, enjoy me, join me and add to the experience.