old news..

Hi!

Welcome to what I am still hoping is the first spring issue of the newsletter. As of today, 3/18, the forecast is snow and freezing rain but the end is near my friends. I have been having a blast reading through treehugger.com lately and found this gem to share, from a well done fake ad series entitled “Well, at least he drives a PRIUS.” It literally had me LOL. :More ads listed here.

Green Living Journal readers: If you live in Northern VT or CA you may have noticed the short article I wrote on LED lighting that’s in the new spring issue. If you haven’t, look for it, but it is not in the local issue sadly. If you’d like a copy shoot me an email, though it doesn’t cover anything different than what I’ve covered here in the newsletter in the past however.

The cool gadgety thing this time is the Belkin “Conserve”. A power strip that features two outlets that are always on, with the rest powered on and off via the touch of a small handheld remote. This is a great way to kill those phantom loads, and in fact we use a similar power strip called the Smart Strip (LCG1) from Bits Limited. Ours has one “control” outlet. It senses when you turn whatever is plugged into it on, then all the other outlets are supplied power. Since you can’t always trust your family to remember the power strips (ahem), I put our stereo on the control switch as it has the lowest standby power of only a watt. When it goes off the power to the TV/speakers/game system are all powered off saving me from unplugging over 30 watts while these devices are “off” (and it also has a true “off” toggle to turn everything off even the control outlet, which is ideal). The Belkin Conserve works similarly but with a small remote control to power up and down the switched outlets. The Belkin Conserve will be available in summer 2008. Along the same lines, APC has released a UPS model (Back-UPS ES 750) that does essentially the same thing with a control outlet, and a power strip with the same functionality called the APC Power-Saving SurgeArrest. Of course, conditioning yourself to turn on and off a regular power strip or UPS negates the need to buy anything like this at all.

The open source application this month is Drupal, an open source content management system you can use to develop a website where easily updating content and powerful advanced features are the name of the game. The learning curve is far steeper than Joomla’s (the other big name in open source CMS), but it does have a few things going for it. Namely the new commercial backing of a startup called Acquia who raised $7M in funding to start offering commercial support services for Drupal users. Drupal is one of the largest open source projects with over 900 contributers worldwide helping to make it happen. Some current users of Drupal are Forbes, Warner Brothers Records and Harvard University. I recently installed it on my personal website and like it, but I don’t LOVE it the way I do Joomla, which we use for our site. I recently installed the updated Joomla 1.5 and upgraded our website (again!) with some cool templates. More on this next month. In the meantime click the graphic for more info.

I recently sent a few of you postcards, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t see quick enough that there were some problems with the image quality. I’ll resend them to you shortly in a more readable format!

Don’t forget that Florence I.T. is a registered reseller in MA with accounts at all the top U.S. and worldwide distributors. We focus on those with warehouses close to us for fast delivery, energy efficient products and prefer U.S. built and backed PC’s and servers. This week we can offer the following U.S. built desktop deal :

This system has a Pentium Dual Core E2180, Windows XP Professional, 2GB memory, 250GB hard drive, memory card readers for your camera and a DVD/CD burner. Also includes keyboard and mouse and a 1 year (extensible to 3) parts and labor Florence I.T. warranty for only $710.00 delivered to your door. Or maybe you need some mobility: The Acer Aspire 5920 costs $1150.00 delivered with a 1 year manufacturers warranty and features the following powerful specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz, 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless, 2GB DDR2, 250GB HDD, HD DVD-ROM, 15.4″ WXGA, Integrated Webcam, Windows Vista Home Premium

We also have another powerhouse QUAD CORE system special for this week in our flash banner on the new website (it’s the last frame that displays) .

The new DLINK Green ethernet line of network switches are a laudable step in the right direction towards lowered power and heat. The innovative designs will power off unneeded ports if nothing is plugged in, and will dynamically adjust the power of ports depending on the cable length of what’s plugged in. This design offers extended product life and lower operating costs. Its genius. Click the pic for more info.

I’d promised to mention PC to TV movie viewing this month so here we are. We watch little TV in our house but alot of nature, documentaries and movies. I’ve been a Blockbuster member for years, with the plan where you can take out 2 movies for as long as you want for a monthly fee. Recently the price jumped to almost double, so I finally looked into netflix and signed up. I didn’t even realize it, but they have a whole section of TV shows and movies on their website available for instant streaming (if your internet connection is fast enough). So I started watching some shows and movies, and there’s a fullscreen option that’s easy to click once the movie starts. Of course I had to see what it looked like on our TV so I hooked it up and was thoroughly impressed! and I’m only using the standard VGA connection as my TV does not have HDMI. I’d describe the picture as almost DVD quality, with instant playback. It’s quite amazing and we’ve been thrilled to watch some TV series that I’d never seen or heard of like “The life of Mammals“, a 10 part BBC series that was just incredibly interesting and beautiful to watch, and left me as impressed as after watching the Blue Planet or Planet Earth series. So, if you want to watch online movies on your TV there are ever increasing ways to do this (one is the HP MediaSmart TV we had on special last month), and would be glad to offer advise on products and services. My setup is one of the simplest: My older TV only has PC and DVI hookups: it’s the same plug that a monitor has so I basically use the TV as a PC monitor. I put a small wireless mouse and keyboard on the coffeetable and we’re good to go! The selection of the online content is not limitlessly entertaining but it was enough for us to cancel some cable channels we never watched AND save on the lower netflix vs Blockbuster costs. I feel like I’ve got more choices, options and service AND saved some money, so wanted to share this info with you. I’d love to hear your online movie experiences with other services and products if you have something to share!

It is truly amazing the content and services that are aggregating into your internet connection!