Friday, September 26, 2008

Eco-button - my little bit for carbon saving

I went to the Recycling and Waste Management Exhibition at NEC with Len and Rosie last week. It was a glorious day.

We had to walk through an outdoor display of giant crushers, shredders, loaders and diggers on the way to the hall.

Len had his own itinerary, but Rosie and I sat down for a coffee to research who we wanted to visit. Rosie was targeting media stands in a bid to get a job and I was interested in the domestic recycling displays.

Naturally, we picked up loads of hemp and cotton bags, pens, pencils, sticks of rock, stress balls and a mug for Len to take back to his new desk in Kazakhstan.

We also bought a Green Cone. That involved Len digging a three foot hole in our clay-bound garden, into which to install it. Some good physical exercise. It isn't quite straight but it is sort of in the sun, where it needs to be in order to digest all the waste food we shall be throwing into it.

None of us relish the prospect of recycling the contents of the Bokashi Bin over the winter! The Green Cone seemed an eminently more welcome prospect.

While Rosie and Len were lugging our green cone to the car park, I made a last-minute diversion around the stalls to find the Ace stall where I hoped to discover where I could recycle tetrapaks.

On the way, there was a gadget stand. One of those companies that specialise in marketing all those knick-knacks that businesses like to hand out as freebies to customers.

And that is where I spotted the Eco-Button. I bought two.

It was rather profligate of me really, since all it does is put your PC into Stand By mode, and the promotional cost was £13.95 each.

Normally I would snort at these 'I want one of those' devices, which you don't really need, but I have to admit that it is so much, much more likely that you will hit the green button when quitting your desk for a while, rather then going through the two clicks needed to put your computer into Stand By.

There's a nice little touch. When you resume your position at the computer, a display shows you how many carbon and power units, and cash savings, that you've made.

I've had it installed for a week, and to date have saved £2.61, 11.86 power units, and 5.10 carbon units. At this rate, it will take me six weeks to get back the cost of buying it.

Nice eh? Mind you, I don't know how much carbon was used to make it in the first place. Would that have been incorporated into the price?

A week later, I have spotted the Eco-button for sale in my local Coop supermarket for £14.99 each.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Made my peace with Firefox 3

Frustrated beyond measure at not being able to install Delicious buttons on the Firefox 3 toolbar, I finally got round to doing the necessary research.

I looked for 'Unexpected installation error' on the Mozilla support site.

Corrupt extension files seem to be the issue.

You need to quit Firefox, find your Firefox profile, then delete extensions.ini, extensions.cache and extensions.rdf.

Restart Firefox and these files are automatically regenerated.

Advice on how to find your Firefox profile.

I was SO happy when Firefox blazed back with my Accuweather forecasts, delicious buttons and Colorzilla dropper, along with the developer toolbar.

Business has returned to normal.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Writing in Google Chrome

Yes, I've downloaded the app and am trying it out right now while I write this.

One of the toolbars looks suspiciously like the one on Flock with Share Facebook, Furl It and Mark in Magnolia. And looking for addons takes me to Firefox.

But all I have to do now is to click the star next to the address bar to add a site to my favourites, which is all I have to do in Flock really, to add urls to delicious.

It is fast. I'll see how I get on.

Just tried to install delicious addon. At least I got a message that Windows does not recognise an xpi file. But why now? It's always recognised xpi files for Firefox extensions in the past.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Really, REALLY peeved with Firefox 3

Since the beginning of this week, persistent reminders have suddenly appeared on my monitor screen urging me to upgrade to Firefox 3. It did point out that certain addons, such as Google tool bar and Autocopy, would no longer work.

So I ignored the exhortations.

When the frequency of these notices increased, I decided that there must be something to the claim that FF3 improved security, so I upgraded.

I SO wish that I hadn't.

I have lost ALL of my addons, and if I try to install them again, such as Delicious buttons for bookmarking pages, I get a message that Firefox cannot install the addons because of an error 203 and that I should check the error console.

"Error: e.location.getItemLocation(e.id) is undefined
Source File: file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsExtensionManager.js
Line: 4007"

Has anybody ANY idea what that actually means?

I uninstalled FF and hoped that I could find an earlier version to download, but no, version 3 is the only one on offer. Reinstallation didn't improve anything about FF3 performance with addons.

Firefox is now virtually next to useless as far as I'm concerned. It was all the addons that made it so valuable.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I have Flocked off to Flock.

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