Posts

Without question, one of the worst things for the environment is air travel.

Air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause climate change. Globally the world’s 16,000 commercial jet aircraft generate more than 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the world’s major greenhouse gas, per year. Indeed aviation generates nearly as much CO₂ annually as that from all human activities in Africa. One person flying a return trip between London and New York generates between 1.5 and 2 tonnes of CO₂.

I once tried to explain why this was such an important issue to someone without success.

I wish I had spoken with the clarity of zefrank’s explanation .

Lurvin zefrank these days. Just added him into the oh so important podcast subscriptions.

I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.

While I find it hard to believe that there can still be sceptics on the climate change front, the fact is climate change deniers are on the uptick as the mighty PR machines that fuel lobbyists and crackpots swings into line against solid scientific evidence, major environmental campaigns and movies like An Inconvenient Truth (check out for instance, these very scary ads from a fossil fuel funded lobby group (dead link unsurprisingly).

While personally I’m busy trying to learn all the other languages, I loved this clever German ad for learning English. Dedicated to mein grossen schister IW in Wuppertal.

I’m like to think I’m pretty good with goal setting every year. It’s the followup I suck with. Generally, I try and look at the month end tracking on what I want to accomplish in a year and fall off somewhere around September as my life gets crazy.

I just need to get nagged a little more. That’s where HassleMe (dead link) comes in.

It chimes in at irregular intervals you’ve set to bug you about the things you’ve asked it to bother you about. It’s like emailing yourself a nagging at a fuzzy time in the future.

Good experience has a great list of fun online games to play if your brain needs a break from XMas stress and your current boss’s tyranny.

Good Experience Games - good games, fun games

One of my favourites, an online version of Snowcraft (dead link sadly) is on here as well.

A little something for MM. A few things to add to your “Movies to Watch” list. Some of my favourite films of all time are on here so, bon appetit.

The 50 Greatest Indie Films

Some very cool open source news just to round up.

OpenOffice 2.0[http://openoffice.org] with full support for the OpenDocument format and (IMHO) a very worthy replacement for Microsoft Office for the vast majority of people who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint in anything under uber-expert mode.

It now includes a quite cool MS Access database replacement as well as a good drawing package. Sadly, a native OSX port still lags but the Linux and Windows versions should keep everyone happy. Also, it’s free, open source and virtually future proof format-wise.

I mentioned the quick Applescript I hacked together](http://blog.wakatara.com/2005/10/10/vienna-rss-reader-and-news-aggregator-for-osx/ ) the other day to allow the superb and free Vienna rss reader and aggregator by Steve Palmer to work with my fave blogging app, MarsEdit.

Steve posted it up and in no time flat Graeme West tweaked it a bit and made it even better with attribution and block quoting. You can find his tweak here (nicely done Graeme).

I made a super minor mod to them to fit my style and am using it already myself.