In ‘ReNew’s ‘Browser’’ Category
Browser – issue 119
Lance Turner’s regular ReNew column on useful websites
READ MORE »There’s a huge number of environmental news and reporting sites around now, but not many sites are local to Australia. The Fifth Estate is one that is.
As they put it, “The Fifth Estate is an online newspaper for green buildings and sustainable development. A website by and for passionate people and motivated companies who are determined to harness the power of the built environment to save the planet.”
The Residential section features news articles explaining how the latest developments affect the average homeowner.
There’s a Jobs section where environmental positions are listed regularly, as well as news on who is working where in the world of sustainability organisations.
For those of us who don’t have time to read their sustainability news in detail there’s a section called Briefs where the news items are, well, abbreviated to just a paragraph or two, while the What’s On section has a fairly extensive list of upcoming events.
The Spinifex category covers public, social and ethical news, and has some excellent reading, such as why is it that millions of people who have mobile phones are still using kerosene to light their homes?
The Business section, of course, covers more business-oriented news and there are many other categories that you need to scroll to the bottom of the site to see, such as Design and Technology, Arts and Letters, Politics and Policies, and numerous others. Of course, there is considerable overlap between categories but there’s plenty to read on this site. You can also sign up to have the newsletter emailed to you.
Living Greener is a Federal Government website put together to help everyone reduce their environmental footprint in simple and easy steps.
It is divided into several broad categories, such as saving energy, saving water, reducing and recycling waste and travelling smarter.
Each category has subcategories such as energy efficient appliances, insulation, rainwater use, greener building materials, motor transport, cycling and the like. Inside each of these you will find simple ideas, tips and solutions on reducing the environmental footprint of your day-to-day activities.
There’s also a complete index of all the actions you can do under the Take Action tab. If you are looking for financial assistance in changing to a greener lifestyle, click on the Rebates & Assistance tab, select your state and you will be presented with all the rebates that are available to you, such as solar energy feed-in tariffs and water tank rebates.
People can contribute their own stories to the site. At the time of writing there were 18, but anyone can add their ideas, along with photgraphs, just by clicking the ‘Contribute’ button—no logons or signups are required.
A list of guides on topics such as greener home entertainment, reducing energy bills, a home buyer’s guide, a home renovator’s guide and a number of others also feature on the site.
If you are looking for simple ways to green up your lifestyle, or just want to share your tips and ideas this is a good place to start.
Browser – issue 118
Lance Turner’s regular ReNew column on useful websites
READ MORE »There’s quite a few environmental news sites around, but many of them lack technical knowledge, and so the reporting can be less than accurate (and is sometimes just nonsensical!).
Cleantechnica is one of a number of blog style websites run by Important Media—as they put it, they are “a decentralized, niche blog network, dedicated to covering those issues which are important to our collective and individual well-being, from humanity’s survival to human happiness.”
Of course, one of those areas is technological innovation in greener and more sustainable technologies. The latest renewable energy developments such as more efficient, cheaper solar panels, policy decisions that promote and advance renewables, transportation technology and many others are covered by the huge number of posts on the site.
But Cleantechnica is just one of a network of like-minded websites. These include the personal transport site Gas2.org, greenbuildingelements.com, ecopreneurist.com which deals with more environmentally benign products and business ideas, eatdrinkbetter.com, which covers food and how it relates in our current world, greenlivingideas.com and a number of other sites, all dealing with sustainability, social issues and similar. There’s enough material in these sites to keep you reading forever!
ALA stands for the Atlas of Living Australia. As you might expect from the name, this site is a repository of information regarding the species of flora and fauna across Australia.
The great thing about this site is that you can simply enter your location into the search system and it will show you all the species in your area. The results are categorised into types and you can select individual species and learn more about them and see where they occur in your area.
You can also search on larger regions such as by state, and the results are given in categorised ‘tile’ format, with the name and a thumbnail image of each species.
Species maps can also be created, where you select the region you want to look at and add species you want displayed. Once the map is displayed, the colours can be customised so that maps with more than one species are easy to interpret.
There’s plenty more to explore in this site, including complete natural history collections and where you can go to see them (such as local museums and the like).
There’s themes and case studies on particular species and they have even developed a Citizen Science web application to help naturalist groups and researchers collect species observation information from volunteers.
If you want to know what critters and plants you are sharing your part of the planet with then this is a great place to start. Everyone interested in Australia’s wildlife should have this site bookmarked!
Browser – issue 117
Lance Turner’s regular ReNew column on useful websites
READ MORE »Almost everyone at one time or another wants to know how to complete a practical task, be it fixing a bike tyre or cooking a particular dish for the family get-together.
Wikihow is touted as the how-to manual that you can edit. Just like other wikis, anyone can update and improve information in articles on the site, view all previous versions of each article or start new articles.
Many of the articles have videos attached, as well as a list of tips and warnings, plus related articles and even a list of suggested articles that need writing.
Topics on the site are wide and varied, with categories including arts and entertainment, cars and vehicles, computers and electronics, food and entertaining, health, hobbies and crafts, travel, relationships, pets and animals, business and finance, holidays, and just about anything else you might want to know how to do.
There’s some great articles on the site, including how to save a laptop from liquid damage, using a multimeter, assorted articles on various aspects of bike maintenance (why pay the bike shop to do simple jobs!), make a flaxseed smoothie, how to make and use a solar oven and many others.
If you want to learn more practical skills, this is a good place to start. There’s not always a lot of detail but each article is a guide to get you started.
Electrical and electronic circuits surround us in our everyday lives, but very few people know anything about them. If you want to be a DIY-er and do your own DC wiring or make your own useful electrical or electronic devices then you are going to need a grounding in electrical and electronic theory.
The All About Circuits website aims to give you exactly that. It starts off as simple as possible, explaining basic AC and DC theory covering concepts such as conductors, insulators, and electron flow, voltage and current, resistance and various other concepts.
It then continues on to AC theory, including phases, waveforms, complex numbers, inductance, capacitance, filters, transformers, multiple phase signals, power factor, metering and more.
It then moves to detailed descriptions of semiconductors including all the common types like diodes, bipolar transistors, FETs and the like. Amplifiers and motor drives are covered, although the inverter section was empty when we last checked.
Next comes digital electronics including number systems, logic gates, ladder logic, boolean algebra, counters, shift registers, analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue conversion and others.
There’s a very useful reference section, a detailed experiments section where you can put your knowledge to good use, and even a series of worksheets so you can check your memory. There’s even a heap of videos for those who find them to be a better learning tool, plus a very active forum section.
All up, this is an excellent place to start if you want to learn about electricity and circuits in a practical way.
This article is from ReNew 117
Browser – issue 116
Lance Turner’s regular ReNew column on useful websites
READ MORE »We all know a climate sceptic, someone who refuses to accept that humans have had any effect on the Earth’s climate. We also know the lengths some sceptics will go to in order to avoid the facts on climate change (when it becomes fanatical, they can be considered denialists).
Run by physicist John Cook, Skeptical Science is a great site, available in 20 languages, that aims to ‘get skeptical about global warming skepticism’.
The website is basically a large collection of the usual anti-global warming arguments and statements sceptics like to trot out, followed by reasoned analysis showing where these arguments have gone wrong.
You can view the arguments by type or popularity, the most popular blaming the sun for everything of course. There’s a section of useful graphics, available in high resolution, on things such as global average temperatures, solar activity versus global temperature and other interesting data.
There’s also a downloadable Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism and smart phone apps and Firefox plugins for the major platforms that give you the latest tweets and comments from the site (see the review on the next page).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Skeptical Science is the sheer number of other sites trying desperately to discredit John and his site. While a few of the criticisms have some merit (everyone gets things wrong sometimes), they usually add nothing to the debate.
Most of us have come across biodegradeable plastics at some point, and some of us even go out of our way to buy products made from them instead of petroleum-based plastics. But how much do you really know about green plastics, and what are they made from?
Green-plastics.net is an information site on eco-friendly plastics. Here you can find the latest news, such as new uses for bioplastics, who’s making them and how they are doing it. Read how a group of students from a US high school developed bioplastics suitable for use in athletic shoes or find out when and where the next bioplastic event is to be held.
There’s a discussion area where you can have your questions answered or read solutions to others’ queries.
The most interesting part of the site was the one and only video posted so far which describes how to make simple bioplastic at home from just four common household ingredients.
While this site is quite new and doesn’t have a lot of content as yet, it’s a great start and will hopefully expand into a very good resource for all things bioplastic.
This site also has a sister site, greenplastics.com (without the hyphen), which is a wiki-style site with more general info on bioplastics, their history, properties, use, how they are manufactured, which companies are making them and which countries are promoting their use.
This article is from ReNew 116
Browser – issue 115
Lance Turner’s regular ReNew column on useful websites
READ MORE »Many readers of ReNew will have an interest in what makes their various electrical and mechanical devices tick. Whether it’s your mobile phone, PC or car, knowing how it works and even how to fix it can save you time, money and reduce your environmental footprint by making your devices last longer.
With the resurgence of DIY interest around the globe of late, there’s been a lot of websites springing up dedicated to those willing to have a go fixing things themselves. Ifixit is one such site. Touted as “the free repair manual you can edit”, it is a bit like an instructibles.com specifically for repair information.
New online repair manuals can be created (really just a series of pages of information, with photos) covering a range of subjects, including phones, PCs/laptops, home appliances, cars and many other day-to-day devices. Existing manuals can even be edited online to improve the information they contain and correct any errors, so the manuals are continually evolving.
The other sections of the site include troubleshooting guides, complete teardowns of equipment (great when you want to know what’s inside your new laptop but are too scared to open it up) and there’s even a parts and tools store.
If you have a gadget or device that needs fixing and don’t know where to start, try this site. There’s a good chance someone has already fixed it and posted the information, saving you from having to buy a replacement device.
We live in a world where ‘stuff’ (everything you use, every day) has never been cheaper. Indeed, many devices we use every day are so cheap it costs more to fix them, if they are even repairable, than it does to buy a new one. In effect, cheap products have created a throw-away society.
Despite their price, devices such as mobile phones, computers and TVs are more complex than they’ve ever been, so why are they so cheap?
The answer to this can be found at the Story of Stuff website. Here you will find an animated movie that explains the many hidden costs in the lifecycle of the average electronic device, and who really pays for those costs.
Despite a few small technical inaccuracies, the movie and related information on the rest of the site is a real eye opener and should be mandatory viewing for anyone who buys ‘stuff’. There’s download areas and ‘get involved’ info too, and also their own YouTube channel.
The site has five separate subsites: electronics, cosmetics, bottled water, cap and trade and ‘stuff’. While the site is US-based and talks about the US, Australian issues are pretty much the same—we buy the same products, we keep our stuff for around the same length of time before throwing it out, and we have just as few recycling systems as the US.
So if you’re a consumer (and we all are, no matter how hard we try not to be), then this site is a must see.