Paperless book

With the increasing amount of paper being consumed and precious forest logged for paper production, environmentalist had been looking forward to paperless books. Looks like we have the first commercial one - Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device

Looks like a good start. Let us look forward to the success of such devices which will help us cut down the ever increasing usage of paper and cut short it growth, hopefully even revers the trend.

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Almost waterless urinal

Each time someone uses a flush toilet as a urinal, a lot of sanitised meant-for-drinking-cooking water gets flushed down the sewage. That is a huge waste of precious and 20 years ago when learning about country's development, we were told that in the future, fresh water shortage is going to be one of the constraints obstructing further developments.

Recently I read about a waterless urinal in a building in my city, but had no time to check. Will do some Google searches later, but for the moment, I think this "almost waterless urinal" will do as it uses only a fraction of the water that get flushed down the sewage each time you flush a toilet. See photo below:

There is a better photo with a less discrete stream (droplets caught by flash when it should be showing an almost continuous stream)
Will update with a better one when I find it or I get a new one, but please don't try to look further down the photo.


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Environmentally Friendly GPS (Global Positioning System) for finding your way around

Environmentally friendly way of finding your way around

I have always been amazed why people like delivery men, taxi drivers or even ordinary folks don't carry a map in their motor vehicle, especially when searching for a place. I frequently choose to walk rather than take the care, and often have been stopped by all kinds of people asking for directions to certain places. Sometimes I can help, sometimes I just have to say sorry. I wish I have the guts to suggest to them to always carry a map of the place they intend to go to. It save time, precious and increasing expensive fossil fuel which they have to wastefully burn, emit more green house gasses (click BACK button to get back to this page) and make global warming, environmental problem of the century (click BACK button to get back to this page) worst. One should check out the map and plan one's journey even before departing to search for an unfamiliar place.

GPS, environmentally friendly way to finding your way around

Street Directory, which is a book I have containing maps of places in and around the place I live in, is a very useful aid to me. Just a few days ago, while traveling in a care with my nephew, our chattering turned from maps to GPS (Global Positioning System). You see, I like to put maps in my blogs, an example of which you can find in Map to Yat Yeh Hing Restaurant. That map was drawn to help participants in an event to easily find the meeting place without needlessly wasting time and petrol searching for the place.

That map was drawn with AutoCad. Now if I have a raster image of a map, I can import that into a file in AutoCAD, create a new layer, trace over the map, delete the raster image, take a screenshot, paste that into the Irfanview photo editor and if I need to highlight something, save the map into my computer, open it with Paint that comes with Window and highlight with ellipse or line drawings of arrows, and resave the map. I asked if I could export the maps from a GPS device into my computer, and my nephew think that is possible.

If that is true, I am going to look at GPS ratings to see if there is such a GPS can do what I want done. Looks like there is a very wide range of choices from fixed GPS devices to handheld GPS devices. There are lots more and it is going to be a real tough job to zero in onto one that may be the one I am looking for.

However, above, I am talking from the point of view of making maps to upload to the web which by itself is helping people find places in an environmentally friendly way. But owning your own rather than depending on a map you find on the Internet or a book containing maps is an even better way of helping you find your way around, and best of all, they have become affordable. From the above site, I see one can even get a GPS device for as cheap as less than $10!!!!

But on checking, looks like things are not as it seems, for the GPS devices in that page filtered by price less than $10 has no price tags, and the first device on further checking, had a price tag of $349 to $370 at the time of publishing!!! However, I believe that website is not static. By the time you check them, thing might be different. I think I will contact them and request for clarification.