Search Results for: green

Save When Watering: INSTEON 8-Zone Sprinkler Controller

Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation, Sports, Health & Fitness, Outdoors / By /

INSTEON 8-Zone Sprinkler Controller Living in Georgia I’m keenly aware of water waste thanks to the current Georgia Water Crisis. Due to our most recent drought, the second this decade, watering restrictions prevent watering of lawns between certain times and on certain days depending on your address. While out subdivision requires in ground sprinklers, the brains of the sprinkler system given by the builder is deficient and can only be scheduled by day. The INSTEON 8-Zone Sprinkler Controller can make your sprinkler system smart by checking to with various sensors to determine if the sprinkler’s should come on. For example, hook up a wind sensor and if the wind is above 10mph, suspend watering as you’ll probably end up watering concrete and your neighbors lawn or hook up a water sensor and if it’s rained recently you can suspend watering.

In addition to saving water while maintaining a green landscape, you should consider modifying your landscape so it’s drought-tolerant. Also, you can help you plants use less water by cutting back the annuals and perennials. Don’t fertilize or otherwise stress your plants during a drought and set your mower blade a little higher. Slightly raising your lawn mower’s blades can make a huge difference encouraging deeper rooting. By cutting the grass higher the lawn survival rates increase as water demand decreases. Sharpened blades also help reduce the need for water because dull blades shred leaf tips requiring the turf to drink more water.

An excellent combatant of drought conditions is mulch. You should cover the entire area from the trunk to the ends of branches with pine straw, bark chips or shredded hardwood mulch. My mulch of choice is redwood which is expensive in Georgia, but if you’re trying to keep your budget low use the mulch that is indigenous to your location (pine trees are everywhere here so pinestraw costs less in Georgia). You can place newspapers underneath the mulch to retain soil moisture too. You should consider aerating your lawn as well as aeration improves the movement of water and nutrients into the soil.

Another way to save water is by setting up collectors around your house. For example you can route the water that is expelled from your air conditioner and collect bucket fulls every day. Also, it’s amazing how much you can collect using a rain barrel connected to your downspouts.

These tips along with hooking your sprinkler system into a home automation system can help your lawn stay beautiful while requiring less water.

Gimmie!

Suggested Price: $124.99

Merry Christmas from the Geeks

Site News / By /

Santa Finally Resting The Geeks finally took a little break on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but are already ramping up for our final week of 2007 as Santa settles down for his well deserved rest.

This week we’ll feature gadgets that will help you go green in the new year. Speaking of the new year, next month the Geeks will visit CES once more to report on some of the innovations coming out next year and other surprises and upgrades are planned for the network.

Stay tuned and check us out everyday this week through the new year for a new green gadget.

USB Fiber Optic Christmas Tree

Gizmo of the Day, Holidays / By /

USB Fiber Optic Christmas Tree In the vast desert wasteland of your cubicle farm, where corporate standards for decoration only allow for limited expression, this little tree says the most in the littlest package – “Merry Christmas.”

This Christmas tree is stuffed full of fiber-optics that pulse festive rainbows of red, blue, and green throughout. Plug the little tree into your computer’s USB power, or go “wireless” with two AAA batteries.

Gimmie!

Suggested Price: $12.99

Costco Offers Electronics Recycling, Pays Members

1 Comment / Computers, Miscellaneous / By /

Costco Recycling

Some great news for fans of the environment and Costco members. Costco has teamed up with GreenSight Technologies to offer its members the ability to trade-in/recycle electronics such as PCs, monitors, cameras, cell phones, and printers. Better still, this service is free and even better yet, if the product you’re returning has some value, you will receive a Costco gift card for that amount.

This is fantastic news. Kudos to Costco for taking a huge step in the right direction. My Costco membership is now worth considerably more to me. I have so much equipment sitting at home b/c I didn’t want it to end up in a landfill, but now that it’ll be easy for me to recycle, I can clear up at home. I would have recycled it without needing any money back!

To find out more and to get started, visit Costco’s website.

StrikeAlert Lightning Strike Detector

Gizmo of the Day, Sports, Health & Fitness, Outdoors / By /

StrikeAlert Lightning Strike Detector Remember Reg from The Great Outdoors?

Bartender: He’s been struck by lightning… how many times has it been now, Reg?
Reg: S-s-s-s-s-s-s-six…
Chet: Six times?
Reg: S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-six-sixty-sixty-six times. In-n-n-n-n-n-n-In-n-n-n-n-n-n-In-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n the head!

Lightning is fourty-thousand to one-hundred-twenty thousand amps at three million volts and carries enough power to light a hundred watt bulb for two months. It travels at fourty-five kilometers per second and can kill you faster than rocket to the face.

It behooves you to know when a lightning storm is coming so you can find cover, or so you can channel its power into the nearest available flux-capacitor. The StrikeAlert device detects electromagnetic pulses that indicate the proximity of cloud-to-ground lightning (cloud to cloud usually doesn’t register). It will tell you whether the most recent strike is within 20-40 miles, 12-24 miles, 6-12 miles or within 6 miles. By watching how the lights move from green to yellow to red, you’ll know the storm is coming. Red to yellow to green means the storm is leaving.

It’s small – pager sized, and runs on two AAA batteries. It’s perfect for outdoor sporting events, picnics, or a day at the beach. It’s impact resistant, so throw it into your bag if you’d like.

Gimmie!

Suggested Price: $69.99

CliqueCam HUE HD Webcam

Cameras and Photo, Computers, Gizmo of the Day / By /

CliqueCam HUE HD Webcam

I like this webcam. It’s the HUE HD from CliqueCam. It has a 1.3 megapixel lens with a flexible neck as you can see from the pic. The cam can also be unplugged from its base so that you can move it around even more. It has a button so you can quickly take still photos, and a 6ft USB to USB mini cable.

Comes in a bunch of colors, including red, blue, black, green and even pink. Works on Mac and Windows. Costs a bit more than the average webcam, but it has style, flexibility and portability.

  • Video: 1.3 mega pixel CMOS, 5 layer antiglare optical, 1280 x 1024 with 10 fps.
  • Video includes: still image capture (True 1.3 mega pixel; SW interpolated 5 megapixel); High color fidelity; Face tracking; low-light sensitivity
  • Audio: Integrated microphone; Noise Reduction/Cancellation; Acoustic Echo Cancellation. Sampling Rate : 8000 / 1600 Hz
  • Windows XP/2000/vista; Mac OS X; Linux kernel 2.6 and above.
  • USB Powered, still image capture button, Detachable matching base.

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CliqueCam HUE HD WebcamRead More »

Eco-lofts in Atlanta backed by Wind Power

Miscellaneous / By /

Eco-Loft

Using the principle of conservation, a long-held creed of the Green Movement and environmental groups in general, some Eco-Lofts, as they have been so dubbed, are being built just outside Atlanta. These Eco-Lofts are themselves powered by conventional electricity, but the developers purchased 1 year’s worth of wind power credits from a nearby wind farm. Buyers do end up paying a bit of a premium due to the upfront purchase of the credits, yet most of the units have been sold.

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USB Fragrance Oil Drive

2 Comments / Gizmo of the Day, Miscellaneous, Portable / By /

USB Fragrance Oil Drive

How about a little more USB gadgeteering? This is a nice cheap one that you’ll have a hard time resisting, especially if you’re into aromatherapy or if you just like your work area smelling fragrant. The USB Fragrance Oil Burner looks like a standard thumbdrive, but it actually takes power from the USB bus to warm up fragrance oil that you drop into a little slot on the stick.

Comes in several colors and scents: Rose – Red, Peppermint – Green, Jasmine – Orange, and Lavender – Blue. Now you don’t have to walk around with that bulky Glade plug-in.

via Gadget Reporter.

Gimme!

More Details on the USB Fragrance Oil Drive

Price: $69.95
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Firefly Mini R/C Helicopter

Gaming & Toys, Gizmo of the Day / By /

Firefly Mini R/C Helicopter

YAIRCH!

What’s YAIRCH? It’s Yet Another Indoor Remote Control Helicopter! Yes, it seems we run across a couple more small RC Helicopters every week. With a bit of practice you can launch the Firefly Mini R/C Helicopter from the palm of your hand, have it circle your desk and land on your file cabinet. Fly it down the hallway and watch your co-workers gape in amazement. The two-channel fully proportional control allows precise adjustment of the top rotor speed and direction. The Firefly is always moving forward slowly, making it very easy to control even for those geeks new to R/C helicopters.

The secret of the incredible stability of the Firefly Mini R/C Helicopter comes down to the torque control afforded by the dual rotor design. A traditional helicopter with only one rotor generates massive torque when the top blade spins. Normally this would cause the copter to spin out of control, but the rotor on the tail is designed to offset this torque. Therefore piloting a traditional helicopter involves constantly adjusting the tail speed whenever you increase the speed of the top rotor… difficult and time consuming to learn. The Firefly Mini R/C Helicopter has dual rotors on the top which spin in opposite directions. These opposite spinning blades cancel out uncontrolled torque making for incredibly stable flight.

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Guest Post Guidelines – Writing and Submission

We accept guest posts for publication here on Gizmos for Geeks. Please read these guidelines carefully before submitting your pitch.

Content

In order to accept an article, it must be relevant to Gizmos for Geeks. You only need to read through our blog for a few minutes to get a good idea of what we publish, although a better idea is to follow us [RSS, Facebook, Twitter] for at least a week.

If you’re unsure of whether we will accept a submission before writing it, send us a pitch with an outline of what you plan to write about. We’ll be happy to give you feedback on it.

To improve your chances of an article being published, send us more than 1 article idea. Note that ‘how to’ type articles are always more popular and ‘evergreen’ than ones with time-sensitive information.

Guidelines

Your article should be at least 300 words, although a better article will probably be at least 500 words long. Search our site first, before submitting your article and/or pitch to ensure it’s not duplicate material.

Your article must be original and must never have been published on the Internet before. It’s ok if it has been published in more traditional media such as magazines or newspapers.

You agree not to re-publish the article anywhere else on the Internet. You may publish an excerpt and link back to the original on our site. You may publish it in offline channels (ex: magazines, books, etc.)

Double-check the spelling and grammar on your article before submitting. It’s a good idea to have someone else read it first. If there are major problems, we will send it back to you for corrections or reject it if there are excessive problems.

Include at least 1 image or screenshot (at least 300x150px, 580x400px max) that has no license restrictions so that we can republish it on our site.

Links

You may include up to a single link in your article body, but only if it’s highly relevant. You should start off by assuming that you will not get a link within the article itself.

You can include 1 or 2 links in your byline/author description which will appear at the end of the article, only 1 of which can be keyword driven (i.e. linked with specific anchor text), the other must be natural: for example, your name linked to your home page, or your company name linked to your company’s website.

Final Authority

Of course, we would still hold the ultimate editorial authority over the article and will reserve the right to modify it as we see fit before or after publication. While we understand that many of you are guest posting in order to promote your own businesses, if you engage in blatant self-promotion, we will reject your submission.

How to Submit

Send us your pitch and/or article to [email protected].

You may either embed the article in your e-mail as text or attach as an HTML file that is formatted with basic HTML tags and well-suited for pasting into the WordPress HTML editor. If you don’t know what that means, see this W3Schools page for an example as well as to learn more about HTML.

Do not submit it as a .doc, .docx or other format generated by a word processing program.

If you don’t hear back from us in 3 days, feel free to follow up; we’re very busy and sometimes e-mails fall through the cracks.

Please don’t expect to send us an article and have it published the same day or even the same week. We receive many requests for guest posts, and can only process so many at a time.

Further reading: Here’s a great example of how to pitch a guest post.

Good luck!

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