So, I’m finally done with my new design. It was already active on the blog but now also on the rest of the site. I personally like it as it is a bit more structured and cleaner.

I decided to revamp my blog’s theme a bit to fix some issues I was having. I really like the look now and it is just more flexible and consistent. The new look will in the future be added to the rest of the site too.

Additionally I added an iPhone optimized theme that gets automatically loaded if you browse the blog with an iPhone or iPod Touch. I do believe in One Web but I guess reading my blog just becomes easier like this.

A couple of things recently got me thinking about how green I’m living and mainly how green others are living. I don’t feel like I’m polluting as much as some others do, but without any real comparison it’s fairly hard to determine, right? So I decided to start my own “tagging meme”.

The idea is to write about the ways (I currently picked 5, but you could pick less or more) you think you purposely handle things “the green way”, and then write about the things you know you should handle better. Then after than we can tag others to do the same and that way we can get a nice idea of how green we all are. In the process we might even learn some small tips and tricks on how to improve ourselves.

So here it goes. My good points:

1. I don’t have a car - I think this is probably my major green point. I used to have a student travel card in The Netherlands, so I never felt the need to get a drivers license. Now that I live in London, having a car is plain idiotic with the congestion charge and heavy traffic and all. I sometimes drive along as a passenger with others, but I don’t think that that’s a real issue as I think it might count as carpooling.
   
2. I carbon offset my flights - As I don’t have a car, the only way to get from London to The Netherlands is by plane or bus. Starting this year I’ve decided to carbon offset my flights, which I think will help the environment in it’s own special way.
3. I buy long-lasting milk - I believe London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingston had the idea to subsidize long-lasting milk because of it’s low impact on the environment. Long-lasting milk doesn’t have to be constantly cooled before it ends up in your fridge, and these days it doesn’t even taste much different than normal milk. Secretly though, I actually just buy it because the milk at the CostCutter downstairs goes bad way to quick.
4. All the lights in my home are energy saving lights - except for a few of the ones my housemates use. When we moved in here all lights were energy devouring 60Watt lights. I replaced almost all with 8 and 11Watt lights. Saved us about 6x the energy costs on lighting.
5. I bought an environmentally friendly toothbrush - This is probably the oddest thing, but a few weeks ago I was looking for a new toothbrush when I found the Recycline toothbrush. I’m not sure these days how good recycling exactly is (with recycling often also using energy) but it seems like a great initiative. The Recycline guys sell even more stuff besides toothbrushes so be sure to take a look at their site.

And now for my bad points:

1. I quite regularly leave equipment on while I’m away - And I’m not just talking about my Mac Mini which is always on (I should put it in sleep mode more often) but also the TV, TFT, and lights in general. It is such a bad habit and I hate it. I think I should get one of those car-alarm-devices that start beeping when you leave the lights on, but then for my house.
   
2. I leave chargers in the wall while they are trickle charging - Trickle charging can use shitloads of energy, but still we almost all leave our mobile phones charging at 100%. I actually don’t blame myself but think that we need to push the mobile phone companies to make better, auto-off-switching, chargers. I actually read an article a few days ago about initiatives to make the electrical wiring in a house more “intelligent” to solve these issues.
3. I sometimes watch TV while working on my workstation at the same time - As a 21st century media junkie I tend to do too much things at the same time. Mainly watching something I’ve already seen on TV while working on my Macbook. Damn you Five and your Scrubs reruns!
4. I don’t use solar panels - Although probably none of you do, I think most of us should use them. I think that for example especially my mobile phone, and my camera batteries could be well charged by solar energy. Does anyone know what the current state is in energy efficiency of mobile solar panels? It would be a waste to buy a solar panel that used more energy to produce than it will ever generate.
5. I throw batteries in the normal trash - Another bad habit. I don’t know why I do it, but every time I have a dead AAA, I realize I still don’t have a bin for chemical waste, so “this time” I allow myself to throw it with the normal trash. Obviously I still don’t have a decent chemical waste bin.

So those are my good and bad points. Now I want to see yours. I am tagging Melinda, Simon, Alper, Ian, and Martijn to do their version. Good luck.

Czeers is a startup by a former house mate David Czap and a friend of his. What do they make? Solarboats! Based on the winning race boat of the 2005 Nuon solar boat challenge, these boats feature a unique design with zero emissions.

Oh, yeah, and they are fast (see video below)!

Melinda just did a “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” and tagged “anyone who read the article” to feel free to do their own version. Admittedly I do read her blog and so here I am writing my own list of 8 things you probably didn’t know about me.

1. I have had three consecutive Guinea Pigs who all died tragically before their time. The first one died because of the fumes that came from the new vinyl carpet that my parent’s got, the second because of the fumes coming from the new paint from our neighbour’s fence, and the third died because I gave it Guinea Pig food without vitamin C (Guinea Pigs have a natural vitamin C deficiency and therefore need to get extra vitamin C in their food. Any food that calls themselves “for Guinea Pigs” that doesn’t have this is clearly a scam!).
2. I have a case of Pectus Excavatum which is a harmless genetic deformity in the chest. It is nothing serious but it does lead to some cool facts like: my heart is actually on the left, not left of the middle.
3. Even though I am Dutch, the only drugs I ever used were some very weak hash brownies. I also tend to tell people that in contrary to believe, people in Amsterdam don’t do that much drugs, it is mainly the tourists that do.
4. I never had a true Dutch girlfriend until Melinda got her Dutch nationality last year. I leave it up to your imagination if this is because I had many foreign girlfriends or none before Melinda.
5. Although most of you know me with my glasses, I have only had them since I moved to the UK. I had been complaining about my eye sight for a while and Melinda kept saying “all was perfectly fine”. In the end I ended up having a cylindrical correction of -1.5 and -2.
6. I have flown an airplane when I was 18. This is because I used to study Aerospace Engineering before realizing I was a major geek. It was a Cessna 150 and it was the best flight I ever had. It was also the second flight I then ever had, which brings us to…
7. The first flight I ever made was a parabolic flight. For this who don’t know what this is, this is when an airplane makes a quick ascend and descend leading into a free fall, creating weightlessness for the passengers. It was done in a Fokker 50 and gave us a total of about 3×10 seconds of near-astronaut experience.
8. I once built a bedroom media centre in a desktop drawer cabinet by screwing the main board upside down against the top of the inside of the cabinet. The HDDs and dvd player were glued against the back of the cabinet, and fans were hanging from the side to keep things extra cool. It was a bliss to clean as almost no dust fell on any of the parts.

Now that I have given my list, I would like to tag Alper and Martijn to give us their list.