Washing without water
Australia is currently in the grip of a major drought and water crisis. It is said to be a
one in a thousand year event.
I discovered
this idea to save water on the Open All Hours blog at
The Age. It is a waterless car washing method used by a mobile car washing franchise in Saudi Arabia.
The secret to waterless washing is a biodegradable wash and polish compound which is sprayed onto the car exterior, surrounds surface dirt and provided a lubricant better than water to remove dirt with a soft cloth - not rocket science, but a supremely clever idea to reduce water usage. (emphasis added)
We need more clever ideas like this. As
Bob Brown says, "This century is going to be about environmental technology - not IT, it's ET."
Technorati tags: ideas |
drought |
water |
environmentLabels: environment
Upgraded to Firefox 2.0
I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 today. The install was very easy. There were a few plug-ins that I was using in Firefox 1.5 that were incompatible version 2.0 and these were automatically updated the first time I opened 2.0.
One of the most noticeable new features is the spell checker. It just underlines words that aren't in the dictionary in red. A right click on the word suggests alternative spellings or allows you to add it to the dictionary. It is fairly unobtrusive, but works well. The other feature that is much needed is opening new pages in a new tab rather than a new window. That saves the hassle of right clicking on a link when you don't want it to open in a new window.
I also installed Internet Explorer 7 a few days ago. I don't use it much but it does seem to work much better than the dinosaur-like IE 6.
I still think Opera is probably better than both of them, but I switched from Opera to Firefox about six months ago. One of the main reasons was because Firefox had better support for blogger. I no longer use blogger for my main blog, but I have never felt the need to switch back to Opera. Opera 9.0 supports widgets, which are like the plug-ins in Firefox.
Technorati tags: Firefox |
internetLabels: tech
