Apple is a top-rated brand globally and is a champion for green technology. It strives to manufacture carbon-neutral products that are friendly to the environment. Apple plans to run its products and services on clean energy from the design phase to the usage.

Thus, Mac users can also adopt an eco-friendly way when it comes to using their Apple machines. You might be worrying about Malware and new updates while wasting energy. So, if you encounter any issue, you must clear it before it affects the system performance. Thus, it is essential to become aware of how you use your Mac every day. 

Our article highlights practical and easy methods users can embrace to reduce energy consumption and become eco-friendly. Follow the insights below and go green as a Mac user.

Save Energy

Even if you have free access to a power source, it does not mean that you leave your Mac with a bright screen and longer sleeping time. Make it a habit to activate the energy-saver feature under the system preferences. Your Mac has inbuilt features that save energy by performing specific actions that control inactive machines. For instance, you can set up the sleep mode after a few minutes of inactivity, or the system can switch off the display. Saving energy is a paramount aspect that helps you to become an eco-friendly Mac user.

Unplug Devices When Not In Use

Most users have many other devices plugged into their Mac. From external hard disks to USB flash drives or other tech components. One way of saving energy is to unplug the devices when you are using them. Make sure you use the device when you need to without leaving it on the machine.

Charge Your Mac Efficiently 

Many individuals forget to charge their machines fully, and thus, they end up plugging their Mac on the power source all the time. To avoid this habit, ensure you charge your laptop to full charge, unplug and use it until you drain off the charge.

Energy Saver Apps

Today, there are numerous energy-saving applications that Mac users can install on their machines. For instance, Lights Out and Power Manager are examples of energy saver apps with advanced features that help you save your Mac’s energy for an extended period. Therefore, you can research more and find one that works well with your device. 

Purchase New Keyboard and Mice

Since Apple is going green, it is investing in new environment-friendly products. Therefore, you can purchase new keyboards and mice that support the green technology. Moreover, avoid using CDs since they are not safe for the environment.  

Use The New Mac Monitor 

Mac users who still have the monitors with cathode-ray tubes should get new LCD monitors. Old monitors consume more energy; but, the new monitors conserve power, which helps users become eco-friendly. 

Buy A New Printer 

Old devices are energy inefficient and go against the green technology. Thus, Mac users should get new printers with advanced features that support the environment. Apart from consuming less energy, you can print your documents back-to-back and cut down on papers by a more significant percentage.

Moreover, the new models optimize the ink usage, and the availability of an EcoFont makes it friendly to the environment.

Reduce Computer Usage

Unless you have to use your computer, make a point of taking long breaks and embracing time-off away from electronic devices. You will save power and improve your health and wellness. Moreover, the environment will also be safe when you reduce computer usage.

Eco-Friendliness and Heavy Computer Use Are Combinable 

Mac users should implement the above tips to help them become more eco-friendlier. With Apple at the forefront in campaigning for clean energy, each user’s responsibility is to support the cause and embrace eco-friendly Mac usage.

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A new girlfriend, once interning for O., Oprah’s magazine, lent me an old review copy of Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman. It’s a series of essays by Silicon Valley programmer and author Ullman, one of the rare women who helped build the early days of computer programming, that which our future world of artificial intelligence will be built on. I know from my work founding a tech startup (read Mountain Thinking) that the coders who build algorithms today, are creating the foundations of tomorrow. 

In her book Ullman explores the personality that engineers transmit to their code. She explores the racism, sexism, classism that pervaded and still pervades Silicon Valley. She tells us how programs built 40 years ago by the world’s first coders are inexorably intwined with the foundations of every new line of code written today. 

Knowing the implications of having a 27-year-old guy who drinks Soylent and who can barely speak to real people –– building the foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence –– is frightening.

While I don’t wish the life of a coder on anyone – it can be isolating, disconnected from reality, anxiety-inducing –– I do wish that those who go for it come with a set of values that embrace whole planet thinking. How? We need equal opportunities in teaching people how to code. (Read our past story on anglers in A.I.) And we need that code to consider religion, gender, age, opinions, fake news, real news, the language of plants…animals, minerals.

And that is why I like to hear about cities that stand up and teach code to anyone who is not like them.

Asylum seekers to Israel from violent countries like Sudan and Eritrea have had a challenging time integrating into Israel. They’ve crossed deserts, evaded live fire at the Egyptian border –- yet have never really felt at home in the Promised Land.

Social projects in Neve Shaanan

A new project by the City of Tel Aviv-Jaffa is offering a coding course to selected refugees, giving them a jumpstart to a new career path. And in my eyes a chance to influence the machine. 

The program is launched by The Platform, a municipal entrepreneurship center located in Tel Aviv’s Neve Shaanan neighborhood, and PresenTense, a social entrepreneurship program in Israel.

Neve Shaanan is the same neighbourhood as the location of the hydroponic urban farm project for refugees. 

The coding program is organized in close partnership with the African Refugee Development Center, a non-profit founded in 2004 by asylum seekers and Israeli citizens to empower African refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers. 

The 10-week coding course provides basic coding in Python and entrepreneurial skills to asylum seekers who wish to pursue future studies in the field.

A pilot welcomed a total of 10 students, who were selected from a pool of over 50 applicants following a basic computer and logic skills test, and an interview. All 10 students completed the course successfully and expressed interest in pursuing advanced-level coding programs in future.

Fisseha Tsegai Tesfamichael, an asylum seeker from Eritrea and graduate of the course said, “My hope for the future is to teach young people from my community and share with them what I know and have experienced. The journey of life is short, so let’s make the world better together.”

Shana Krakowski, director of The Platform said: “The dedication of the students in the course exceeded our expectations, with students never missing a class and improving their skills in such a short time. We hope this will be the first of many.”

The course was guided by Ismail Kharoub, a self-taught coder and successful entrepreneur from Jaffa who was able to teach participants in Arabic, Hebrew and English. 

While some students hope that the course will represent their first step toward a tech career, others ultimately hope to start their own businesses building websites or their own applications.

Others aim to transfer their newly acquired knowledge to their respective communities, narrowing digital divides and expanding sought-after opportunities to enter a hi-tech industry that has remained resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can now find coding workshops all over the world. One of the best workshops I have been exposed to is General Assembly in New York. But you can find classes and mentors at community colleges and online everywhere. Founded by an Israeli, there is also a tuition-free degree and diploma program at University of the People. 

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You know you should have done it. The DropBox folder is there, the extra hard drive is on the shelf. Hey, your partner even set up a wifi link to help you back up your files from any room in the house, without cords. But you have fallen into the trap of laziness. You are human, like me. You do not back up because it is a pain in the a**.

Think about the time wasted, resources purged, stress endured and relationships that have almost ended thanks to not having a back up plan. I am talking about backing up your photos, files, code. We’re all guilty – so what is it that stops us from being so unresourceful in a time when we recycle our bottles, count our calories and go out of our way to conserve food miles. Can there be another way?

You might have seen our lovable post on 15 ways to upcycle your old PC into something super useful. Well this might be the case for your old laptop already. We seriously hope your motherboard won’t be turning into a fish tank with all your family photos still on it.

Avoid a meltdown and back up, people. We buy insurance to avoid a natural disaster. We use sunscreen to prevent cancer. Save yourself heartache and back-up your files now.

If the above options aren’t on the table there are a number of simple online back-up solutions that can be your back up angel that has your back. Backup freeware is the name of the game from companies like EaseUS that offers a backup windows 7 option and other options for Windows which automatically sets up and performs a back-up on schedule as commanded.

I am going to knock on wood while I am saying this because as a Mac user I don’t have to worry about hard to back-up operating systems. The amazing Time Machine does it for me – granted I have enough free disk space.

When I used a PC years and years ago I was always confused on how to back-up the system, and always did it in parts. What a waste of time. Time is money, money is energy, energy is greenhouse gases that could be better saved relaxing on a beach somewhere.

Save the planet: back up your files!

Image of computer files on fire from Shutterstock

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A tale of two wafers: Both begin as 99.9999999 percent pure silicon, one of the basic ingredients in desert sand. A furnace melts the silicon and controls the cooling and growing of a mono-crystalline cylindrical ingot which is then sliced into standard 100 to 300mm (4 to 7.5 inch) wafers.  Infinitesimal quantities of doping materials are added to change the wafer into a semiconductor with the correct properties to become either a microchip or a photovoltaic solar cell. From this point these two types of wafers go their separate ways and give little indication of their common roots. But now a company named Sol Chip of Haifa Israel intends to combine these two silicon-based technologies to make solar-powered microchips.

In 1981 I connected a photovoltaic solar cell to a pocket calculator. I stood on a chair, held it up to the classroom’s florescent light and it worked!  My friend Fernando laughed at me and I didn’t get a patent. Within two years nearly every pocket calculator was powered by photovoltaics and ambient light. Thirty-one years later microchips are in RFID tags for livestock, medical devices, utility monitoring equipment, cars, satellites, remote sensing buoys, price tags, toys, security alarms… It seems that microchips are everywhere!

Given what happened to pocket calculators, I would have expected that every laptop, phone and flying car would be powered by solar energy by now.  But while microchips advanced beyond my wildest dreams, photovoltaics languished in the disco era.

Perhaps I’m being harsh, photovoltaics are advancing, albeit at a snail’s pace. For example photovoltaic cost has fallen from about $100 per watt in 1970 to about $1 per watt in 2012.  But during the same time, the cost of a microchip transistor dropped from one dollar to less than 1 millionth of a dollar.  Perhaps there hasn’t been enough collaboration between the photovoltaic wafer engineers and those hot-shot microchip wafer engineers.

Fortunately that is about to change.  Sol Chip raised one million dollars to develop their solar chip technology.

Their idea is to create light-powered chips for these small ubiquitous wireless devices.  The chips will have windows on top like some EEPROM memory chips do.  But these windows illuminate the photovoltaic device and power the chip.

This will allow small devices to run indefinitely without replacing and disposing of those silly lithium batteries. That’s good for the environment. Sol Chip’s idea sounds simple but if you’ve owned several hundred RFID-tagged sheep or a beluga whale transponder, you’d appreciate not having to replace their batteries every year.

Images of solar chip from Shutterstock

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Blood, milk and mucus proteins could soon replace silicon to produce transistors, which amplify electrical signals and are at the basis of most modern technology. One of the most important benefits of this discovery is that these transistors will be biodegradable.

A team of researchers including students Elad Mentovich and Netta Hendler of TAU’s Department of Chemistry and The Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, with supervisor Shachar Richter and in collaboration with Prof. Michael Gozin and his  student Bogdan Belgorodsky, have brought together biology and chemistry to create self- assembling protein-based transistors.

Each organic protein has unique properties and when mixed together can create a complete circuit with electronic and optical capabilities with great flexibility in terms of conductivity, memory storage, and fluorescence.

Blood proteins can absorb oxygen allowing researchers to add different chemicals to adjust the properties of the semiconductor in order to create specific technological properties. Milk proteins, which say strong and stable in different environments, form the fibers which become the building blocks of the transistors. Finally, mucosal proteins have the ability to keep red, green and, blue fluorescent dyes separate, together creating the white light emission that is necessary for advanced optics.

If this can be scaled up, there will be an important revolution in nano- sized technology. First there will be a shift from a silicon era to a carbon era, and these products will be biodegradable, notes Mentovich.

Apple, Nokia and all the big electronic companies could finally help address the growing problem of electronic waste, which is overflowing landfills worldwide.

Second, transistors built from blood, milk and mucus proteins will be ideal for producing smaller, flexible devices. Current technology which uses silicon is 18 nanometers high, but in the case of blood protein, for example, the film is approximately four nanometers high.

This breakthrough in biological electronics could lead to a new range of flexible technologies, screens, cell phones, tablets, biosensors, and microprocessor chips. The hope is that this can lead to a more flexible and eco-friendly technology.

The team at Tel Aviv says they are already working on a biodegradable display, with other electronic devices to follow.

Image of gold nanospikes from Shutterstock

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Apple product releases are  delayed in the Mideast shortening the supported product life in this part of the world. Apple also practices planned obsolescence.

In an open letter to customers, Apple’s senior VP of hardware engineering admitted that it was a mistake to remove Apple products from the EPEAT environmental rating system. He writes:”We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”

The Electronic Product and Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) is a voluntary environmental rating system for electronic products.  It was developed in 2003 as a collaborative effort between business, government and academic interests and helps define and measure such parameters as energy consumption, use of toxic materials, greenhouse gas emission, recycling efficiency and serviceability.

When Apple suddenly removed all of its iPhones, iPads and Macbooks from the EPEAT registry, it was the equivalent of an architectural firm suddenly saying it would would no longer look at LEED, BREEAM, Estidama or GSAS green building standards.  It went beyond mystifying, it was just plain stupid.  This isn’t just a green opinion, it was an immediate threat to Apple’s bottom line. When Apple dropped EPEAT, certain government agencies including the city of San Francisco and large companies such as Ford would stop buying Apple products.

Now that Apple has reversed its decision, anyone can search the EPEAT website and see some of the criteria which helped the 15 inch MacBook Pro earn a ‘Gold’ rating:

Retina Display MacBooks “Designed for End of Life”

Apple gets 5 out of 5 points here but they were right about one thing, EPEAT doesn’t tell the whole green story.  Notice particularly criteria 4-3.1.3 Easy disassembly of external enclosure and 4.3.1.7 Molded/glued in metal eliminated or removable.

According to the experienced technicians at iFixit, the 2012 Macbook’s Pro’s display and battery are glued into the aluminum case rendering it virtually unfixable.  You can forget about replacing or upgrading the RAM or hard drive too.

The RAM is soldered to the motherboard and the hard drive does not use an industry standard SATA connector.  Notice also that iPods, iPads and  iPhones do not appear on the EPEAT website.  The current generation are even less serviceable than the MacBooks.

Remember when batteries were replaceable?

Apple knows how to design serviceable products.  Last night I repaired the loose antenna inside my wife’s iPhone 3G using only a screwdriver, a suction cup and a bit of sticky tape.  My thirteen-year-old Apple Powerbook’s DVD drive, hard drive, RAM, battery, keyboard and individual keys can be replaced without any special tools.

Some lithium batteries only last about 300 charge cycles, less than a year of daily use.  So it is conceivable that my 1999 Powerbook will outlive these 2012 MacBooks.  Except that Apple recently obsoleted it with their iCloud service.  Software upgrades and cloud services should extend a device’s life, but Apple found a way for them to do the opposite.  Apple product releases are often delayed in the Mideast further shortening the supported product life in this part of the world.

Can a greenwashable standard keep my iDevice out of the iLandfill?

Apple topped Fortune magazine’s most respected company list for the past four years.  It has beautiful products and enviable market-share.  Sometimes it seems that Apple can do no wrong and yet they were not able to ignore even this weak environmental standard.  Perhaps there is a lesson here for all of us?

Consumers do care deeply about the environment and yet even the best available standard for green electronics overlooks the fact that the current generation of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are designed to be disposable in as little as one year.

Apple may use green materials and contract with good product recyclers but think of the energy required to ship your device to Apple when a dead battery renders it useless.  Apple’s short-cycle planned-obsolescence violates the spirit of EPEAT standard, but they aren’t being evil.

Planned obsolescence is simply how Apple survives in our fast-paced economy where environmental standards are greenwashable and consumers are focused on “I” and “Now!”   Whether your next iDevice goes into a landfill or is recycled into a toilet seat, it is unlikely to have a long iLife unless consumers demand it.

Photo of Lego man fixing an iPhone by Brian Nitz
Photo of women with laptop via Shutterstock

The post Apple Admits Dropping EPEAT Eco Standard Was a Mistake appeared first on Green Prophet.

A 61 second minute was added to clocks around the world on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC in order to compensate for slight variations in earth’s rotation speed.  This triggered a number of software bugs one of which caused a spike in data center electrical power consumption.

We won’t have to worry about a replay of Y2k until the year 10,000 but leap-year bugs reappear like clockwork every four and four hundred years.  Programmers periodically reinvent leap-year mistakes while re-implementing an algorithm first perfected by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.  Leap second bugs are less predictable.  Leap seconds are necessary because the Earth’s rotation speeds up and slows down in

response to lunar and solar tidal forces.   Leap seconds realign astronomical time with standard earth (UTC) time.  This year’s leap second caused a number of software bugs including a Linux kernel bug which caused server power consumption to spike at web hosting companies such as OVH of France and Hetzner AG of Germany.

In a message to their customers, Hetzner AG admitted that this leap-second bug caused their electrical power consumption to increase by about a megawatt.

Even as I type this article on a Linux-powered laptop, I hear the fan speed up and slow down in response to varying CPU load.  Websites such as Facebook, online games and web advertisements cause the CPU to draw more power and run hotter so the fan speeds up.  Computer malware such as stuxmark and flame also have a significant energy cost as do the anti-virus programs which are designed to protect us from these threats.

Computers are far more efficient than they were a few decades ago.  They have grown so efficient that software developers can no longer justify spending time on optimizing algorithms or hunting down CPU performance bugs.  But because computers have become so ubiquitous, they consume an increasing fraction of our electrical power consumption and should not be ignored.

The June 30th leap second bug coincided with heat waves in parts of North America.  Air conditioning pushed some electric power utilities to the brink of their capacity.  Thunderstorms took out some redundancy and the remaining active power lines actually sagged as electrical load heated them enough to soften their copper core.

It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the power consumption spike associated with a leap-second bug could have pushed power plants beyond their capacity, leaving consumers in the dark.

Such “butterfly effect” power outages have occured in the past.  One of the most famous ones began in November 1965 when a mis-configured circuit breaker tripped and caused a cascade of overloads which left much of Northeastern US and Quebec in the dark.  So as the world moves towards a more efficient balance between electrical production and consumption, we must pay more attention to the energy consumed by inefficient computers and buggy software.

Stopwatch and frog image from Shutterstock; Leap second power spike graph via Hetzner, color fill added to improve contrast.

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