Individual and Community

Now the average consumer can participate in the renewable energy revolution. You can power your home with wind energy, biomass, and other renewable energy sources. All without installing any new equipment.

Alliant Energy’s Second Nature Program allows you to buy renewable energy for your home.

When your family participates in Second Nature, you’re helping us buy earth-friendly wind power and bioenergy.

Through Alliant Energy’s innovative Second Nature™ program, your family can support renewable energy equal to 25 percent, 50 percent or even 100 percent of your household electric usage each month.

This additional renewable energy comes from new Second Nature resources, above and beyond Alliant Energy’s standard sources.

As electricity from renewable sources comes into the energy pool, it displaces electricity that would otherwise come from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.

Caveat: You must live in Iowa, Wisconsin, or Minnesota.

Your small monthly contribution covers the added expense of harvesting the wind power and biomass energy used in the program:

* Your electric meter measures the kilowatt-hours you use each month. We use your Second Nature participation level (25%, 50% or 100%) to figure how much green energy you require.
* Next, we combine your requirement with other Second Nature customers to get the month’s total green requirement.
* Then, we bring enough new green power into our energy pool to meet the total green requirement.

Learn more and sign up here. You can even sign up online.

http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/

These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the ‘battles’ between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?

Learn the basics about intellectual property & what is really going on ..

Download the torrent: Steal This Film II

If wood stoves, solar electricity, and 1 room cabin living are your fancy, then check out this fine creation. This is a farm grain bin that is constructed into 2 separate apartments, each with their own windows, doors, and electricity. The interior walls are made of strawbales and mud plaster.

The grain bin is featured in a television show called “30 Days” directed by Morgan Spurlock in an the episode called “Off the Grid”. The premise is to take 2 normal Americans (from New Jersey) and send them to a rural Missouri eco-village named Dancing Rabbit and learn about sustainable living. They stay there for 30 days. I wrote briefly about the upcoming situation here last year when I first learned that they were featuring the Grain Bin.

Details of the construction and more pictures of the grain bin are at the Dancing Rabbit website here.
It looks like Morgan & FX could not be bothered to create a program guide for Season 1 at the FX website. You can check it out at EBay, though. schneez here

If you have interest in a rustic weekend getaway, then you can contact Dancing Rabbit and inquire into renting a room.

• Dancing Rabbit’s response to the 30 Days episode.
• Dancing Rabbit Fan Site More pictures of the place there.

Why do I care?
because I built the place. -Gare :)

Gare’s DR Bio

30 days Grain Bin; 30 day’s grain bin

Your own personal hovercraft! And for only $17,000.

Utilizing the same gravity-defying principles found in larger hovercraft, the hovering scooter is powered by a four-stroke internal combustion engine that operates for approximately one hour on a full tank of unleaded gasoline.

Max speed 15 mph. It Runs on Unleaded Gasoline. And its sold by Hammacher Schlemmer, so it’s got a lifetime guarantee!

If you have a spare 17 grand, Buy One Here.

Get Firefox Now

The about:config trick:

After you get past the Beginner’s Guide stage with Firefox, this “power-user” trick will make Firefox download pages faster by allowing multiple connections so it can download more than one file at a time. (Broadband users only!)

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows: Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

So in Iowa we have 10% - ‘E10′ - ethanol fuel available at the pumps. It is a mid-grade fuel that costs less than low-grade gasoline.
What is ethanol?

Ethanol is a clean-burning, high-octane fuel that is produced from renewable sources. At its most basic, ethanol is grain alcohol, produced from crops such as corn. Because it is domestically produced, ethanol helps reduce America’s dependence upon foreign sources of energy. source: Ethanol.org

Does ethanol currently require more energy to create than it produces?

The National Corn Growers Association has a site dealing with ethanol energy use. They cite oil industry corruption as one of the reasons for the slow adoption of ethanol use. They also cite 10 studies that show that ethanol has a positive energy balance.

Iowa Corn growers have an informational site that addresses the issues and questions surrounding ethanol. They have a FAQ regarding ethanol use - Common Questions Regarding Ethanol Use

A conscientious exploration of the issue blog-style describes some of the issues involved in the debate.

In a time when people are crying out for energy policy change, ethanol seems a great topic to explore.

World’s first working $100 laptop
Tech evangelist Nicholas Negroponte wants to outfit the world’s children to improve education.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/16/technology/laptop_fortune/

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Nick Negroponte would like to sell you a $100 laptop, especially if you’re head of state in a large developing country.

That’s why he is at the World Summit on the Information Society, the giant UN-sponsored gathering that starts Wednesday in Tunis. Negroponte plans to show for the first time a working prototype of his new device, intended for hundreds of millions of mostly-poor students worldwide. The techies and government ministers in Tunis are his ideal target market.

At the Media Lab at MIT, which Negroponte founded 20 years ago, researchers are working not only on the engineering to make such an inexpensive product possible, but on computer interfaces to enable kids to learn without teachers, and on a curriculum to teach them every sort of subject.

Negroponte’s message has a seductive simplicity. As he puts it in an interview: “One laptop per child: Children are your most precious resource, and they can do a lot of self-learning and peer-to-peer teaching. Bingo. End of story.”

… more from the article

If every household in the U.S. replaced one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent enough pollution to equal removing one million cars from the road. CFLs provide high-quality light, smart technology, and design, requiring less energy while lasting longer than typical incandescent bulbs.

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, now has a show on FX ‘30 days’. In the movie Super Size Me, he ate nothing but McDonalds for 30 days, and tracked his weight gain and the effects on his health.

30 Days (large Flash-based site) has an episode that features 2 normal every day people from New York who go to live in an eco-village in Missouri for 30 days. They have to account for their energy usage, and learn to live off of the land in a more environmentally sensible manner. They are in for the shock of their lives!

I built the grain bin apartment that the visitors lived in! Humped my butt for 90 days buidling that thing — lots of other people helped as well, to be fair.

Looks like the episode “Off-The-Grid” will be the 5th Episode of “30 Days”. No air date yet.

Morgan’s Blog - non- Flash, easier to read/access.

POST Episode Update

At first, “Off the Grid” seems to lack anyone for the audience to sympathize with. The conspicuous consumers come across as spoiled bullies, while their eco-friendly counterparts seem too whiny and fanatical. As the episode progresses, though, we find ourselves rooting for both groups. These episodes work because they show how positive interaction between diverse groups can help to change hearts and minds. source: http://www.tvdvdreviews.com/30days1.html