I recently attended Peats Ridge Festival for New Years Eve. It was a great opportunity to escape the city, celebrate the turning of the years and importantly do this without generating a great deal of waste. The festival had some great ideas for reducing waste and impact on the environment, some of those being:

• recycle, recycle, recycle - divided into compost, recycle (cans, bottles etc) and landfill
• plates and cutlery made from palm litter
• pit compost toilets, they were surprisingly cleaner and with less odour then the “Kenny” style porta-loos
• minimum impact transport alternatives ie bus, train, bike etc

All in all a fantastic experience - the music line up included Hermitude, Pivot, Firehouse, Resurrectors Ras Ronnie, King Tide, Afro Moses, kid Confucius and many, many, many more.

But what can we, as electronic designers, developers do to reduce our impact on the environment? (more…)

After many people mentioned Second Life to me at BBQ’s and Christmas parties this festive season I decided to download the software [30MB] and give it a whirl. It takes some learning but then I guess that is to be expected for an application that offers so many possibilities. Second Life’s environment, its objects and entertainment are created predominantly by users rather than the creators of the software itself, Linden Lab. Developers, or simply those wishing to create their own virtual environment, can introduce externally created 3D objects or use Linden Scripting Language to animate existing objects.

I was soon changing my avatars appearance, flying, chatting to fellow second life users and dancing in nightclubs. (more…)