This brings me to the topic of my post today. I’m happy about the fact that Apple has shown a lot of responsibility towards the environment and going green. As evidenced by their current line of products plus how they build them. It’s explained in their environment section of their web site.

Apple is explaining their environmental footprint and the breakdown. According to their site, 38% of their footprint is on caused by manufacturing, 5% by transportation, 1% by recycling, 3% by facilities and the biggest is product use which comprises of 53%.

Over the past few years Apple has tried to lessen the amount of materials they use for their products. Achieving this through better design and engineering. The current generation of iMacs uses 55% less materials than the 1st 15 inch iMac launched years ago. They’ve also tried to keep their packaging as compact as possible in order to use less materials and ship more products per container, thus saving on transportation costs.

The materials used on the products have been taken into consideration as well. Apple is leading the way in reducing or in some cases eliminating toxic substances in their products. Limiting the use of plastics and other materials that are not recyclable.

And because the biggest part of the environmental foot print comes from the usage of the products, Apple has tried as much as possible to make their products energy efficient. Quoting from their web site.

Take Mac mini, for example. It uses as little as a quarter of the power consumed by a typical lightbulb,⁴ making it the most energy-efficient desktop computer in the world.⁵

As we’re now feeling the effects of our actions, we should be more responsible in conversing energy and our natural resources. I’m just glad that the company that manufacturers the computer I’m using is doing it’s part. Learn more about Apple’s environmental program here.

Post from: EveryJoe

Hooray For Green Apples!

%APPDATA%\\\\Microsoft\\\\Internet Explorer\\\\Quick Launch

\\r\\n\\r\\n(APPDATA is an environment variable which can be found by typing echo %APPDATA% at the command prompt.)\\r\\n\\r\\nI checked it on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, but it is possible that this location is preserved across OSs. I can’t fathom the reason behind placing quick launch icons in the APPDATA folder belonging to the Internet Explorer. Some might consider it harmless, but say when a custom slipstream installation of Windows is made where the Internet Explorer is not installed, it is possible that Quick Launch is also gone. The location is senseless and a bug, whatever maybe its priority. It is just a tiny example of bad software.\\r\\n\\r\\nWhile there are tools that can help you clean your quick launch cache, etc., if you are not a complete newbie the best way would be to navigate to the Quick Launch folder and see the various files present in that folder (mostly .LNK or shortcut files). You could see for yourself if the files are wrongly pointing to any dead or moved links and update them if necessary. You can also add your own shortcuts directly using Right Click –> New –> Shortcut.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Obscure Location of Quick Launch

The command env typed in your command prompt or Cygwin terminal will list the entire set of environment variables and their current values. My Computer –> Properties –> Advanced –> Environment Variables will also show you the Windows environment variables divided into two categories: System variables and User variables.

While on cmd each variable can be referred to using %ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE%, on Cygwin and all Unix-based OSs they are referred to using $ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE. ($ echo %ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE% or $ echo $ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE)

ALLUSERSPROFILE, APPDATA, COMPUTERNAME, HOMEDRIVE, HOMEPATH, PATH, PROGRAMFILES, SYSTEMDRIVE, SystemRoot, USERNAME, USERPROFILE, WINDOWS are a some important environment variables some of which may be modified and are usually quite useful while writing batch programs. OS, NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS, PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE, PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER, PROCESSOR_LEVEL are a few other interesting variables which are best left untouched.

$ set ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE=value can be used to change an existing or define a new environment variable.

Image Source: Microsoft Windows on my desktop.

Post from: EveryJoe

Environment Variables