Sleep mode is good enough. While the sleep mode in today’s computers uses minimal electricity (15 watts or less for Energy Star–certified ones, and as low as 2W for laptops), it’s intended for when you step away from the computer for a couple hours, not overnight. Turning computers off at night wears them out. A […]

On Tuesday I talked about recycling our old cell phones. This came about because of a fall cleaning of our office, and the biggest piece of electronics that we needed to get rid of was our desktop computer. My tech guru, Jason, talks about how he prepared it for reuse. Our computer turned 10 this […]

Earlier this summer I lost my cell phone in the river while kayaking, and we used this as an opportunity to switch to a different carrier. Since Jason’s phone doesn’t work with the new carrier, we’re going to recycle it, along with another phone that I’d been meaning to recycle for almost two years. I […]

Last month I figured out how to put Mobipocket format books on the Kindle. Unfortunately, that leaves out the vast majority of library books out there, which are in ePub format. I put off figuring out ePub this long because I thought it was going to be much more complicated, but it’s actually not. However, […]

This is a guest post from Jason, since he’s the master of all things technical in our house. Enjoy! When we tested all our electronics with the Kill-a-Watt, we found out that the ten-year-old desktop was using a lot of energy, even when it wasn’t powered on. Since we were mostly just using the desktop […]