I’ve had my Kindle for five months now and in that time my spending on books has noticeably increased. The problem is that I can buy them whenever, wherever I want. And books that I’d think twice about buying in hardcover, I don’t even notice the cost digitally. There’s no question that it’s more convenient, […]

Since I wrote about how wonderful my Kindle is, I feel like I have the obligation to show the flip side, like the fact that the screen died this weekend. Black, horizontal lines appeared all over it. If you look online, you’ll find other examples of this, as well as suggestions for fixing it. So […]

Massachusetts and Rhode Island National Grid, Until, WMECo, Cape Light Compact, and NSTAR Electric customers can get SmartStrips for only $16.95. These things are great. We have one for our entertainment system, and when the TV is turned off, power is cut to the Wii, Playstation, etc. No more vampire energy.

I got a Kindle for Christmas (thanks, Jason!), and in Maine I was really happy to have as many books as I wanted at my fingertips, in a package far smaller than the fifth volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. But as the book geek and tech geek in me rejoiced, the green geek in me wondered: are Kindles better for the environment than regular books?

We finally got that Kill-A-Watt we’ve been thinking about, and we spent a good part of last weekend running around the house measuring the energy use of every single piece of electronic equipment we own. It was surprisingly fun. It was also a lot of numbers. (See below.) But we could draw a few conclusions from all of them: