I was looking at this article in the paper the other day about two people who are travelling all over North America to set a world record for the longest journey by car using alternative fuel (in their case, used vegetable oil from local restaurants). They want to look at alternative energy ideas, the tar sands and give talks to schools about their awareness project. Their trip has a title of Driven to Sustain
So what does this have to do with websites and all things computer? Well, on their site I found this little 20 minute movie called Stuff. Check out The Story of Stuff. It was fascinating and made me think of all the technology that we have and how quickly it is useless. But it doesn’t always have to be.
Let me illustrate. I have a pda (personal digital assistant to be fancy, or an electronic diary/address book) that I bought way, way back before the year 2000. Its a bit big and clunky now compared to the new fancy sleek phones, but I’ve looked after it and it still works. However, it started to show it’s age in it’s synchronising with Microsoft Outlook, and like an elderly person’s memory, my appointments started occasionally disappearing. And that doesn’t look good when you were supposed to be somewhere and you don’t show up! But, rather than get the newest model and consign my pda to the growing pile of garbage, I did some research and found two programs that would still work with my old pda, and refreshed its usefulness. It turns out it wasn’t anything to do with the pda’s brain, but the new operating systems don’t really want you to use an old version of Outlook and the version of Outlook my pda would work with couldn’t be updated and the pda company wasn’t doing any further updates, and so on. To make a long story shorter, I was able to use a different Contact program, Time and Chaos, and synchronise with a different synchronising program called Companion Link.
In that video Annie Leonard talks about planned obsolescence and this is what the computer companies want. They don’t support a product that is over ten years old because, let’s face it, they want you to buy a new one. But if you work at it, and don’t mind not having the newest, shiniest toy, you can keep some of your “stuff” for a lot longer, and not contribute to the mess we are in.