High-Tech Green will be traveling to the Renewable Energy Roundup and Green Living Fair in Fredericksburg, Texas this weekend. We have traveled to this event several times in the past and found a lot of useful information to help reduce our environmental footprint. Subjects include green building, energy conservation, renewable energy, organic gardening and many others.

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I was prompted to compose this post in response to numerous criticisms I've read on Amazon's decision to not include a charger with the purchase of their new Kindle Fire HD 7". Most of the arguments go something like "at this price, I'd expect the charger to be included!" Obviously Amazon chose not to include a charger so that they could offer the Kindle Fire HD for less than $200. I for one would like to commend Amazon for this choice. Most of the readers of this site probably already have multiple micro USB chargers for other devices, perhaps even extra chargers from devices that are no longer used. Hopefully your charger is ENERGY STAR certified. Lowering the price and allowing customers to use an existing charger can help keep electronics from unnecessarily entering landfills. I would like to see other manufacturers follow suit and allow us to purchase our new phones and other personal electronics without a new charger. I would go even further than Amazon did and make the micro USB data cable optional as well, I already have a drawer full of these.

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High-Tech Green is excited to be launching our new store powered by Amazon Associates. The goal of this store, in addition to financially supporting this site, is to simplify the process of finding and selecting environmentally friendly technology products. We will offer products that we either have experience with, or products that have received favorable responses from the green tech community. We will not include any products that we believe might provide an unfavorable user experience. We know of too many people who have become disenchanted with trying to live a “greener” life, because products they have tried did not perform up to their expectations. This may have been because the products simply did not perform as advertised, or it may have been because the user was not aware of the limitations of some high-tech products when used in environments for which they were not designed. We will try to help you avoid these kinds of disappointments.

We are not exactly sure what path this site will take, because we will be learning as we go. We will share what we learn with you. We hope that you will come along for the ride.

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High-Tech Green endured the summer heat of Las Vegas to attend the 2012 LED Show. The conference was a gathering of industry and research leaders in the field of LED lighting systems. While we have personal experience with some of the different energy efficient lighting technologies, the LED Show was an opportunity learn more of the science behind the future of lighting. Subjects included Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) vs. inorganic Light Emitting Diodes (LED), efficacy of LEDs, along with light quality.

We also got a chance to view many new products in the exhibit hall. There were many different approaches to heat management, lumen maintenance and color rendering. In addition to retrofit applications there were an number of new LED luminaires on display. We will be doing further research on the state of the art in solid-state lighting and bring you more information in the future.

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High-Tech Green will be traveling to the LED Show conference and exhibition in Las Vegas next week. In addition to the weather, we are making the trip to learn about the latest advances in Solid State Lighting (SSL).

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Too many devices such as cellphones and media players are discarded before the end of their useful lives. One reason is that the non-replaceable batteries will no longer hold a sufficient charge. You may be happy with a device, but after a couple of years of use, you maybe forced to chose between spending a significant amount money having the battery replaced, or replacing the device entirely. Many devices on the market today do not have user replaceable batteries. This can be for many reasons. Among the most common is to reduce the cost of manufacture, or to permit designs that are deemed more stylish and desirable.

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High-Tech Green launches its new site utilizing the open source Orchard Project CMS. We selected the Orchard Project because of its use of ASP.NET MVC. This facilitates the creation of a very flexible and extensible platform for a web site. There is considerable community support for the project. As we gain more knowledge about implementing a web site using the Orchard Project, High-Tech Green plans to contribute to the community.

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