Make Me Sustainable Because Green Is In

http://makemesustainable.com/ - Are you one of those people who wants to become more eco-friendy but doesn't really know how or where to start? Well, even if you aren't, you should be anyway.

Make Me Sustainable is a great website that tracks your environmental impact in the form of your carbon footprint, and also how much money you save due to your "green" actions. You can register as an individual, business, family, or student. Once you register, you then estimate your carbon footprint by putting in information on your housing, transportation, and lifestyle.

After, there is a tab that takes you to your actions. In this tab is a check-list of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. You can "pledge" to do these actions, click "already do" and place a date when you perform the action.


You manager tab will keep track of your carbon footprint, reductions, and money saved. It's very easy to use and really helps you visualize your accomplishments ... or how much more you still need to do. What's great about this site is that it also serves as a social networking site of sorts. You can add friends, join groups, and keep a journal of things that you have done, are doing, or plan to do. Get on it!

I haven't done much as of yet, but you can view my profile for this site at http://makemesustainable.com/users/davidjohannes.

Newer Isn't Always Better (apparently?)

http://www.oldversion.com/ - Are you one of those software conservatives who thinks that older versions of software are better than their newer counterparts? Or, do you just have a really old computer where new application versions just won't run. Who knows where or how many there are, but some of you do exist out there.

OldVersion.com is a site that archives and makes available for download older versions of mostly internet freeware and sharware apps. I can't imagine what anyone would still want with Internet Explorer 3, or AIM 1.7, but they're available if you ever need them, along with a multitude of other older versions of programs.

Animoto - Add a Bit of Zest to Your Slideshows

http://animoto.com/ - Animoto is a great web service that creates eye-catching audio-visual slideshows from your photos and music. You can upload your own photos or even fetch them from other services such as Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. You can also upload your own music, or choose from Animoto's own diverse collection of genres and artists. Once your finished with that, Animoto will analyse your selection and create a great video slideshow. No two videos are ever going to be the same, and once you're done creating it, you can then view it, send it to friends, download it, upload directly to youtube, or embed it on a site of blog.

The service remains free only when you want to create 30 second videos. Any longer and you'll have to cough up some money. Full-length videos cost $3 each to make, or you can make an unlimited number of full-length videos for $30 a year. I was quite disappointed that the free video is only 30 seconds long, because it limits the number of pictures in your slideshow to about 20.

In all, I was quite happy with the production quality of the videos that Animoto creates. The service was created by tv and film producers, so, you can expect a certain level of quality from their presentation. Check out the video I made below from photos of a recent outing from last Saturday.

[B^3] is Now Mobile!

We just launched the mobile version of the site, powered by MoFuse! Just direct your mobile device's web browser to m.beta-cubed.com. It's also formatted for easy viewing on the iPhone.

An Elephant's Dream

http://www.elephantsdream.org/ - Who says open source applications can't stay competitive with their commercial counterparts? Anyone who does obviously hasn't seen Elephants Dream, the world's first 3D animated movie created using totally free and open software. The movie was made using programs such as Blender, CinePaint, Inkscape, all running in Ubuntu Linux. The production quality of the movie is quite stellar, comparable to the animated shorts by Dreamworks and Pixar. Check out the movie at the site. It's pretty cool.

Hate Seeing Ads on Sites? Get Adblock Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865 - Adblock Plus is a Firefox add-on that claims to hide 99% of advertisements on websites. When you run this extension, you can right-click on a banner ad, image, ad module, etc., and opt for it to be blocked. When you do this, the add won't appear ever again. Better yet, Adblock Plus lets you subscribe to ad filters, which are databases that contain information on ad modules, so you don't even have to block the ads yourself. Everything will be done for you.

However, this extension has yet to find support in Firefox 3 Beta, so it will only work on version 2 at the moment.