My next project: Wind Power

I bought a Thermor BIOS Wireless Weather Station For PC the other day from Woot.com. Should be delivered today. The goal is to set this puppy up on top of my buddy's garage in order to determine if there is enough wind to feasibly power the meager electrical needs of his garage. This includes (for now) a few light bulbs, and maybe a radio and saw. All I need is this, a PC, and 3 months worth of patience to collect data. Assuming it works, this is the first step of my master plan to become familiar enough about wind power systems that I might be able to make some money doing related contract work in my community. Stay tuned for more as this develops.

Eee Box B208: It's BACK!!! Woo-hoo!!!

Oh happy day. Asus re-announced the PC I've been waiting for: the Eee Box B208. No word yet on price or availability, but they seem to have updated the specs:

The only thing that looks different from before is that the B208 does not have an internal UPS (battery backup). While this is pretty lame, I have to say that I'm pretty excited about the impending release of this machine, and the clones that are sure to follow from other manufacturers.

Uh, maybe not.

Tax Day came and went, but neither the Eee Box B204 nor B206 was released in the U.S. So much for taking Asus at their word. Stay tuned for more on this.

Eee Box B204/B206 U.S. Release Date: April 15

Looks like eco-nerds in America will actually have something to celebrate on Tax Day this year. I called Asus' US Sales department and asked them when the Eee Box B204/B206 will be released. Their answer: April 15. Finally. No word on price, though. This gets the ball rolling for nettops with HD graphics chipsets. Asus is once again ahead of the game. I'm probably going to hold out for their nettop with a 330 dual core chip (B208?). Either way, hooray for Asus.

Atom 330: The future of Green PC's.

My Asus Eee PC 901 is the first Intel-based system that I've ever owned (all others were AMD-based). As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm more that pleased with the amount of punch the 901 packs with such a tiny carbon footprint. By that I mean that it sips electricity instead of gulping it like other larger notebooks. The 901 is powered by the Atom N270, the most common chip in netbooks today. What this chip can accomplish with 4W of power is staggering. Even though the N270 netbooks use the crappy GMA 950 graphics chipset and slow hard drives or solid state drives (upgradable), I'm still digging them.

Sometime this year, the netbooks and nettops of the world will be transitioning from the N270 to the Atom 330 (8W power consumption), which is, for all intents and purposes, a dual core N270. This means that low-power, or green, systems will be on par with some desktops with regard to overall throughput. While this is rather rad in and of itself, many vendors like Asus and Dell plan on combining the 330 with a discreet graphics chipset like the new Nvidia Ion or the ATI HD 3000 or 4000 series. Oh my. That means that we can have green PC's with twice the CPU power and 10 TIMES the graphics muscle, AKA full 1080P video decoding, AND 10 TIMES less power consumption than a full size desktop, at a miniscule price? Wow. It's gonna be a good summer.