Snap!

@DangerousLiberal: true - whether it's worth it depends on your exact needs; my old drives sit in a box most of the time and see occasional use.

If you have several hard drives lying around, it might be more economic and convenient to buy a hard drive dock like the one above instead of a whole bunch of caddies.

@stickboy: you're right in that a flourescent tube backlight consumes most of the power in an LCD. You may also be right about it being an underestimate - I was trying to make a point about prioritising, i.e. there's little point switching from 90 down to 80 if you're just going to leave the thing turned on all the…

@jb70115: Interestingly, this can be explained because a typical laptop battery has less than 60Wh of juice*, and so if you're getting even a few watts difference in monitor power consumption, then you'd run for longer.

Regarding the "Save Money by Lowering your PC's Brightness", I'm going to be pedantic now, bear with me while I do this sanity check...

@rob.lingle: Of course! Tasker is awesome and I use it for a lot of things, the developers did an awesome job. However no app can handle every single task we need to perform on our phones (if there were, we wouldn't need applications in the first place), and in this particular case, it is my opinion that phone…

@neely615: Try Prey Project: [www.preyproject.com] also available on Android.

@LuluFanuimor: You could get it to send an SMS to a predefined number whenever it boots up (assuming that you needed to have taken the battery out to change the SIM). But then it'll do that every time you reboot the phone.

@robot-shmobot: True true, I do use Tasker for its awesomeness, but for phone tracking (particularly in case of theft), I still prefer Prey since it's got more rounded features for this application: password protected settings make it more difficult for a thief to disable, reports arrive via email (including link to…

I use Prey Project to track my G1 . I would highly recommend it, as it has a very similar set of features but is free and open source: location reporting, alerts/alarm, SMS activation. Save yourself the $6.50!

@cyberbuddhah: I agree with you, the saying goes "for every grain of rice, a farmer sheds a bead of sweat", although it's slightly more poetic in Chinese. But it's so easy to forget in the west.

@icecreamman: The answer is twofold:

I rooted my G1 to install Eclair (and soon Froyo) since official updates for it has stopped somewhere at Donut.

@icecreamman: I was under the impression that you need to root the phone first before you can install a custom rom (certainly that's what I had to do to root my G1)

I had a decently spec'd laptop at one point, which tended to overheat and shut off ONLY when playing games. Propping the laptop up increased the airflow somewhat, reducing shutdowns, but investing in a laptop cooler solved the problem completely.

I would say that the general idea is good, and the other examples one the page are great. But I'd give a different explanation for the ball game example.

This is an even bigger problem in the UK, with the big plugs. Fortunately, B&Q here sell this neat 4-cable plug that you can wire up yourself.