These days it is absolutely obligatory for manufacturers to have eco-friendly products in their product range. If not? Well, you are doomed to disappear into oblivion...
But nowadays this rage is getting so extreme, that you can't tell anymore which ones really are eco friendly and which ones aren't. Everyone just seems to cling to this word "ECO" to attract the consumer.
It's like the last pair of shoes in a shop and 1000 greedy women that desperately make a run for it.
But is this really necessary? And is the word "ECO" in every case rightly deserved?
On the first question, I am pretty sure the answer should be YES! Any company that still neglects to go Eco-friendly these days, should get a slap on the butt! We can't neglect the fact that our ancestors did a good job in creating environmental-unfriendly industries. The media buzzes all around: we need to change our habbits, we need to search for our harmony in nature again.
And the brand "ECO" was born.
Sadly not all products with "ECO" in the name are ecologically friendly. A lot of car companies now have an eco-modell. Sadly this eco-modell still has quit a high level of exhaust fumes. But with some good branding and marketing of the word "ECO" and with the help of the media they make the consumers believe that you're buying a better world.
So in my opinion, in the most cases the label "ECO" is not rightly deserved.
But don't panic. There really are some musketeers around that offer the hard-ECO stuff.
If you are looking for a zero emission vehicle, you'll find that there are already some nice scooters and heavy bikes on the market.
A very nice example is the Vectrix. A light heavy bike (or how do you call a 125CC?) that runs completely on electricity. It literally is plug and play!
So zero emission, almost no maintenance... this must be the ultimate dream of anyone!
Despite this fact the technology still needs to outgrow it's puberty.
At a speed of 40 km/h you have a driving range of 100 km. Not bad, since 40 km/h is the general speed these days and most daily use isn't more than a 50 km range.
So, ideal for work-home travel and if your boss agrees, you can plug it in at work to have a worry-free drive home.
But what if I'd like to drive a bit further than 100 km? What if I'd love to cruise around in neighbouring countries? What if I'd want to make a city-trip or drive to my holiday location?
Would I be able to refuel on time? And where do I get to recharge my bike? And what will they charge me, since electricity has different rates in different countries... ?
To these questions I don't know the answer, but I'd love to know if Europe is working on this.
Preferably I'd love to see the same range with these electric machines as in an old fashion car -> 800 km... which is 8 times more. This would mean I could just drive to anywhere I like without the concern of a forthcoming necessity of recharging the battery.
I do hope that the industries keep investing in this technology, because I believe this just might be our future.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Time out...
This is a blogpost to inform you all of my upcomming dissapearance for the next months.
The next comming months I will appear to be "dead" or vannished. But fear not my fellow friends, because I'll be back ;-)
The reason for this is very simple. In my daytime job I work as Production Planner for Vivaboxes. (www.vivaboxes.com) During the next coming months we are preparing (already) for the upcoming parties at the end of the year. As everyone might know, during December there are some people who like to buy presents for one another. Well the company I work for happens to be specialized in gifts...
This means that I won't have time to read my private e-mail or answer your calls during this period. So If you want to get in touch with me, you'll have to be patient untill januari :-D
For those who know my, they can try to reach me through my private mail-adress or through Bart.
See you all again soon in January!
The next comming months I will appear to be "dead" or vannished. But fear not my fellow friends, because I'll be back ;-)
The reason for this is very simple. In my daytime job I work as Production Planner for Vivaboxes. (www.vivaboxes.com) During the next coming months we are preparing (already) for the upcoming parties at the end of the year. As everyone might know, during December there are some people who like to buy presents for one another. Well the company I work for happens to be specialized in gifts...
This means that I won't have time to read my private e-mail or answer your calls during this period. So If you want to get in touch with me, you'll have to be patient untill januari :-D
For those who know my, they can try to reach me through my private mail-adress or through Bart.
See you all again soon in January!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Making people to work with you...
Some of you might and some of you might not read my last blogpost "Making money".
I had some really nice comments and support on this. This makes me conclude that we should give it a try.
Since I am not a superwoman that can do anything herselve, I'd love your help (the community).
So here's what I am looking for:
a developer to write me a desktop program/widget -> kde-shop
an artist that creates the coolest artwork
and as I am already a creative mind that can come up with great idea's (wink), It'll be still great to have some extra creativity brainies to help me out with this
What needs to be done as well:
creating following documents:
- deliverie conditions
- terms & conditions
- privacy policy
Since I already work for a commercial company that has a webshop, I could take there documents as example.
I had some really nice comments and support on this. This makes me conclude that we should give it a try.
Since I am not a superwoman that can do anything herselve, I'd love your help (the community).
So here's what I am looking for:
a developer to write me a desktop program/widget -> kde-shop
an artist that creates the coolest artwork
and as I am already a creative mind that can come up with great idea's (wink), It'll be still great to have some extra creativity brainies to help me out with this
What needs to be done as well:
creating following documents:
- deliverie conditions
- terms & conditions
- privacy policy
Since I already work for a commercial company that has a webshop, I could take there documents as example.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Making money
After one week of thinking an listening to presentations, I (again) got the "a-little-lamp-blinking on-my-head"-syndrome.
One of the presentations I went to was about making money out of open source.
Since open source is free most of the time, this might proof to be quit of a challenge.
Or not?
As I already stated some years ago, there is a very powerful media called merchandising.
Not only do you get your name out on the streets, you can also create buzz around wanna-have-goodies and make fame with it. The fun part of this: you get paid to advertise.
The money that comes in can be used to subsidize developers, organize events, create promotional stuff, ... etc.
Okay so we have the coolest merchandise, good quality, very trendy and fashionable.
Now let's think a bit further. How to sell it?
Most of you will probably spontaneously think: Oh Oh I know it, at our events, or on the kde.org website!
Well yes, that's a possibility, but it doesn't really reach everyone.
Are there better ways? Yes!
I give an example with Amarok:
You have a musicplayer, which already has music shops/services integrated. Aha shops, so it's already possible to buy stuff with a program!
Now let's ad an extra service: "FanShop"
What doe we sell: everything that can be linked to a music player and has the Amarok logo on it:
mp3 players, speakers, t-shirts, remote control for laptop, headset, fluffy stuff, ... etc.
Oh but my program can't! Yes you can.
Some examples:
Social Desktop: Pokens with logo on it, cool t-shirts, fluffy stuff
Dolphin: dolhpins of course, usb-sticks, again t-shirts,...
and I could go on for a while.
it's just a thing of stimulating the creative part in you.
One tip: get a really good Artist to work on the artwork for great succes and be creative!
One of the presentations I went to was about making money out of open source.
Since open source is free most of the time, this might proof to be quit of a challenge.
Or not?
As I already stated some years ago, there is a very powerful media called merchandising.
Not only do you get your name out on the streets, you can also create buzz around wanna-have-goodies and make fame with it. The fun part of this: you get paid to advertise.
The money that comes in can be used to subsidize developers, organize events, create promotional stuff, ... etc.
Okay so we have the coolest merchandise, good quality, very trendy and fashionable.
Now let's think a bit further. How to sell it?
Most of you will probably spontaneously think: Oh Oh I know it, at our events, or on the kde.org website!
Well yes, that's a possibility, but it doesn't really reach everyone.
Are there better ways? Yes!
I give an example with Amarok:
You have a musicplayer, which already has music shops/services integrated. Aha shops, so it's already possible to buy stuff with a program!
Now let's ad an extra service: "FanShop"
What doe we sell: everything that can be linked to a music player and has the Amarok logo on it:
mp3 players, speakers, t-shirts, remote control for laptop, headset, fluffy stuff, ... etc.
Oh but my program can't! Yes you can.
Some examples:
Social Desktop: Pokens with logo on it, cool t-shirts, fluffy stuff
Dolphin: dolhpins of course, usb-sticks, again t-shirts,...
and I could go on for a while.
it's just a thing of stimulating the creative part in you.
One tip: get a really good Artist to work on the artwork for great succes and be creative!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
KDE connecting people
(hope I don't get in trouble with some kind of mobile operator now...)
I finally managed to get my laptop, connect to the internet and find some time to blog.
I did not attend a lot of talks, since there's also a beach that's very appealing to me. (Not to mention the shopping centers!)
But the talks I did went to really brought me some new stuff to think about.
A lot of the talks were focussing on socializing KDE, bringing the Community closer together and closer to the public users.
Frank Karlitcheck's talk about the Social Desktop was one of them. The Social Desktop could well become one of the most important new features for our community to push KDE to the wider public.
As you might know, a lot of people are afraid of new stuff, like switching from Mac/Windows to KDE (Linux). I believe that the social desktop will make it easer to convince those people who are suffering from these uncertainties.
After attending another talk about Zanshin (Getting Things done - talk). This brought me to an idea.
Why not connect everything with eachother. Why not BRING the COMMUNITY to our DESKTOP.
I see a lot of "hey, I got a really cool new thingy that I am coding on right now", but not enough "hey, I have a really cool new thingy that I am coding on right now and it would be even better if we could implement it with the cool thingy that you are working on right now." (which kind of refers a little to the talk of Alexandra Leisse -> we need to get more interested in each other, not only in the code. Btw great talk Alexandra!).
So here's my idea: Let's think beyond, let's think out of the box!
Zanshin is a task manager, with just that little bit more than the general task managers out there. I'd like to see it even more advanced.
Social Desktop is a great medium to get in contact with other people from the KDE community or users, local or international.
What if we could link these two together? What is we, from the community, could create a community-task-list (like the mailinglist)?
This would mean that new entering members of a project would instantly could tune-in into the mailing-list AND task-list and would have an instant view on what needs to be done, what's already running, who to contact, ...
This would especially be a great tool for the promotion and events teams. And if you'd think further: companies would be able to use this to assign tasks to certain departments within the company!
More advanced: I would be able to: have my personal tasks, see the running tasks of the community, ad f.i. remember the milk tasks (?), ... IN the Social Desktop AND in Kmail (because I would like to link everything with eachother).
This also makes it easier to invite new people to the community, because it makes things more open and accessible to newbies. Because we need to remember that there are also those people who are introvert and do not spontaneously start asking around if they can be of any assistance in your project. By creating an even easier way to get into contact with the community, I am confident that we will attract more enthusiastic talents!
Please, feel free to use the comments to discuss about how this project could work out for KDE.
I finally managed to get my laptop, connect to the internet and find some time to blog.
I did not attend a lot of talks, since there's also a beach that's very appealing to me. (Not to mention the shopping centers!)
But the talks I did went to really brought me some new stuff to think about.
A lot of the talks were focussing on socializing KDE, bringing the Community closer together and closer to the public users.
Frank Karlitcheck's talk about the Social Desktop was one of them. The Social Desktop could well become one of the most important new features for our community to push KDE to the wider public.
As you might know, a lot of people are afraid of new stuff, like switching from Mac/Windows to KDE (Linux). I believe that the social desktop will make it easer to convince those people who are suffering from these uncertainties.
After attending another talk about Zanshin (Getting Things done - talk). This brought me to an idea.
Why not connect everything with eachother. Why not BRING the COMMUNITY to our DESKTOP.
I see a lot of "hey, I got a really cool new thingy that I am coding on right now", but not enough "hey, I have a really cool new thingy that I am coding on right now and it would be even better if we could implement it with the cool thingy that you are working on right now." (which kind of refers a little to the talk of Alexandra Leisse -> we need to get more interested in each other, not only in the code. Btw great talk Alexandra!).
So here's my idea: Let's think beyond, let's think out of the box!
Zanshin is a task manager, with just that little bit more than the general task managers out there. I'd like to see it even more advanced.
Social Desktop is a great medium to get in contact with other people from the KDE community or users, local or international.
What if we could link these two together? What is we, from the community, could create a community-task-list (like the mailinglist)?
This would mean that new entering members of a project would instantly could tune-in into the mailing-list AND task-list and would have an instant view on what needs to be done, what's already running, who to contact, ...
This would especially be a great tool for the promotion and events teams. And if you'd think further: companies would be able to use this to assign tasks to certain departments within the company!
More advanced: I would be able to: have my personal tasks, see the running tasks of the community, ad f.i. remember the milk tasks (?), ... IN the Social Desktop AND in Kmail (because I would like to link everything with eachother).
This also makes it easier to invite new people to the community, because it makes things more open and accessible to newbies. Because we need to remember that there are also those people who are introvert and do not spontaneously start asking around if they can be of any assistance in your project. By creating an even easier way to get into contact with the community, I am confident that we will attract more enthusiastic talents!
Please, feel free to use the comments to discuss about how this project could work out for KDE.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
KDE hotel for FOSDEM!
Hi KDE people that are coming to FOSDEM,
Here are some small adaptations to the hotel reservation.
In the meanwhile I managed to get an option untill 19 januari for Hotel Albert.
For those still in search of a nice hotel, I managed to get a reduction on rooms in a very nice hotel in the center of Brussels. Very positive: the hotel has free wi-fi!
If you make your reservations at this hotel, please do not forget to mention "KDE voor Emile" to obtain these special prices.
Prices for KDE are:
single room 45 EUR
double/twin room 50 EUR
Tripple room 60 EUR
Quadouble room 70 EUR
Breakfast is included in these price.
You can make your reservations by calling the hotel, by e-mail or by means of the reservation form online.
It is a very nice hotel with 2 up to 3 stars.
Since I do not have an option on these rooms, it will be first reservation = first gets. Rooms are limited, there this hotel is situated very central and very popular with tourists.
Hotel information:
Albert
Koninklijke Sint Mariastraat,27
+32.2.217 93 91
info@hotelalbert.be
www.hotelalbert.be
Situated:
Hotel Albert is situated very near Brussels "Kruidentuin or Botanique" (Herb Garden). Acros the streat you'll find a concerts hall "Hallen van Schaarbeek", where in the weekends concerts and cultural events are kept. The hotel is almost next to Nord Station, very near the shopping area, the central station and the Royal Palace. Every room has a shower, toilet, flat screen television, hair dryer, FREE WIFI.
Bus 272 stops in front of the hotel and goes directly to Brussels airport. For other transportation, Brussels Nord station is almost next door.
An other option:
It is also possible to book in the hotel where KDE stayed last year. It is situated a little less central, but still has a good connection to public transport.
Prices are more or less in the same rate. http://www.hotelsabina.be/
Also here make sure to use "KDE" in your reservation!
Here are some small adaptations to the hotel reservation.
In the meanwhile I managed to get an option untill 19 januari for Hotel Albert.
For those still in search of a nice hotel, I managed to get a reduction on rooms in a very nice hotel in the center of Brussels. Very positive: the hotel has free wi-fi!
If you make your reservations at this hotel, please do not forget to mention "KDE voor Emile" to obtain these special prices.
Prices for KDE are:
single room 45 EUR
double/twin room 50 EUR
Tripple room 60 EUR
Quadouble room 70 EUR
Breakfast is included in these price.
You can make your reservations by calling the hotel, by e-mail or by means of the reservation form online.
It is a very nice hotel with 2 up to 3 stars.
Since I do not have an option on these rooms, it will be first reservation = first gets. Rooms are limited, there this hotel is situated very central and very popular with tourists.
Hotel information:
Albert
Koninklijke Sint Mariastraat,27
+32.2.217 93 91
info@hotelalbert.be
www.hotelalbert.be
Situated:
Hotel Albert is situated very near Brussels "Kruidentuin or Botanique" (Herb Garden). Acros the streat you'll find a concerts hall "Hallen van Schaarbeek", where in the weekends concerts and cultural events are kept. The hotel is almost next to Nord Station, very near the shopping area, the central station and the Royal Palace. Every room has a shower, toilet, flat screen television, hair dryer, FREE WIFI.
Bus 272 stops in front of the hotel and goes directly to Brussels airport. For other transportation, Brussels Nord station is almost next door.
An other option:
It is also possible to book in the hotel where KDE stayed last year. It is situated a little less central, but still has a good connection to public transport.
Prices are more or less in the same rate. http://www.hotelsabina.be/
Also here make sure to use "KDE" in your reservation!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
My first program!
About 1 year ago I bought myself a book called "Learn to program". Since I really do not know anything about programming, I wasn't really expecting much of it.
But some month ago I came to the idea to write a program that creates unique strings, consisting out of letters and numbers.
So I started with the basics I already learned from the book (btw wonderfull book for those who know nothing about programming...). Next I did some research on the internet and before I knew I had made my first program in Ruby!
Okay, it is far from perfect yet, BUT while working on it I will evolve into a uber-geeky-girl :-)
Is it something KDE could use? I don't know, if KDE needs a program that creates random passwords, maybe...
Anyway I am very happy to have succeeded in this! Next steps now is to make an interface (frames and buttons) so that is is more accessible to the "normal" user. And of course make is usable on Linux, Windows and Mac.
(me = happy)
But some month ago I came to the idea to write a program that creates unique strings, consisting out of letters and numbers.
So I started with the basics I already learned from the book (btw wonderfull book for those who know nothing about programming...). Next I did some research on the internet and before I knew I had made my first program in Ruby!
Okay, it is far from perfect yet, BUT while working on it I will evolve into a uber-geeky-girl :-)
Is it something KDE could use? I don't know, if KDE needs a program that creates random passwords, maybe...
Anyway I am very happy to have succeeded in this! Next steps now is to make an interface (frames and buttons) so that is is more accessible to the "normal" user. And of course make is usable on Linux, Windows and Mac.
(me = happy)
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