Our good friend Douglas Lapsley produces a pretty unique podcast which we liked so much that we asked if we could use one of his videos on our website seeing as it fits our theme so nicely. You can see it on the contact page.
If you like it, you can subscribe to his podcast for free from iTunes. It’s called “Peaceful Landscapes in HD” and can be found in the Places & Travel category. In Doug’s own words he describes the podcast as:
“Moments of peace from beautiful locations around the world. Just take a moment to relax. You deserve to. Each podcast is 1.5 minutes of HD. No music or voiceover, just natural surroundings. Designed to give you a few moments of peace in your day. Travel with us and be free”.
Doug is pretty much “living the dream” in our opinion. He and his family live, work and travel the world in their campervan, resting in some of the most beautiful spots imaginable. With a satellite dish on the roof he can pretty much go anywhere he wants while staying connected to the world. How cool is that?!
Being a big fan of TED I thought it would be fitting to mention a talk done early this year by Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video. Have a look, the possibilities seem endless!
Every website on the internet is hosted on a web server which is switched on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These machines process large amounts of data and consume a constant stream of electricity whilst functioning. The production of this electricity, which is generated in power plants, results in large amounts of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas held responsible for global warming, being released into the atmosphere.
Websites can seem like quite abstract, ethereal entities that live 'somewhere in cyberspace', but like pretty much everything we do in modern life, they create carbon emissions. Which is why we signed up with COCO2 to offset our website carbon emissions. What does this mean? Carbon Offsetting is the method by which you can minimise your impact on the environment through global warming. For every one ton of CO2 your activities produce, you can enable one ton to be saved somewhere else in the world.
This is done through projects such as planting trees, creating wind farms or investing in renewable energy projects throughout the world. For example, if your website needs electricity that emits half a ton of CO2 per year, then COCO2 could plant trees that offset that effect by taking half a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
As a business we are nowhere near to being carbon neutral, but we’ve working on it. Here are some handy tips on what you can do to reduce your impact at home.
Deciding on the new logo for Blue Beetle was no quick and simple matter. We went through several (40 odd I think) logos and months of deliberation before narrowing it down to two possible directions which were very different from each other. Internally we referred to them and the “Grass” version and the “Ted Burton” version.
I personally liked the Ted Burton version as did Mladjan (our lead designer) but it appeared that we were the only ones. So for a bit of fun we decided to put it to the vote and create a poll on our temporary holding site. To be honest we knew what the result of the poll would be but what I didn’t know was that it would be such a landslide. Actually landslide is a bit of an understatement. It was more like a tornado on speed.
The grass version won by an overwhelming 87% of the vote. It seemed that not only did the majority prefer the Grass version but most actually had negative comments about the Ted Burton version which in hind sight was valuable feedback actually. Therefore we chose to go the Grass route and developed the logo further until we were happy, which we are :)
