Low-tech Magazine

Truckloads of hard disks

Imagine you put a portable hard disk of 500 gigabytes in your backpack and start walking.
In which cases are you faster than your internet connection?

The right to 35 mobiles

The high energy consumption of the mobile phone network is mainly due to the limited life span of the phones.

This week, more than 50,000 people gather in Barcelona for the ‘Mobile World Congress’, the annual high mass for the mobile telephone. They gape in admiration at the newest generation of gadgets, which is again fitted with new applications and new designs. This almost unanimously praised innovation, however, has a dark side. Around half of the energy use of the mobile phone network is attributed to the production of the phones. 

Information damages the environment

Is an electronic newspaper more ecological than a paper newspaper?

Newspapers and magazines don’t have a green image because lots of trees have to be cut down to produce them; but electronic publishing is not always more ecologically friendly. The Swedish Royal Institute of Technology made a life cycle analysis of both distribution systems (PDF, heavy download) and has come to some remarkable conclusions.

Picture: Bernarr Macfadden

Email in the 18th century: the optical telegraph

More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane – wireless and without need for electricity.

Email leaves all other communication systems far behind in terms of speed. But the principle of the technology – forwarding coded messages over long distances – is nothing new. It has its origins in the use of plumes of smoke, fire signals and drums, thousands of years before the start of our era. Coded long distance communication also formed the basis of a remarkable but largely forgotten communications network that prepared the arrival of the internet: the optical telegraph.