Change your online behavior to save the Earth! (2)

It seems strange that being online is causing pollution. We are using a computer, reducing the need for paper, not travelling distances to communicate, and we are using mostly energy efficient machines that have a low average electricity consumption. So why does being online cause pollution? And what can we do to reduce it?
In the previous part, we gave you tips on how to reduce your personal carbon footprint impact. In this part, we are giving you tips on how your company can act greener and reduce its Internet pollution impact!

Internet Pollution

Are you familiar with the term Internet pollution? It is a term that refers to the pollution caused by the data processing servers and data centers, since they consume a lot of energy. In fact, a data center on average consumes the same amount of energy as 30’000 European inhabitants DAILY! Energy is used to power and cool down servers, and ensures that they operate c continuously in case there’s a failure. Since the world still relies heavily on dirty energy, this energy is causing an additional release of CO2!

The Internet pollution, also known as Digital Pollution, originates mainly from activities that require a lot of resources, such as streaming videos, mining for bitcoins, and sending/storing emails.

What your company can do

Companies can adopt greener online behavior as well, and their contribution can reduce immensely their online activities’ carbon footprint by using really simple tips:

– Use the FAQ section to answer your customers’ most common questions on your website. Be clear and straight to the point. Customers will need less time to research and read, you’ll receive less clarification requests through emails and phone calls and you’ll gain a reputation for being a transparent and honest business.
– Optimize your intranet: reduce unnecessary files create and a systematic filing system. Prefer putting your news on the intranet instead of sending emails if you can.
– Encourage live communication, or even phone calls within the company instead of sending tons of emails. Make the emails a un-urgent issue so employees can work uninterrupted, without keeping their eye the whole time on the inbox.
– Use white boards within a department (with nontoxic whiteboard pens of course) for small news, it’ll do the same job as a forward to all email.
– Encourage employees to remove useless emails from their inboxes and to only keep what’s essential. Your company’s party invitation from 5 years ago is a nice memory, but it’s not necessary to keep it in the inbox.

– Remind your employees to send clear emails and include any necessary details to avoid follow-up emails.
– Prefer simple pages and designs to using extremely heavy online content on your website. Most companies do not need to load their websites, it will slow down the website launching and use up too much internet. I have tried to use the same tips on my startup’s website, and it did not affect the traffic nor the amount of information I wanted to share.

Companies, when working together, can achieve goals much faster than individuals. Consider these tips as a head start in your green behavior, they will not cost you money, but they will definitely save a lot for planet Earth

Change your online behavior to save the Earth! (1)

It seems strange that being online is causing pollution. We are using a computer, reducing the need for paper, not travelling distances to communicate, and we are using mostly energy efficient machines that have a low average electricity consumption. So why does being online cause pollution? And what can we do to reduce it?
In this part, we will be giving you tips on how to reduce your personal carbon footprint impact. In part 2, we will give you tips on how your company can act greener and reduce its Internet pollution impact!
I gathered the best advice from various sources, I hope you will enjoy the content!

Internet Pollution

Are you familiar with the term Internet pollution? It is a term that refers to the pollution caused by the data processing servers and data centers, since they consume a lot of energy. In fact, a data center on average consumes the same amount of energy as 30’000 European inhabitants DAILY! Energy is used to power and cool down servers, and ensures that they operate c continuously in case there’s a failure. Since the world still relies heavily on dirty energy, this energy is causing an additional release of CO2!

Retrieved from CCCB Lab, Source: Jon Koomey.

The Internet pollution, also known as Digital Pollution, originates mainly from activities that require a lot of resources, such as streaming videos, mining for bitcoins, and sending/storing emails.

How can I help?

You may think that as a user, you may not make a difference. It is true that the upgrade of data centers and servers is up to the companies. But you can reduce your own activities’ carbon footprint and energy requirements with a few steps:

Take care of your email

Clean your inbox regularly, and get rid of those thousands of emails that you stored a long time ago to read later on, but never did. If you are a nostalgic person and you saved every email your friends and family sent you, just save these letters on your computer and remove them from your inbox, you’ll be doing the Earth a favor.

Unsubscribe from the useless newsletters that you do not read, it will reduce the distraction created by recurrent incoming mail, reduce the number of emails uselessly stored, and help you find the important emails faster.

Send short, clear, and easy to read emails, with optimized attachements. It will require less energy to send and receive the content, and your recipient(s) will need less time to read the email, and understand your goals better. If the email is unclear, you will receive back another email demanding clarifications, which will cause an unnecessary amount of energy to be spent for additional emails.

Use compressed and light format files in your email attachements and when uploading files to an online drive. If you are sharing a photo with family, prefer JPEG format to Bitmap to reduce the size, and you can always resize it. Although a 10 megapixels photo is cool, unless you need professional work done on the photo, you can have a great photo quality for 5 megapixels as well. You can easily resize the photo using Paint or online tools.

Don’t check your email all the time. To avoid missing out on important emails, we advise you to have a personal email for all the personal emails, and a professional email for all education and work emails.
You can stop all the incoming email notifications during work hours from your personal email, and you can disconnect from work by turning off the notifications of your professional emails during your off-work time. Not only will you reduce the carbon footprint, you will also be able to work with much less interruptions and have a better performance during work hours, and be able to disconnect better from work and its stress in your off-duty hours.

Unless you REALLY NEED to, don’t use the “reply to all” option when sending back an email. Send the follow-up message only to the concerned people.

Make use of the subject line in emails to inform your recipient about the content, so they know whether it is urgent/important enough to read on the spot, or whether they can read it later.

Act more responsibly online

This part is really important. You need to reduce any unnecessary carbon emissions that your online presence may cause.

Choose a greener online cloud service, use lighter file formats, and reduce the unnecessary use of online space. We know it’s awesome to have a free cloud storage and put all our treasured memories, but it is also consuming too much energy, when you can keep an offline copy on an external storage and/or your computer. Make sure to back-up regularly your files and remove that 4 year old university project that you saved online when you feared you might lose it.

Reduce the number of photos you share on social media by removing unnecessary photos. These photos take a large space off servers, and with the increasing number of users, companies keep on adding data servers to cover the need. Your school photos are really cute, but do you really need an album of 100 photos to confirm it?

Delete your old accounts if you no longer use them, and don’t create unnecessary email addresses just for fun. Although it’s cool to have 1 extra free month from Netflix when using a new account, it’s doing a lot of harm when you consider the number of users doing it.

Bookmark the websites you always visit, instead of researching them every time you want to use them. It will save a whole lot of energy.

Reduce the time you spend online. Since pages usually keep on loading, if you have a long read, you can download the web page as offline copy, or simply disconnect yourself from the internet until you need to use it again.

Optimize your research by using specific keywords and favorite your frequent searches. Remember that each search is using more energy. Prefer using green search engines like Ecosia, as they use way less energy, and prefer clean energy to dirty one. In addition, many of them use the revenue to support an environmental cause!

Research the companies whose services you’re using. You will discover which ones are working towards greener services and which ones do not care about it at all. A good reference is RE100, a reference for companies that pledged to use 100% renewable energy. RE100 is a global corporate leadership initiative bringing together influential businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. You can also check Clickclean, an initiative by Greenpeace. They do annual reports on the green performance of large corporations, and they do campaigns to influence companies to turn green through petitions.

The next time you think that you can be more eco-friendly when using online services, think twice! Sometimes, their environmental impact is worse than doing things the traditional way. If you can communicate it live, prefer it to sending emails or instant messages. If you feel safe to store a file on local drives, prefer it to cloud systems.

One person may have a small impact, but when a group of people do it, they can make a difference and inspire others to do so as well. So make sure to inform others on how to reduce their online carbon footprint as well!

Is your private data exposed online?

Every month, we hear about data breaches on some of the most used websites. Most of the time, small data breaches also occur. Is your privacy was breached? How do you know? And what can you do?

Thankfully, there is an easy way to know. Since all services require an email and a password for you to use them, you can check your email addresses and see which ones were compromised, when, on what website, and what information could have been stolen.

How to check if your email was involved in a security breach?

To get these information, use the website haveibeenpwned.com, put your email addresses, and check all the security breaches that affected your accounts. If you tend to change your passwords frequently, you may be safer than others. In case you forgot when was the last time you changed your passwords, it is safer to change it.

How to reduce the chances of having my data exposed?

To keep your data safe, you need to have a safe online behavior. I gathered 12 tips to help you stay safer online:

1- Do not use the emails that contain personal and/or professional details everywhere, have an email for fun, and an email for serious use.

2- Make sure to use a secondary email that is not used much, to secure your more active accounts and be able to retrieve them.

3- Do not use the same password everywhere, and make sure to change it frequently. If you are as forgetful as I am, keep a paper version of your passwords and update it regularly.

4- Check the websites you use carefully, make sure they are protected: if you see the lock icon and the https on the address bar, then the website is secure.

5- If you are sending sensitive data, as soon as you are done, delete the information to avoid the details getting to others in case of any future hacking. Request from your recipient to do so as well.

6- Add the minimum number of personal details, just the essentials, when using any website.

7- Use a browser add-on to check on the safety of websites, like Avira Browser Safety, so you land less on bad websites.

8- Do not download from shady websites, and check your computer all the time for viruses and malware.

9- Pay attention to the emails you receive, too many fall for scams and download malware by downloading content from spam. Even if the email says Apple, check the email address and more often than not, it will not be sent from Apple.

10- If you can afford it, buy an antivirus, Kaspersky have great products for very reasonable prices. If you cannot buy an antivirus, at least download a good one, like Avira, Avast or AVG, update them regularly and scan at least one a week.

11- Add antiviruses to your phone as well and choose carefully the apps you download.

12- Check haveiveenpwned.com regularly to see if your emails were compromised in additional breaches of security.

I wish you a safe internet trip!

Easter eggs decoration with natural ingredients

I hate complicated methods to color eggs, I always used the coloring kits available in stores. But I realized that I may be harming myself by choosing the easy packed way, especially that in Lebanon, I did not find a natural ingredients dye kit yet. This is why I decided to find the best natural methods to color them.

Although it takes more time than just popping a colors pill or using food coloring, the results are great, the ingredients are majorly cheap, and you have room to get creative and experiment

The coloring ingredients

There are hundreds of ideas out there, my favorite are onions and beetroots for the amazing colors they give. Both ingredients are also very widely used in Lebanon, and were used by families for decades. I retrieved a list of many easy to find color ingredients via Practicallyfunctional.com, shown below. They also included their recommended quantities, but you can add more or less depending on the color intensity you desire. Don’t forget that the original color of your eggs will affect the final result.

You can use many more ingredients, like:
– well brewed camomille tea for light yellow
– strongly brewed hibiscus tea for dark green
– blueberries for a marbled blue
– Hibiscus flowers for reddish blue to lavender
– sunflower petals for pale yellow
– curry powder for pale orange
– paprika for darker orange
– chili powder for red to brown
– cranberry juice for pink to red
– undiluted pomegranate juice for pink
– frozen cherries or raspberries for pink
– simmered orange peels for light yellow
– chopped carrots for red-orange
– Frozen blueberries for grey-blue
– Spinach or parsley for green

You can also mix between different colors and experiment to have more shades and colors.

The coloring methods

You also have either the cold dye method, which is suitable for the lighter colors and to have eggs that last longer, and you can use the hot dye method for richer deeper colors, but with over boiled eggs that last only until Easter is over.

Hot dye method:

Add water, your dye ingredient and white vinegar to a pot and let them boil. The quantity of vinegar recommended is 2 tbsp of vinegar per liter (or quarter in US) of water. In addition add some salt to the mixture to help retain the color. You can also have different color shades if you use baking soda in small quantities, as it affects the acidity of certain ingredients, like cabbage, which affects the resulting color.

Then add eggs, allow them to boil for a few minutes, then reduce the heat to allow the pot’s content to simmer for around 15 minutes. Avoid overcooking the eggs, don’t keep them on heat for more than 30 minutes as they will be overcooked, making them edible for a shorter period.
Remove the pot away from the stove, cover it and and let it rest for an additional 15 minutes or more, depending on the depth of the color you desire.
Remove the eggs, rinse them carefully in lukewarm water, and let them air dry.

Cold dye method:

Add water, your dye ingredient and white vinegar to a pot and let them boil. The quantity of vinegar recommended is 2 tbsp of vinegar per liter (or quarter in US) of water. In addition add some salt to the mixture to help retain the color. You can also have different color shades if you use baking soda in small quantities, as it affects the acidity of certain ingredients, like cabbage, which affects the resulting color.
Simmer the mixture, covered, until the water is well colored. It takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours.

Strain the colored water from the remains of your ingredient, let it cool.
Add you hard-boiled eggs to the colored mixture, and let it soak for as long as you see it necessary to reach your desired color. You can even keep them in the fridge overnight.

Decoration ideas

An Easter egg needs some decoration, and by using natural coloring, it is a little tricky. But if you decorate BEFORE coloring, you can end up with really cool eggs.

For patterns, use stickers all over the egg to create patterns, let the egg color, then peel off the stickers, You can also use ropes and tape.

For natural decoration, ciaoflorentina.com recommends that you add a plant on the egg by using some water.

Then firmly enclose the egg in stockings and proceed with the coloring method of your choice.

  
Once you are done, you will have beautifully decorated eggs.

These are few ideas, there are so many more. If you have tried other methods and they worked, please share them with me as well. I hope you have a great Easter and you enjoy decorating your eggs without worrying about toxic components.

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#color #egg #decorate #decoration #eggs #easter #natural #coloring #vegetable #plant
#fruit #dye #idea #tip #linventif #lebanon #green #notoxins #clean #red #colour #colours #yellow #blue #brown #pink #orange

Crafts tips (1)

Crafts are really fun, but a lot of resources is wasted. But sometimes, a little care can help you save your tools and keep them in a good state for longer. In this post, I will add some useful tips that helped me out:

1. Bad scissors: if your scissors are no longer cutting well, they need to be resharpened. Rather than a scissors sharpener that may not be available, use sand paper: cut with the scissors the sand paper and the abrasion of the paper will sharpen them. You can use a small test paper, and keep on cutting in the sand paper until you’re satisfied. The sand paper can be cut into pieces that you can use for other projects.
2. Spraying: you want to spray but you don’t want to ruin the covers you’re using? Opt for a cardboard box. Put the item to spray inside it, and spray it to your heart’s content!
3. Sticky cuts: you want to cut duct tape but you don’t want to ruin your scissors? Run some baby wipes on the scissors prior to cutting, and they will not stick as much to the tape.
4. Tape residues on scissors: if your scissors have tape or glue on them, they’re not ruined. You soak your scissors in lukewarm water for 30 seconds then open and close the scissors to get rid of the glue. Repeat as much as needed. An alcohol wiping can help you get rid of the stubborn residues.
5. Old tape roll: if you are finding it hard to use an old tape roll, put it in the microwave for 10 seconds (make sure it doesn’t have foil in it) so that its glue will loosen up rather than stick altogether.
6. Stained paintbrushes: paintbrushes are not that cheap if you work with high quality. To keep them in a good state, wash the bristles and the ferrule (metal tip that holds the bristles) with shampoo or soap, gently rub to keep the bristles unharmed, then rince well with lukewarm water. They need to be stored either horizontally or vertically with the bristles up.

These are few ideas and I will be adding some more soon!

Don’t forget to follow my own early stage startup news on Facebook, Instagram and the Website. Kindly consider helping me grow by liking my Facebook page, so I can reach more people!

#tips #tricks #tools #crafts #ideas #lebanon #linventif #save #maintain #simple #paint #scissors #glue #art #artist #DIY #handmade #hobby 

Super easy DIY to get rid of bad smells in a room

Looking for an easy and natural way to make a room smell better?
Fill a small ceramic bowl with coffee beans, and add a small tea candle on top. Once you light up the candle, the metallic container will heat up and the smell of coffee will fill the room. What is better is that it’s safe and you can reuse the coffee beans as long as they are giving out a smell. You just need to store the beans in a dry place.

What is even better is that coffee smell disturbs flies, so you can use it outdoors and on hot days during meals to keep those pesters away.

Don’t forget to follow my own early stage startup news on Facebook, Instagram and the Website. Kindly consider helping me grow by liking my Facebook page, so I can reach more people!

#idea #tip #house #home #natural #smell #organic #easy #bean #coffee#linventif
#lebanon #fresh #aroma

How to replace an old zipper

You may have a few clothes laying around, waiting for the tailor to fix their zips. If you can’t find a good tailor or you don’t have the time to drop them to one, you can mend them yourself. But make sure that you are comfortable with the basic sewing skills. This project doesn’t require a very high level of sewing knowledge, but it requires some time, patience and attention.

With the following few steps, you can change your old zipper:

1) Choose a zipper of the same color and length of the old zipper. If you end up with a longer zipper, you can cut it from the lower part using sturdy scissors, then close its ends using a plier to hold firmly the prongs (the metal part used to close the zipper). You can sew the lower part really firmly if you don’t have prongs (check the photo). Make sure that when you cut the zipper to shorten it, the zipper is closed.

2) Remove the old zipper, but still make sure that you know where it was sewn, so that the new zipper will work correctly. Note anything you notice, even the pattern, so you can sew the zipper the same way. Use a seam ripper (the item similar to a 2 toothed fork in sewing kits) to cut the stitches holding the zipper in place. Pull gently the zipper upon cutting the stitches while holding firmly your clothe item.

3) Clean the spot from any remaining stitches or threads.

4) Position the new zipper, using needles to hold it into place. make sure that the zipper and the fabric are well stretched. Use the old zipper’s sewing linings to mark where you will be sewing.

5) Sew the new zipper into its place using a sewing machine threaded by the colored thread of your choice, preferably the same color used for the old zipper. You can sew it by hand but it will take more time and you need to be careful with the distance between each two stitches. You can use the small holes of the old zipper’s sewing as reference, putting the needle in the small holes marked by the old sewing work.

And voila! Your clothes are now as good as new!

Don’t forget to follow my own early stage startup news on Facebook, Instagram and the Website

#sewing #tip #trick #zipper #zip #handmade #diy #lebanon #linventif #mend#dontthrow
#waste #reduction #doityourself #fashion #clothes

This content is based on wikiHow‘s tips and tricks. You can find illustrations to help you by following the link https://www.wikihow.com/Replace-a-Zipper