…on March 1, 2009.

On that date, the traditional lighting source of incadescent bulbs will be banned from stores, forcing people to purchase more energy efficient bulbs such as compact fluorescents, halogens and/or LEDs. I have to say, at our last house, I had tons of halogen ceiling lights, which put out TONS of heat and had to be replaced about 3 times a year. That doesn’t seem ecologically friendly or energy friendly.

I have slowly begun converting some of our “main” lights in the current house to compact fluorescents, which with the ones I purchased, you have to get over two issues: one is the warm up time and the other is the color. I know that the color and warm up time can be compensated for by higher priced bulbs, but they also expend a bit more energy to have a constant “primed” bulb. I just figure it is a gradual light for late at night when your eyes need to adjust.

Now, for the LEDs, I am slowly becoming to love those little lights. They just need to come down on price before it can really be cost effective in a house my size. Maybe that will be the next experiment.

Anyways, do you think the people of Ireland will hate or love this change? It appears overall, there is a higher cost for the bulbs, so I wonder if that will sway them?

Retrieved from -Popular Science-

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…that only weird people like me would find fascinating.

So, if you haven’t been able to tell from previous posts, I have a fascination with watches. I still hold true that my two favorite watches are the Seiko Kinetic watch my wife gave me when we got married (and much to her dismay, wear very infrequently) and my Casio G-Shock Atomic Solar…uh…watch. I’m sure it’s got some more descriptive adjectives in the title, but I think you get the point.

Well, it seems that Casio has developed their “Tough Movement” system to utilize LEDs to synchronize the watch with six different time bases. Every hour, when the minute hand hits the 55 minutes mark, the watch will receive a time calibration signal which, if it doesn’t match with the watch, the LEDs will fire a beam of light to a phototransistor. The beam shines through a 300 micrometer hole in the gears for the hands. If the light doesn’t make it through, the gears will rotate until it can and then the time will be correct.

This new “Tough Movement” system also utilizes plastics as well as metal in the mechanisms to reduce weight and size. In some cases, it has reduced the cases up to 33%! I am also happy that they are adding this to the G-Shock line which is what mine is. Once mine dies, I might have to invest. It will start at $388 in Japan at the end of September, so I will have to wait until costs go down first!

Retrieved from -OhGizmo!-

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