They’ve just announced that they are planning on spending 10’s to 100’s of millions of their own research money to prove that renewable and clean energy creation is able to be brought down to the same, or lower, cost levels of current coal power generation. It’s an ambitions task, but will certainly be a huge push that could jump start the renewable energy market.

From a USA Today article, Larry Page was quoted as saying “Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal… We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.” As part of this push to research and push the cutting edge in renewable engergy, Google will be hiring talented engineers in many fields of related study.

News like this certainly puts a friendly face on Google despite the fact that it’s becoming a HUGE company; I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how successful this project is so that I can eventually buy my own solar, wind, and geothermal energy creation solution for my house (when I eventually own one).

[as heard on NPR’s Marketplace, in other news Verizon may become more “open” to a broader range of phones come next year]

[Related news: NYTimes, NYTimes 2, CNN Video, BBC ]

Are you a self-proclaimed nerd, a dork, or a geek? Do you have a significant other than doesn’t understand your way of thinking or fascination with your computer and technology? If you answer yes to both of the above questions, you will probably want your significant other to read “The Nerd Handbook” to get a good glimpse into what it is to be your nerdy self. It’s a very funny read and is on-the-spot with all of the points that it makes about us technically inclined folks.

[via Sam Devore’s Blog]

If you have an image file that you want to make into an icon, look no further than Bradicon! It’s a web-based icon generation tool that allows you to generate icons from just about any image file. The website provides both an “advanced” and a “simple” interface to their scripts, but the simple interface has produced the best results for me. Some hints that I have learned are to upload only square images to the site, otherwise it will automatically crop the pictures and make sure the pictures have transparent backgrounds.

See here at the bottom of their Political Thinker blog

This is a quick tip that allows multiple configurations of Firefox on the same user account within Windows or LINUX.

• First, close all Firefox program instances.
• Next, from the command line run “firefox -ProfileManager“
• Create a new profile
• Create a new copy of your Firefox shortcut
• Modify the shortcuts to run “firefox -P <profilename>“

This same trick will also work for Debian IceWeasel or GNU IceCat, the two 100% free variants of Firefox.