Notices comparing how much energy your home uses, compared to your neighbors’ homes, is proving an effective prod at getting people to become efficient, reports the NY Times. From the story:
The utility thinks behavior modification could be as effective in promoting conservation as trying to get customers to install new appliances is … and maybe [...]

If you see a flock of wild turkeys in New Hampshire this winter, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department would like to hear about it. Report sightings of turkey flocks seen from now through the end of March 2009 by filling out a electronic survey form at http://www.wildnh.com/turkeysurvey.

You know the old joke/story about the ancient village where everybody made a living by doing ech other’s laundry? It sometimes seems to me that sites hosting free Flash games are like that.

The Burlington Free-Press has a good story today about biologists working to find the cause of “white-nose syndrome,” which has been hitting populations of bats throughout the Northeast. Vermont has a program asking people to report unusual behavior in wintertime bats, especially the tell-tale white fungus on their face.

One of the things that struck my attention when I moved here (more than two decades ago) is Raised Windshield Wiper Syndrome, pictured here from the Telegraph’s parking lot. It struck me as hilarious, until I had to spend 10 minutes chipping away at accumulated ice on the wipers one morning. Now I salute the sky with my blades like a Granite State native.

Yesterday, while reporting on a future story about the UNH landfill-gas-to-energy program, I got stuck in the snow atop the massive Rochester landfill (the Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprises is the official moniker). This is why I got into journalism, to do fun stuff like that!

My Telegraph column today is about a local guy, Dan Brown, who photographs snowflakes - a non-trivial operation.

You may be aware of the tiff between Boston.com and GateHouse Media, which publishes a bunch of small newspapers around Boston. GateHouse has long had various hyperlocal Web sites, largely consisting of the stories from their paper; Boston.com is setting up lots of hyperlocal Web sites, which prominently feature links to all of Gatehouse’s stories [...]

I’ve written a lot of stories over the years about the facing of amateur radio - ham radio - along with the dying of Morse Code (editors love those stories, because then they can put … — … into the headline). But there’s a Telegraph story today with a different slant; it talks about a [...]

This utility does it all, from protecting your data anytime with a single click, to restoring your lost files easily when disaster strikes. We especially liked the backup “live: documents feature. Now there’s no need to close your programs to back up files.

Alfred E. Neuman is going quarterly instead of monthly.
Like many Baby Boomers I haven’t actually read Mad in decades, but it was such a dominant part of my childhood - such an intelligent channeling of teenage angst and annoyance - that I remember it fondly even now. The satire on “2001: A Space Odyssey” in [...]

I put together a little story for the Telegraph today on the Macintosh turning 25. I couldn’t find much in the way of celebrations, so it’s not exactly the most informative of tales.

Regular readers of Granite Geek(that vast, literate mob) know that New Hampshire’s first connection to the Ig Nobel awards is that we had two of the writers on the 2003 winner for literature: a medical study on heart problems that had 976 co-authors - in other words, 100 times as many authors as pages.
Well, as [...]

The CEO of Vermont Electric Power Co. says his utility would be an “excellent candidate” for becoming the nation’s first smart grid, according to this short and not very informative AP story. I guess by that he means that the utility is relatively small and already has laid a lot of fiber-optic lines, which allow [...]

Interesting piece in the Union-Leader about a couple of Seacoast companies joining forces:  Kingston Systems Inc., which among other things makes robotic simulators, has bought Holodek, which Seacoast gamers know because of its Gaming Theater in Hampton, where you can be 360-degrees immerged in a video game, and its facility at Daniel Webster College as [...]