Since out kids are off to college, my wife and I don’t have an excuse to participate in our town’s trick-or-treating (like many communities, Mont Vernon gathers along Main Street for its Halloween candy grab; it’s a great time to see just about everybody in town).
So as not to miss out, for several years we [...]

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to used Gmail for all the city’s e-mail service (LA Times story here), becoming by the biggest, most public entity to sign onto the “cloud computing” idea. It’s a $7.25 million contract covering 30,000 employees. Not exactly a big deal for a company Google’s size, but nothing to [...]

A survey run by Intel, as reported by Wired.com, claims that parents are far more comfortable talking about drugs with their kids than talking about math and science - largely because they can be vague about drugs but have to be precise about math, and they don’t remember enough to be precise!
The survey is designed [...]

When I first started as a reporter, a staple of newspaper stories in the East involved sightings of coyotes, which were just beginning to return and still counted as exotic and scary. Now they’re routine, of course, having been a part of the ecosystem here for half a generation. It’s pleasantly creepy to hear them [...]

Vermont has the nation’s first statewide feed-in tariff for solar power, that will eventually add 12.5 megawatts of peak power, or almost 1 percent of the state’s electric usage. Basically, people or companies participating will get paid an artificially high rate for the power they produce (30 cents per kilowatt-hour, about three times the rate [...]

Forget the silliness with the Farmer’s Almanac and its long-term weather “predictions” based on secret formulas - what do real forecasters say about the coming winter?
NOAA says this winter will be a toss-up for New England, as this map shows (the temperature outlook also forecasts  “equal chances” of above or below average for us):
On the [...]

TDS, a company that owns lots of rural phone companies around the country (including a few here in New Hampshire) has installed fiber to the home in a Minnesota town, with 50 Mbps speed for $49.95 a month, says this Ars Technica story. What’s interesting about the story is that it implies that TDS [...]

OK, so that headline is a little overdone, but the Government Accountability Office says in a new report (Washington Post article here) that if the H1N1 pandemic gets really bad and a bazillion people stay home from work and try to telecommute all at once, it could bring the Series of Tubes known as the [...]

At least 832,000 “smart meters” will be installed across New England as a part of projects receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant funding, reports Mass High Tech. They’re part of 18 million such meters that should be rolling out nationwide.
The only NH recipient is New Hampshire Electrical Cooperative, [...]

New Hampshire Fish & Game reports that following record breeding success in 2008, New Hampshire bald eagles had trouble this year, apparently due to rainy weather.The total number of young eagles raised in nests in the state this summer was down 33 percent, although this still makes it the third best breeding year on record for bald eagles in the state.

A UMass-Amherst post-doc is testing a predatory beetle called Laricobius nigrinus (I can’t find a common name) to see if it can stem the spread of hemlock wooly adelgid beetles, a voracious invasive that has snuck into New England. Here’s the school’s press release from earlier this month, which generated a short AP story yesterday [...]

The Union-Leader’s Lorna Colquhoun has a fun piece today about an Inn owner in the little town of Bethlehem, N.H., who collected a big chunk of weird ice that fell from the sky. She talked to a bunch of experts who give the opinion that it’s either a) ice falling from a plane; b) odd [...]

Old-timers in New England remember when rivers ran different colors, depending on what color dyes were being used on fabrics at the textile mills that week. On Tuesday, the Piscataqua River will turn “reddish in color” but this time it won’t be an ecological disaster. It’s part of an flow study, conducted by EPA’s New [...]

We here at GraniteGeek like opinions best when they’re quantified, so let’s give a Tip Of The Hat to Jim’s GraniteViewpoint blog on the Seacoast, who was so intrigued by news reports about California’s new, strict energy-use regulations for TVs that he did some tests with a Kill-A-Watt meter on his Samsung LCD TV.
You can [...]

The question “do helicopters ever find lost hikers in our woods” came up at the outdoorsy forum Views from the Top - you can read it here - and an interesting discussion ensured, which included this quote about the limitations of airborne FLIR (thermal imaging):
Helicopter searching in forested areas is tough. Even fancy technology has [...]