Earth Day 2013: 5 gadgets that help make going green easy

4. SolarKindle Lighted Cover

Solarmio
The SolarKindle Lighted Cover has a built-in solar panel to absorbs solar energy that powers the reserve battery.

The key to reducing your carbon footprint is not only in recycling and shutting off the lights when you leave a room, but also making eco-friendly adjustments that don’t require work.

By using a solar-panel cover on products like an e-reader, you can increase your intake of alternative energy sources while reading on the beach or in your car. And with Kindles becoming increasingly popular, they may also bring an opportunity to save energy. 

Kindle owners can cut down on their energy consumption with the SolarKindle Lighted Cover. The cover, which was released by SolarFocus in January 2012, is the first solar cover for Amazon’s e-reader. 

The form-fitted cover has a lightweight solar panel built in to absorb extra energy for the reserve battery, according to the product website. The solar power ends up providing extra energy for the LED reading light, as well as some additional power for the Kindle overall.

The website states that with the SolarKindle Lighted Cover, the integrated reserve battery can run the LED lamp for up to 50 hours straight without using the Kindle’s main battery. One hour under direct sunlight can provide up to three days of reading time.

Jordan Crook of TechCrunch, who featured the cover a week before it went on sale, wrote “I’ve done my fair share of Kindle cover research, and to tell you the truth I wish this new cover from SolarFocus was around when I did.”

4 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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