Green Tips For Snowy Days

The current winter is shaping up to be a harsh, bitter-cold winter in many areas of the United States and in most of Europe. Harsh winters with extra low temperatures often produce lots of snow. Here are a few tips for saving and conserving even when it's cold and snowy outside.
If you use a de-icer on your sidewalk or driveway, use products made from magnesium chloride instead of sodium chloride (salt) or calcium chloride. While salt stops working at 15 degrees above zero, magnesium chloride melts ice at temperatures as low as minus 17 degrees and is less damaging to concrete, to your car and to surrounding plants. You might also want to try replacing chemical de-icers with non-toxic alternatives such as clean clay cat litter, sand, or fireplace ash. Chemical de-icers are hazardous to pets, to trees and to shrubs. They can also pollute surface waters and groundwater.

Use electric snow removal products instead of gasoline-powered ones. No solution is perfect of course - electric products do consume energy after all, but they do not emit greenhouse gases. Of course, you can always opt for getting some healthy exercise and shovel snow manually using snow shovels!

Buy recycled winter gear. More and more winter clothing and gear, including jackets, scarves, gloves, and boots, are now made from recycled materials. When it’s time to buy new winter gear, make sure you support green manufacturers by buying their products.

Make snow sports greener. Trail grooming, ski lift operations and snowmaking are extremely energy-intensive and are harmful to natural resources and to wildlife. Try to choose ski resorts that are committed to reducing their effects on the environment – before you go, find out if they adhere to the National Ski Areas Association Sustainable Slopes Environment Charter. Consider cross-country skiing or snow-shoeing instead of downhill skiing, as these sports do not require graded slopes and ski lifts, and so have lower environmental impact.

We hope these Green tips have been helpful. Shoot us a reply if you have any questions, comments, or tips you would like to share! We get a lot of mail, but we read them all and are diligent about responding to as many as possible.

Green Tips For Book Lovers

I love books. Unfortunately, I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book (or ten) on my bedside table and a huge wish list of books I would like to read "some day." If you're a book lover too, you might find the following green tips for avid readers useful.
Borrow instead of buying. Buying a new book feels so good. There's something about the touch and the smell of a new book that I find irresistible. But buying new books encourages the printing of more books, which is hugely wasteful. Try to limit buying new books to special occasions. For your everyday reading, join the local library, an online book rental service such as BookSwim, and exchange books with friends.

Buy used books. If you must own books, at least try to buy them used. This is not just better for the environment – it will also save you money. Used books tend to be ridiculously cheap.
Read electronically. Instead of buying physical books, download books from the Internet directly to your computer or to a reading device such as Kindle. Many avid readers initially object to the notion of giving up physical books, but eventually get used to it and find that it helps them keep costs down and reduce clutter in their homes.

Recycle your own books. When you’re done reading a book, instead of placing it on a shelf where it will basically sit unused and accumulate dust, offer the book to friends, or donate it to a local library or to a bookstore. As a last resort, place paperback books, and the inside pages of hardcover books, in the recycling bin. Never toss books in the trash!

We hope these Green tips have been helpful. Shoot us a reply if you have any questions, comments, or tips you would like to share! We get a lot of mail, but we read them all and are diligent about responding to as many as possible.

Best Wishes on the Year to Come!!

L.E.E. Design wants to wish you the best in the new year to come!! We look forward to making the year beautiful & prosperous for you!

Speed Navigating in Save As, Part 2

Want to speed things up by using the keyboard to get around in the Save As dialog? There’s just one thing you have to do first — press the Tab key. That removes the highlighting from the Save As naming field, and changes the focus on the sidebar (notice the blue highlight rectangle around the sidebar shown here). Once the sidebar is highlighted, you can use the Up/Down Arrow keys to move up and down the sidebar. Press Tab again and the search field is active. Press Tab once more and the Column (or list) view is highlighted, and you can use the Arrow keys on your keyboard to quickly get right where you want to be. When you get there, press the Tab key again to highlight the Save As field so you can name your file, and then hit the Return key to “make it so!”

Note: if you don’t see the sidebar or viewing modes, click on the little blue down-facing arrow button to the right of the Save As field.

You’re Two Clicks from a Photo’s EXIF Data

When you take a photo with a digital camera, the camera embeds info directly into the file, including the make and model of camera, the exposure, shutter speed, and a host of other info (called eXiF data). That info is usually viewed within an application like Photoshop or iPhoto, but now you can view it right from the Finder.

Just click on the photo’s icon, then press Command-i to bring up the info dialog. When it appears, click on the right-facing triangle beside the words “More info” and the basic eXiF data will appear.

What If You Don’t Want To Open The File?

The idea behind Spotlight is that it will find the file you want, and then open that file for you, so you can start working on it immediately. But what if you just want to know where the file is, and not necessarily open it? (For example, what if you just want to know where it is, so you can burn a backup copy to a CD?) To do that, once the results appear in the spotlight menu, just hold the Command key and then click on the file. This will close Spotlight and open the Finder window where your file is. Or if you want Spotlight open, just click on the file and press Command-R, which will open a Finder window with the file selected, leaving the spotlight dialog open.

PDF: The Smaller PDF Secret Control

This is another one of those “secret, buried-in-a-vault” killer tips that addresses something Mac OS X users have complained about: The file sizes of PDFs that Mac OS X creates are sometimes too big (vs. Adobe’s Acrobat PDFs). believe it or not, there’s a way to get smaller PDFs. Here’s how: launch TextEdit, then choose Print from the File menu. From the PDF pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, choose Compress PDF. That’s it. It’ll compress the PDF and call it a day.

However, if you’re charging by the hour, and let’s pretend you are, you have a wonderful time-consuming option: Choose Print from the File menu, and from the second Presets pop-up menu choose ColorSync. From the Quartz Filter menu that appears, choose Add Filters. Click on the three-oval icon in the top-left corner of the dialog that appears, click on the filter named Reduce File Size, and then click-and-hold on the arrow button to the right of the filter and choose Duplicate Filter. This creates an unlocked filter you can edit.

Now click on the triangle to the left of the duplicate filter to show its options; this is where you choose what you want. I recommend clicking on the arrow to the left of Image Compression and dragging the magic slider that lets you control the amount of JPEG compression your PDF images receive. For smaller file sizes, drag the Quality Slider toward Minimum. Now go back to TextEdit and in the Print dialog, choose Colorsync from the second Presets pop-up menu, choose your new filter from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu and click Print. That’s it. (Whew!)