Google in Black

As we all know, summer is fast approaching… or should I say, already here! This means that, naturally, our electric and water bills shoot up. We consume twice as much as we did when the weather’s much akin to our liking. You know, like you take a bath everyday now when just two months ago, you don’t take a bath at all. Haha!

One simple way to save on energy is by using Blackle. Not only will this lower our electric bill (hopefully) but we are also heeding the advocacy on global warming (whew!).

So how does Blackle save energy? And what is Blackle anyway?

Like my subject heading says, it is Google in Black. For a more enlightening view, you can visit ecoIron.

Going back, Blackle is created by Heap Media and uses Google Search with the rationale that “an all-white web page uses about 74 watts to display on a CRT monitor as compared to an all-black page that uses only 59 watts”. Yet, Blackle is not owned by Google Inc. This entails a lacking of some features that only Google has and some searches may vary a little.

To use Blackle as your search engine, just type http://www.blackle.com on your browser’s address bar.

But if you’re willing to totally go blacksurfing, there’s a generic way to do it. In Firefox 3 (F3 Beta 5);

1. Go to Edit > Preferences > Content > Fonts & Colours > Colours.
2. Set the background colour to black and the text colour to white. You have the option too to change the colour of the visited and unvisited links.
3. Make sure that the Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections above is unchecked.
4. Click Close.

The downside to this is that you won’t be able to see the creativity of the web design or you’ll miss out on the play of colours. But hey, is this blogsite amiss in creativity? Naah. Thanks to Ulysses for this page’s theme.

So if you’re just looking for information, then why not dress your browser in black, save on electric consumption and help lengthen planet earth’s life?