Jamie Hyneman, the famously beret-clad Mythbuster recently just wrote a fantastic list of lame-ass (and coincidentally environmentally disastrous) things about today's consumer electronics industry. It's great to see him coming to agree with EcoGeek from a completely different angle.
He bemoans the fact that there are no standard battery sizes for new lithium-ions, and you can never find the battery you want for the device you need powered. Jamie points out that no one would buy Chevy's if you need a Chevrolet battery to start the thing.
Useless software, preloaded onto computers, wastes space and creates a constant drain on your processor, and thus your power grid. "Obnoxious" electronics in cars only make the things go obsolete and break more quickly. And, of course, everything in a car is designed to be completely impossible for an amateur (or even a mythbuster) to fix these days.
It's a fascinating and entertaining look at how the gadgets of our lives only make us more frustrated and less capable people. But there are also a few good examples people trying to fix these problems. The problem of 10,000 different chargers for 10,000 different phones, for example, is nearly ready to be tackled:
Miraculously, the industry appears to be working on a solution to this problem. The Open Mobile Terminal Platform (omtp.org) is supported by a number of manufacturers that would like to see the micro USB become the standard connector. It's too early to know if they will succeed; let's hope they do.
