trash

Ever get the urge to douse your annoying sibling/pal/boyfriend/girlfriend/neighbor/stalker with water (you know, to teach 'em a lesson)? A crafty 12-year-old inventor from Ava, N.Y., has just made public-revenge drenchings a lot easier to pull off than they used to be.

Lilly Bulawa, one of three winners of a green-design contest sponsored by the PBS competition series "Design Squad," created the "Sibling Soaker," a homemade dunk tank fashioned from common household items. After seeing a dunking booth in action at a fair, she decided that she wanted one for backyard parties.

"I made a target out of an old kitchen grease screen that pivots and swings an arm with a pin attached. This pin hits a water balloon hanging off a clothes pin," she said. "Throw, hit target, break water balloon, douse annoying sisters!!"

Now, as a winner of the 2010 Trash to Treasure competition, Bulawa has netted the sort of prize even the most seasoned inventor dreams of: she was flown to Boston to watch her innovation bring built by Continuum, a global design consultancy (watch the video below).

Trash to Treasure challenged kids ages 5 to 19 to recycle, reuse, and re-engineer everyday materials to create the next great green invention.

The device had to fit into one of the three categories: mobility, environmental protection, or play. Lilly's Sibling Soaker, which clearly falls into the latter category (if you're the one doing the dunking), might not seem so green on the surface, but think about how much water it saves, compared with the traditional dunking machines used to keep school principals humble.

Also concerned with saving water is Lilly's 14-year-old sister, MaryAnn Bulawa. No doubt fresh off being hit by a water balloon in the family backyard, she came up with another grand-prize-winning invention, the "Smarter Toilet," which lets users decide how much water they need to flush. … Read more

There may be times when you start up your system that the trash will have a folder called "Recovered Files" in it, and it may contain a number of oddly named files that might contain garbled data or could be 0KB in size.

The Recovered Files folder contains temporary files that were used by applications and system processes, which were not properly released and discarded when the application was terminated. This can happen if a program unexpectedly quits, or more commonly if the system crashes in the middle of your work.

The next time the system boots after … Read more

The trash and recycling services company Waste Management is expanding into the organic gardening business, the company announced Wednesday.

The Houston-based company has acquired Garick, which manufactures things like mulch, garden compost, and playground turf made from recycled organic materials.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. WM only went so far as to announce that Garick's composting facilities will be used to augment WM's existing organic recycling services, and offer a line of organic garden products made from WM-collected biomass waste.

The new line of products will include organic garden compost, which is often referred to … Read more

I know that the Green Goosesteppers mean well.

I know that they are saving the world from itself and preserving it for those who currently need to chew gum and smoke pot simultaneously in order to pass from one hour to the next.

However, I am a little concerned that, as we are all increasingly placed under surveillance, we will soon be called out for our supposed moral, as well as legal, deficiencies.

Please, for example, look at Cleveland. I don't know whether the city has decided to climb the Mount of Moral High Ground because of the departure … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed to us by our readers. This week, we have questions about multiple files being deleted when using Secure Empty Trash, application integration between OS X and virtual machines, using Spotlight to search system files, and using Web mail (Gmail specifically) as a default e-mail client.… Read more

When OS X performs some system tasks that take a little while to complete, the system will present a progress window or similar notification to keep the user informed of what is going on. This includes tasks like mounting disk images, copying files, burning discs, or emptying the trash. Despite the convenience of these notifications, there may be times when they hang up and prevent the user from interacting with the system and doing things like restarting.… Read more

One problem that crops up from time to time is stubborn files that will not move to the trash, or be deleted from the trash when the command is given to do so. There may be errors that accompany these behaviors which include files in use or access denied errors, but at other times there may be no such error.… Read more

As software reviewers, we install and uninstall a lot of programs, many of which leave bits and pieces behind. We're always on the lookout for a good tool to help us clean up after ourselves. Registry Trash Keys Finder is a simple program that does just that. This no-frills program identifies and deletes invalid Registry keys that take up space and contribute to poor system performance.

Once Registry Trash Keys Finder is launched, it automatically scans the computer's Registry, which for us took only a few seconds. The interface is pretty bare bones, listing the resulting trash keys … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature from MacFixIt in which we answer questions e-mailed to us by our readers. This week we have questions asking for clarification on our previous article about account and group associations, the system displaying the wrong printer icon in the system preferences, and a common problem where upon deleting a file you will be prompted to delete it immediately instead of putting it in the trash.… Read more