videogame consoles

To get rid of the mess of wires from his many videogame consoles, PopSci reader Brian De Vitis decided to repurpose his R2-D2-shaped cooler. The engineering student modified its legs and repainted it to look more realistic. Then he stacked the motherboards from the eight consoles on shelves inside, added a sound system, and rearranged the inputs so he could plug in controllers from the outside. To watch all the gaming action, he added a projector in the rig’s dome, just like the real R2’s.

Play the latest videogames without investing in an ultra-fast computer, a pricey console or even a disc from the local game store. Just log onto OnLive, a Web service that runs processor-hogging games on its own computers and zaps them over the Internet to almost any screen, including your cheap laptop or TV.

No more standby modes for this man

It seems like its becoming increasingly difficult to buy an electronic device that doesnt come with a standby mode—the always on function that draws a reduced amount of power to allow for quick startups. TVs, videogame consoles, DVD players, cable boxes—basically your whole living-room A/V setup, not to mention your coffee machine—now come stocked with little standby lights that continue to glow well after the devices have been turned off.

This week, in its annual energy review, the British Government announced intentions to put a stop to this trend, proposing a ban on any device with a standby mode that draws more than one watt of power. With more efficient standby modes—especially from notoriously power-greedy televisions—Britain hopes to reclaim a large chunk of the 8% of annual British energy consumption drawn by devices in standby.

And while were talking about phantom energy wasters around the house, what about that tangle of A/C adapters beside your desk, used for charging the laptops, cellphones, digital cameras and portable game systems that no gadget fiend can leave the house without? As long theyre plugged in, power bricks continue to draw energy—even when not charging anything.

What can you do to eliminate this waste? Put your gadget chargers on one power strip that you can switch off when not in use. While you may not notice a huge difference on your individual power bill, when applied to the estimated 2.5 billion devices in the U.S. running on power supplies, the difference is pretty significant: The Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental nonprofit, estimates that increased power-supply efficiency could result in savings of 32 billion kilowatt-hours per year—the equivalent of six coal-fired power plants and 24 million tons of carbon emissions. —John Mahoney