Not-so-green Apple

We had to order a replacement wall current-to-USB charger for our iPhone 3G because the old one was shockingly dangerous -- or so they say. Anyway, we're talking about an item the size of a large bullion cube with prongs. Being familiar with Apple's very compact packaging (our Shuffle shipped in a tiny box indeed), we were on the lookout for a very small parcel.

Yet when the thing arrived, it was in a rather large box. Heck, a case . . . you could ship a handgun in this thing. That's Bonnie's hand in the image to the right. The little white cube is the charger. I think you can appreciate how silly it looked, sitting there on the foam like the crown jewels. You could in fact pack 48 of these gizmos in there, with room to spare for the packing material.

The moral of the story is that Apple might be one of those Left Coast companies that cultivates a hip, hippy image, but they're not exactly with the program when it comes to "green" packaging. I'm almost tempted to order a screw or something just to see how it comes packed!

And yeah, I totally realize that this is a trivial thing to write about. It's just that overpackaging is a bugbear of mine. I'm still not over wasting an hour getting my new mouse to work because it was so well-packaged that there was packing material down in the battery well. Or maybe it was some hard-to-get Pocky that drove me mad. I'm not sure which.

GURPS Action 2: Exploits . . .

. . . is out. Please excuse the shameless pimping of my latest publication.

Another week in the life of GURPS

Here we are at the end of the week. So . . . what's happening with GURPS? Good of you to ask!

• <pimp>My latest PDF, GURPS Action 2: Exploits, is now uploaded!</pimp>

• We did our final review of Phil Masters' GURPS Thaumatology: Age of Gold PDF this week. I foresee no delays at this stage . . . look for it soon.

• We reviewed the rough PDF of Jason Levine's GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Allies this week. It's looking very good! I honestly don't see it being held up, either.

• I continue to edit David Pulver's GURPS Mass Combat. It's about half-done as of this writing.
 
• The final draft of David Pulver's GURPS Abydos is in and Nikki is editing it.

• We've finally got internal movement on GURPS Low-Tech. Normally, I don't share far-future information such as this, but I think you'll agree that this news is truly significant.