Vast datacentres are being built worldwide, amid growing concerns about the environmental costs. So should we all be considering a data diet – if not complete digital sobriety? Nearly 20 years ago, the British mathematician Clive Humby coined a snappy phrase that has turned into a platitude: “data is the new oil”. He wasn’t wrong. We have an insatiable appetite for data, we can’t stop generating it, and, just like oil, it’s turning out to be bad news for the environment. So the Guardian set me a challenge: to try to give a sense of how much data an average person uses in a day, and what the carbon footprint of normal online activity might be. To do that, I tried to tot up the sorts of things I and millions of others do every day, and how that tracks back through the melange of messaging services, social networks, applications and tools, to the datacentres that keep our digital lives going. Continue reading...

Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs. It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head). Continue reading...

Funky transparent design backed by good sound and noise cancelling make these budget buds winners The tech firm Nothing’s latest set of cut-price Bluetooth earbuds offer great sound and noise cancelling for an even more competitive price, while continuing to stand out from the crowd through cool design. The London-based firm has launched the budget Ear (a), which keep almost everything that was great about previous Nothing earbuds and cost £99 (€99/$99). That is £30 less than its previous offering and the new £129 (€149/$149) Ear, which offer a few more customisations for sound and other features. Continue reading...

Quality earbuds with improved Bluetooth, great battery life, good controls and future-proofed tech Sennheiser’s latest high-end earbuds aim to retake the crown as the best-sounding noise-cancelling earbuds you can buy, with cutting-edge chips, tricks and future-proofed tech. The Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds cost £259.90 (€299.90/$299.95), pitting them directly against the best from Bose and Sony. Water resistance: IP54 (splash) Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4, SBC, AAC, aptX adaptive, LC3 Battery life: Seven hours; up to 28 hours with case Earbud weight: 6.2g each Driver size: 7mm Charging case weight: 66.4g Case charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging Continue reading...