I'm currently in the midst of the Greener Gadgets conference. So far we've been treated to the photography of Chris Jordan, our keynote speaker. He photographs trash.

Fun right?

Well, with a little bit of Photoshop magic thrown in, he creates stunning and disturbing images of our daily consumption in the U.S. Some of these mountains of paper cups, "retired" cell phones (400,000+ a day) and brown paper bags dwarf people, buildings and even Seattle's space tower.

Check out his site for some of his work.

Mary Lou Jepsen just got off the podium. She's formerly of OLPC and now of the personal spin-off of sorts called PixelQi that's striving for the $75 laptop. She oozes both intelligence and heart, a rare combination in geeks.

She shared some of the neat technical tricks that makes the OLPC a 2-watt machine (1-watt at idle). This includes an architecture that doesn't go into low power states in X-number of minutes, but in minuscule fractions of a second.

She also spoke of the economics and how, despite popular belief, "it doesn't have to be expensive to be green." The camera within the OLPC, for instance, cost them just $1.50 to include, with no markup for going into a green machine.

She also contrasted the size of the OS, 0.1 GB vs over 12GB for Vista and advocates the ability to "skinny down the software" so that it doesn't take increasingly bigger, faster, more power hungry chips to run the software.

Another interesting fact is that the battery, with some processing, is suitable for fertilizer. Just imagine, your battery someday becoming food for your food.

More later...