The thing to do is to convert it into something like 'equivalent driven miles' and then calibrate your outrage to that number.

It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure with some very cheap electronics (I believe they even used a led as a light sensor) and the battery lasts very very long. I wouldn't know on the impact of that on the ecology though. When it comes to recycling I remember from long long ago that PCB's have a pretty large ecological footprint, but than again, it's not part of the packaging, so it can be easily taken out and used for other purposes!

I was a little sad when I took mine apart to find that the chip was epoxied. I was hoping it would be something easily reprogrammable that I could give to my girlfriend to use at school (she teaches 3,4,5 year olds, so having a box that makes a noise when you open it is something that gets their attention).

After having received one from a vendor (Vidyo), I was looking into creating auto-playing video cards for my own company. It seems http://www.bigdawgspromo.com/ is one of the leading vendors, but their per-piece pricing is pretty hefty. Pretty neat stuff, and they are re-programmable.

Thanks for that link. For a long time I've toyed with the idea of a dedicated video card (as in business/greeting style); brings video to the self-containment of a book: immutable physical instance of content, including the reader/viewer. Still a bit aways from what I had in mind (think: little larger than a credit card, cheap) but well on its way.

That would have been too good to be true, haven't even thought about that!

I remember way back I was trying to make a cheap wifi-powered box with a display that could play short video's and stuff. The base idea came from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywr0A2aC_Jk, and I'd use a very cheap 3g-wifi router running openwrt as base. But in the end the firmware changed and made it impossible.

But nowadays with an arduino mini pro, i2c, cheap small displays or audio modules you can get a long way! It does however require you to purchase a lot of stuff like resistors, opamps, breadboards.. etc. And in theory, with the ESP8266-module you could make any device internet-connected.

there are birthday card that do the same, it's very little extra stuff compared to the computer itself, I imagine.

A birthday card that plays the Intel jingle would make a pretty good gift for a geek :P

The dirty relationship between life and entropy could be "hoard as much energy as possible, multiply and feel free to waste energy for fun."

Good point. However to me it still just seems terribly wasteful/stupid. Considering the aux battery in most computing devices, couldn't the musical thingie be embedded into the computer itself?

It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.

> It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.

How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1].

No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry.

[1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned.

The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.

From one of the comments above: "It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure"

And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.

It's not really an excuse to waste more resources though. Saying "this only wastes a tiny amount of resources compared to this other thing" isn't justification to waste it anyway.

agreed. baby steps!

A baby probably has thousands of times the environmental impact of this. Possibly millions.