Triplesourced

Although mistaking the Tory party for anything more than an extremely skilled spin device at present – think a Dyson washing machine – would be a serious mistake, we were slightly impressed by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne's very tech-savvy speech earlier this month. The monologue principally extolled the benefits of open source – something anyone with any tech knowledge at all will already know – and was littered with references to MySpace, Google and Mozilla.

However all the good work that George has done endearing the Conservatives with a zeitgeist-like shine of technical credibility risks being stripped away by comments made by David Cameron this week where he claimed the NHS has had its heart and soul ripped out and replaced with – a Computer! Yep, while Osborne may have ventured below the surface of Big-Brother doom-mongering favoured by a lot of politicos – Cameron has seen fit to revert to type.

While Cameron may be justified in claiming that the NHS' IT overhaul has been mismanaged and wasteful – sound-bites go a long way and demonising IT is all too easy.

But it's not just the Tories who are going in for some IT bashing this week, the government is at it too. The latest ad for the DVLA seems an odd choice for a government currently being accused of Big Brother behaviour with the clumsily draconian ID-Card scheme. How do you engender trust in a populace already paranoid about Governmental IT cock-ups and ID theft – launch a massive ad campaign based on the premise of monstrous mainframes chasing hapless motorists around the country.

Love it or hate it – the extravaganza that is the CeBIT IT trade show in Hanover kicks off tomorrow. ZDNet has a whole raft of its top reporters on scene including our News Editor Richard Thurston who'll be coordinating things on the ground. We have also dispatched a video operator who'll help our team send back some interesting visual snippets from the show which while vast is always big on colour.

You can stay up to date via the CeBIT special report – signposted from the homepage – and the Emerging Tech Toolkit

Thanks again to everyone who supported our Kenya Cycle challenge - it was an amazing trip.

The £17.5K CNET raised bought most one of the two shipping containers of PCs we donated -- which equates to about 200 machines I think. Having been on the ground and chatted to pupils and teachers, I can testify what an important difference machines that may have reached the end of their natural life in the UK can make to Kenyan schools and the wider community.

At the moment Computer Aid are pushing hard for laptop machines as part of the project for blind teachers . in the region. Teaching is one of the few jobs open to the blind in Kenya – people with disabilities are often hidden away from public view and marginalised – and getting access to the latest teaching aids is an almost impossible task given the expense of Braille books.

Laptops mean visually impaired teachers can store audio and text-based teaching aids in a highly portable and flexible format. So if you're company has got an old laptop hanging around – they tend to sit in cupboards and storage areas rather than being recycled as they are smaller than cumbersome desktops - please get in touch with Computer Aid .

A weekend with friends in Dublin put me in range of the Irish papers and a piece in the Irish Times (subscription only I am afraid) profiling a company behind a range of sustainable PCs.

First pass of the web-site indicates a heavy use of wood rather than plastic -- which has its obvious benefits -- but it seems the company MicroPro Computer has also built in some smart energy efficiency and the ability to upgrade into its IAMECO range of PCs.

They are not cheap though - around £3000 - and more worryingly - they are available running Vista which has attracted a lot of criticism from green groups for its thirst for power.

I am going to try and make contact with MicroPro in the next few days to find out what's behind these so-called green machines. Stay tuned.

We were surprised by PC World's decision. to build an environmentally sustainable PC around Microsoft's Vista OS – an operating system that has been widely derided for how power hungry it is. Also the upgrades associated with people moving to Vista could result in thousands of PC's being discarded as companies look for higher-spec kit to run Vista.

PC World has got back to us with a statement on why they selected Vista which…we will let you judge for yourselves:

"One of the key drivers in the technology industry is the development of components that utilise lower levels of power and generate lower levels of heat whilst at the same time increasing the speed, processing power and capability of PCs. Our approach to this project is to look holistically at the construction of the PC and we believe that Windows Vista's power management capabilities are an integral, important and hugely beneficial element of this project."