End 2010 and start 2011 with great food and drinks this weekend in Beijing. Friday night has lots of dinners: Mosto has a five-course dinner with a Champagne toast. Brasserie Flo is offering a four-course meal with a great lucky draw. TERRA’s throwing a party with a four-course meal and free-flow bubbly. Celebrate New Year’s Eve the Spanish way, by eating 12 grapes at midnight, and drinking lots of cava, at Olé. Or, toast the new year overlooking Tian’anmen Square after a seven-course dinner at Capital M.

The next day, as well as on Sunday, there are several brunches around town to help you recover from the party the night before. Sip on bloody Marys at SALT or hit up the buffet at the Rennaissance Beijing Capital Hotel’s BLD Cafe. Alternately, check out our recommendations for Beijing’s best hangover-cure meals, including fresh, healthy smoothies and greasy, alcohol-absorbing breakfasts.

Also, to celebrate New Year’s, the Wine Republic is offering 15 percent off Champagne and 20 percent off sparkling wines through the end of January.

Happy New Year!

Enjoy instant-on light your home—closet, pantry, shop, garage, basement, garden shed, virtually anywhere! No fumbling for a switch—this battery-powered light detects motion and switches on automatically.

The light is simple to set up and easy to install. And the light comes on instantly and is very bright. Comes on as soon as I round the corner of my house to the front door and it actually brighten the area well.

Having husband with some mental deficiencies from head trauma, he sometimes couldn’t remember how to turn off/on light switches; now no need to worry about him not being able to see when he gets up in the dark; I have not attached them permanently to the wall, just set it on the floor next to baseboard and adjusted with swivel so light shines exactly where we want it.

After a while you may feel that you lack lighting in your bedroom, bathroom or even kitchen.

When you think of different lighting options, you may find these lighting options costly.

Here is an easy option in lighting up the closets, cupboards, cabinets [Cabinet Lighting] etc.

You do not need to hire a plumber or any electrician in lighting up your surroundings.

These lights are LED flood lights, which do not need any apparatus to setup. These are self-stick LED flood lights and are battery powered lights.

This light has 6-LED light bars, which rotate according to your needs and aims at certain point.

Features of LED flood lights:

* They can also light up small areas such as counter tops, closets, book shelves etc.
* The swivel head rotates according to your needs.
* They are made up of plastic.
* This works on 3 AAA batteries and the life can last up to 25 hours.
* Mounting plate can be detached from the LED flood lights.

Probably, though, it’s because whenever I’m in my kitchen, I am pinned beneath the clinical glare of a monstrous 45-by-16-inch fluorescent light fixture situated over my island. Just a few feet away, a second one (22 by 22 inches) stares down from above the sink. The effect is far from soothing, and in fact rather unsettling, as though my kitchen were a morgue and my island an autopsy table.

The good news, as I contemplate a kitchen overhaul in the (hopefully) near future, is that lighting in kitchens has changed a lot since the previous owner of my home remodeled the space some 15 years ago.

Kitchen designer Mary Galloway of Onesta Design in Alexandria agrees, saying she views the kitchen as a place of many scenes set, in large part, by how it is lit. “You think about someone cooking, someone eating, someone snacking at midnight,” Galloway says. ” . . . Your lighting needs change depending on the scene.”

Recessed lighting, which provides the general lighting in many kitchens these days, has come a long way, says designer Jennifer Gilmer of Jennifer Gilmer Kitchen & Bath in Chevy Chase. Most types now use smaller cans than the once-standard six-inch size, and incandescent bulbs have been replaced by more efficient lights.

Indeed, just as we’ve seen the proliferation of tiny, bright LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs on trees and roofs during the holidays, so are these energy-efficient lights making their way into the kitchen, not only in recessed lighting but also in task and accent lights.

More and more kitchens are also adding accent lights — those that draw attention to a particular appliance or decorative piece, the inside of a cabinet, or the so-called toe-kick space just above the floor — though the latter seems to have its detractors. “I would say that 50 percent of our customers love the toe-space lighting, while the other 50 percent see no point in it,” says Anderson. Its primary function (and appeal) is that it can softly light the kitchen at night, he says.

Pendant lights continue to be popular. They are “a good way to add color and some bling,” Anderson says. Gilmer says the sheer variety in styles makes pendant lighting a good option for almost any kitchen. In fact, it was a pendant light that helped solve a puzzle for one of Gilmer’s clients. “This particular person has contemporary tastes, but we needed something that would fit in with the traditional look of their Georgetown brownstone.” In the end she chose a pair of spare, vessel-shaped frosted glass and chrome pendants to hang above the sink and adjacent cream, black and gray mottled granite countertop.

This simple little light could even be used in other areas besides in your home.  It could also be grabbed for when you go camping if you need some small lights to keep you from tripping over anything.  On the light itself you can adjust the sensitivity of the motion sensor.  You can also just shut off the light entirely.  It runs on 4 AAA batteries which aren’t actually included.

If you made the switch from traditional energy-sucking holiday lights to efficient LED ones this year, we applaud you. But we also know that they aren’t the cheapest thing in the world. That’s why were absolutely delighted to receive this clever tip from reader SleepySyrup that lets you leverage your LED light investment into something that can provide you with light year-round instead of just around the holidays:

“A string of LED holiday lights, combined with a two-dollar socket adapter from your local home-improvement store, can transform a lamp or overhead light into an eco-friendly light source. A 50-bulb string uses less than 5 watts of electricity, and, this time of year, they can be had for a fraction of the price of a commercial LED bulb.”

LEDs use 10% the electricity of incandescents, and are 90% more efficient than their old-school tungsten counterparts. They’re perfect for strings of holiday lights, because they don’t get hot, they last forever and when one burns out, it doesn’t take the whole chain with it! You’ll get a full 100,000 hours out of most LEDs, they’re made with less nasty chemicals, and come in all kinds of festive shapes! What more could you ask for? Read on for some suggestions on where to buy…

If you are also wondering what has been showcased in these pictures above, take a look at some of the pictures below and you will find out, and I am sure by the time you get to the last picture you would have fallen in love with this product, and would be adding it to your list of things to carry around everyday.

Who would have thought, that a flashlight can be made so appealing, besides being so functional and useful. Jetbeam specializes in manufacturing efficient handheld flashlights and offers us a variety of LED flashlights worldwide. What use would a fancy flashlight be of you? Well, let us not think short-term, but think reliable, green and long-term. LED flashlights have a tendency to be equally bright and do not grow dimmer as the battery is getting used up. The body is usually made of aluminium – to be weighless and not conduct heat, but Jetbeam flashlights it comes with a stainless steel tail to make it stand upright, and they also come with a lock out function. An extremely useful, must have, household or outdoor gadget, you never know when you might need.

So I think if the price tag could be put off on quality lighting instruments, the Jetbeam LED Flashlight would be a very good buy.

With so much of artificiality and heaps of tech substitutes around, any resemblance to natural stuff is refreshing. Candles were one of our resorts before Thomas Edison hatched the bulb, so these LED Blow On Off candles are here to remind you about the good old days.

The flames controls are just a Blow away. It has an edge over the usual candles as they turn off when you blow but this one will blow on. There is a master on/off switch at the bottom that helps your realize the blow controls.

A blue and yellow flame is what we have to choose from. I wonder why the makers didn’t think of introducing the VIBGYOR scheme here. No solar inputs here, 3 AAA batteries provide the necessary juice for as much as 300 hours. Bizarre, huh? They retail in the price bracket of $11.99 to $14.99.

This one surely joins the league of unconventional lighting devices with Elephant Lamp, the Candle Lamp Concept and the Rainbow LED Lamps.

A fact sheet from Brodrick’s office says this about LEDs: “In the coming decade, they will become a key to affordable net-zero energy buildings, buildings that produce at least as much energy annually as they use from the grid.”

The technology is advancing quickly, and costs will continue to drop, Brodrick said. The DOE tests LEDs and sets performance and efficiency guidelines under its Energy Star program.

LEDs are directional lights, used in recessed lighting and under-counter lights, for example. They’re not yet available as bulbs that cast light all around and fit in ordinary sockets.

“There’s an enormous and exciting potential, but we have a long way to go before we see anything besides directional lighting,” said Jeffrey P. Harris, the vice president for programs at the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit group that promotes energy efficiency.

Even so, LEDs already are used to light offices, hotels, restaurants and other businesses.

The DOE predicts that LEDs will have better performance capability than fluorescent lighting in the next few years, and that they’ll continue to improve after that. They’re now comparable with fluorescent fixtures in efficiency, and the DOE says its Energy Star LEDs last two to five times longer.

Cost is the biggest reason that LEDs aren’t used more widely, Brodrick said.

LEDs have other advantages: They can be dimmed, don’t emit heat, don’t contain mercury – unlike compact fluorescents – and can produce warm-toned light.

Home Depot, the world’s biggest retailer of light bulbs, is starting to stock LED bulbs this summer and plans to have 10 kinds by September, said Jorge Fernandez, who’s in charge of light bulb purchases for the company.

Philips is working on many kinds of LEDs, including one to replace a 40-watt incandescent bulb that’s scheduled to be available next year, she said.

Derrick Hall of RE/Construct Inc. in Asheville, N.C., said that residential customers weren’t asking for LEDs because of the high upfront cost. Still, he’s hearing of some nonresidential customers who are looking into LEDs for the energy savings.

LEDs are much better than other lighting options, Hall said. The quality of the light is “far superior,” they offer big energy savings and there’s no cost to society for dealing with mercury, he said. Mercury, a neurotoxin, is found in small amounts in compact fluorescent bulbs.

Light is categorized by its color rendering index, or CRI for short, and its color temperature.  CRI is how a light source, a bulb, causes the color of an object to appear to our eye and how well variations in color and shade are duplicated in comparison to natural light.

The CRI number is a rating from 0 to 100, the higher the CRI number the better the color. An incandescent bulb has a CRI of 100. Fluorescent lights can have CRIs of anywhere from 50% to 99%.

Color temperature is expressed on the Kelvin scale (K) is the color appearance of the bulb and the light it produces.

The color temperature of lamps makes them visually “warm,” “neutral” or “cool” light sources. The lower the temperature (2700-3000K) , the warmer the source, yellow-red colors. The higher the temperature(5000K) the cooler the source, green-blue color range.

How this all applies to us when we go to buy light bulbs at Home Depot is that  we generally want light that will  give us the best color rendering, a high CRI number, usually with a neutral or warm color temperature, a lower Kelvin number.

Originally these parameters’ were only met by incandescent lighting, but that is not the case anymore. The compact fluorescent bulbs available today have CRI numbers and light quality that closely matches that of incandescent bulbs. Although compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs tend to be more expensive they convert electricity into light much more efficiently than incandescent. The lower energy cost of the CFL can offset the higher cost of the bulb. Compared to incandescent bulbs,  fluorescent bulbs use less power for the same amount of light and usually last longer

An article in Wikipedia states that  ” In the United States, a compact fluorescent light  can save over $30 dollars in electricity costs over the bulb’s life time compared to an incandescent bulb and save 2,000 times its own weight in green house gasses. ”

Many compact fluorescents are designed to replace incandescent bulbs and can fit into most existing fixtures.

A problem with compact fluorescents bulbs is that they are made with a small amount of mercury. This mercury  requires that they be disposed through a hazardous waste disposal program, they cannot be put in the regular trash.

Another type of light is the LED. The LED appears to be the bulb of the future. Although expensive LED bulbs can produce light that is comparable to incandescent.

LED (Light Emitting Diode) last longer that compact fluorescents, they use less energy than traditional bulbs and potentially, compact fluorescents. LED lights are made in all sizes and shapes. LEDs do not contain mercury so their disposal is not a problem.

An article in the New York Times quotes Charles F. Jerabek, the president and chief executive of Osram Sylvania, a unit of Siemans as stating “In the US 78 percent of the public is completely unaware that traditional light bulbs will be phased out in 2012.”

As we all konw that light bulbs should be more energy efficient, and incandescent bulbs will be a thing of the past.