Category Archives: General

Take charge of your batteries!

I get through a lot of batteries.

This is mostly because of my strange habit of wearing a GPS logging device, which means I always use at least three AAAs every day. But even without this idiosyncracy, the increasing number of flashguns, remote controls, bluetooth trackpads, keyboards and mice, bicycle lights, microphones, voice recorders and other gadgets around the house means that I would have been bankrupt long ago if I hadn’t switched over entirely to rechargeables a few years back.

It strikes me that I can’t be the only one in this position. So here are a few ‘workflow’ tips from a seasoned charger, to help you take control of your battery-powered life!

1. Be willing to invest in power!

There’s nothing worse than having to find a fresh battery for your remote control in the back of a drawer, just at the moment at which everyone in the family is waiting to watch a movie. Make sure you have plenty of batteries for your needs, and lots left over. Brace yourself, spend a reasonable amount of money, and your life will become easier. It is Christmas, after all.

2. Set aside space for it.

I have four little storage trays labelled ‘AA flat’, ‘AA charged’, ‘AAA flat’ and ‘AAA charged’, and there are typically about 6-12 batteries in each tray, besides those actually installed in my devices. There are always charged batteries available whenever I need them, and when the ‘flat’ trays start to get too full, I stick a batch of them in the charger before I go to bed.

battery_shelves

There is also a small shelf in our store room which is dedicated to charging. That’s where my iPhone dock, and all the chargers for my various different battery types, live. There’s a multi-way mains adapter so I never have to search for a charger or search for a socket. Makes life much easier.

3. Get yourself good batteries.

And by that, I mean Sanyo Eneloops. These have served me so well that I never buy anything else now. They aren’t the highest-capacity ones available, but they are low self-discharge. This means that you can charge them up, put them in your ‘charged’ tray, and be pretty confident that they will have retained plenty of oomph when you come to take them out again. Traditional NiMH batteries will discharge pretty quickly over a small number of weeks, meaning that there’s likely to be a gap between realising that you need them, and being able to use them again! (It drives a lot of the sales of turbo 20-minute battery chargers, which do work, but will shorten the life of your batteries. And you may still have to wait 20 mins before watching the movie!)

4. Treat yourself to a decent charger.

I have an exceedingly good one by Maha.

maha_charger

Whoa, I hear you say… you spent how much on a battery charger? Well, trust me, it’s possible to spend a great deal more than this, but I went for Maha after seeing recommendations from professional wedding photographers who go through large numbers of batteries every week, and I’ve been very pleased with it. It has fast and slow charging modes, can take any number of batteries from one to eight, but, most importantly, these are 8 independent charging circuits, which means that they will do the right thing even if you mix up partly- and fully-discharged, AAs and AAAs all at the same time. There are smaller Maha ones, but you don’t need to load and unload your charger nearly so often if you can do eight at a time!

But if that seems like overkill for you, then I recommend the Energizer CHCC-UK, if you can still find it.

energizer1

This has four independent circuits, supports 9v batteries too, and doesn’t try to woo you with super-high-speed charging. Fill it up before you go to bed and empty it in the morning. (I’ve found Energizer batteries to be good, too, though not as good as Eneloops).

Beware, though, of more flashy modern imitations like this Energizer CHP42UK:

energizer2

This may have a pretty display, but it only has two charging circuits, so you must insert either two or four batteries at once, and ideally you should always pair up similarly-discharged ones of the same type and age. Too much hassle. It can be hard to find out in advance just what a charger can do; see if you can find the manual online before buying.

5. Old batteries die.

When they do, you should send them to the great recycling centre in the sky. Fortunately, the days of leaking acid destroying the inside of your bicycle lights are mostly behind us, but a dead battery will sap the strength of your good ones if placed in the same device. No point in having taken good care of your troops, if they then have to go into battle dragging an injured colleague with them. (Am I overdoing the analogies?)

When I suspect a battery of being near the end of its life, I make a mark near one end of it with a fine-tipped permanent pen, and then stick it back in the charger. If, at a later date, I again find it rather flatter than I think it should be, it gets another mark. Three strikes and it’s out.

Recently, I’ve taken to labelling new batteries with their date of first use, and a code to help me to keep them together as a batch if wanted. This helps give a clue as to whether a permaturely dead battery is likely just to be discharged, or is in fact very elderly.

eneloop_pack

And so we come to the last point – how do you know when they’re dying?

6. Get a good battery tester.

You want something that can test various different battery types, and test them under load. Simple devices will just measure a battery’s voltage, which is useful, but almost anything more sophisticated will give you a better indication of how it’s likely to perform in the real world.

You need something that will let you quickly check any batteries before you dash out with your flashgun to that important press event. But you should also periodically review the ones in your ‘charged’ tray to make sure they are behaving as they should and won’t take you by surprise in future. Ideally, you want to check your batteries periodically, a few hours after they’ve been charged, to make sure they’re charging properly, and holding their charge. I’m not that disciplined. I tend just to do random spot checks from time to time, but this is much better than nothing.

To do this, I use the ZTS battery testers, which can check a variety of different battery types using a test cycle of just a few seconds, and then give you a simple readout.

zts_chargers

I have a big one for my charging shelf, and a smaller one for the office and when on the road. Once again, you may want to brace yourself before looking at the price, but they’re well-made and I’ve never regretted my purchases. You can get them from Amazon, or, slightly more cheaply in the UK, from here.

zts_charger_2

So there you are: these tips will make you the light of the charge brigade, or something like that. If the above seems terribly complicated, then that’s just because I’ve gone into some detail, but I can summarise it more succinctly:

  • Buy lots of good batteries – more than you need – and a good charger
  • Use a good tester to weed out dead batteries from your stock

And if it seem expensive, that’s because I’m a believer in buying good quality stuff infrequently, rather than rubbish on a regular basis!

Take control of those little packs of power, and they will be your friends, rather than letting you down in times of need. This system has worked well for me now for some time; some of the suggestions must be useful to others!

P.S. In fact, this could be the first draft of the upcoming bestseller, Getting Things Charged. GTD enthusiasts will recognise many of the elements: gathering all your batteries into a limited number of in-trays, processing, sorting, clear labelling, periodic review… it’s bound to be a hit!

Cheating with Pebble

I’m pleased to say that I hadn’t thought of this particular use for my Pebble smartwatch!

ConTest watchface

Thanks to Alastair for the link

A super response

We were talking at lunch today about the foolishness of that old interview question:

“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

Several people proposed suitable responses, but my favourite came from Richard. His suggestion?

“Kryptonite”

The habits of Hobbits

My quick review of the new Hobbit film: I enjoyed it a lot, though perhaps not as much as the first one. Too much romance, not enough Mirkwood, too many echoes of LOTR, and somewhat excessive use of decapitation, but, it must be said, an exceedingly fine dragon.

Tolkien purists (like Rose) will be furious, but my view is that you have to change even a good book to make a good film. And, if you’re going to invent new characters, then you’ll get fewer complaints from me if you have them played by people like Evangeline Lilly.

The middle film of a trilogy is always the hardest to do, to which a fair response would be that they were foolish to do it as a trilogy. That, I imagine, was determined by pure economics. It’ll be interesting to see whether Peter Jackson can do something really new with part III. In the book, Bilbo misses the whole final battle through being knocked on the head. Somehow, I think the movie may deviate from the canon there…

Meanwhile, I imagine that the entrepreneurs of New Zealand’s South Island are already planning barrel riding trips for the spring tourists…

Being social…

Some people find these scribblings through Google, others through RSS, Tweets, Facebook or App.net posts. And you lovely readers often write comments, but in all these different places, so only a subset of other readers are likely to see them.

In an attempt to make it easier to post comments here on the site, I’ve now enabled one of these newfangled social login things, so you can post using your Facebook or Google account if preferred. Other options may come along in due course!

Just wondering…

What is it that estate agents really mean when they talk of a “deceptively spacious” property? It’s one of their favourite phrases, after all.

If I say that my wallet felt deceptively full before I left the house, doesn’t that suggest that later, at some inconvenient moment, I discovered I had less money than I thought? Still, perhaps the operative word there is felt, which implies that I was mistaken?

OK, then, so if a house actually is deceptively spacious, that must mean that it does have a lot of space, but for some reason that doesn’t bring with it the characteristics that you’d normally associate with spaciousness. It’s a very inconvenient shape, for example, so you can’t actually use it as you would expect.

Or there is occasionally some warping of the space-time continuum in that area, so that when you visit, it is spacious, but later on you’ll discover it’s only suitable for hobbits? As in, “it’s deceptively spacious at the moment”.

Yes, I guess that must be it. Good of them to warn you in advance.

Welcome To My Humble Adobe

adobe-logoAs many of you will know, two months ago, Adobe’s servers were hacked into and the user information stolen. At first this was thought to be a major breach, with about 3M records lost. Then the number went to abut ten times that. Now, however, there is talk of it heading for the Guinness Book of Records, as it appears the number may be closer to 150M!

Now, the passwords were encrypted (or, more technically, ‘hashed’), so the bad guys can’t just read them off. But they weren’t encrypted as well as they might be, in particular because if several people use the same password, the system stores the same thing. So if you know one person’s password, perhaps because you got it from a previous hacking incident elsewhere and can tie it to their email address, you can now work out anybody else who uses the same password.

But it’s more fun than that… and there’s a great article on the Sophos site going into more gory detail if you’re interested.

One column that wasn’t encrypted in the database was the one holding the ‘password hints’… you know, the phrases you can put in on some sites to remind you if you forget your password.

Now, the most popular password is “123456”, which encrypts to “110edf2294fb8bf4” in the Adobe database. Hundreds of thousands of people use this one. Another very popular one, believe it or not, is “password”, which becomes “2fca9b003de79778 e2a311ba09ab4707”. (You can see more of the most common choices here.)

If you know the encrypted form, you may not be able to work out the original. But if many thousands of people use it, and just one of them gives it away in the password hint, then things become trivial. And it turns out that there are lots of lovely examples in the Adobe file, where users have put in hints like “Rhymes with assword”, or ‘1-6’…

Anyway, if you’re curious about whether you appear in this list, which you might if, say, you’ve ever downloaded Acrobat, there’s a a very nice service that LastPass have put together at:

https://lastpass.com/adobe/

where you can type in your email address and it will let you know if you’re in the database. It can also email you a link showing how many other people used the same password as you, and what some of their hints were. Which can be quite sobering.

I’m embarrassed to say that mine, which was mildly obscure, I originally thought, had 40 other users. That’s only 40 in 150 million, but it’s still not good for precisely the above reasons. I’ve had an Adobe account for a very long time, and this password predated my use of 1Password to generate unique and complex passwords for each site. Thankfully, since I’ve been storing my passwords in 1Password for quite a long time, it’s easy now (if somewhat tedious) to find the other elderly accounts on which I’ve used it, and fix them…

How about you?

Time travel

As we know, people in the past were black and white – you can see that in the photos…

But there are some very dedicated artists who, using today’s technology, are doing a fabulous job of recolouring some iconic images from the past.

higheststandard

There’s a great selection here. I find them very compelling.

crash

IMAP, Sent mail, Apple Mail and Mavericks

This is one of those posts that’s chiefly intended for those Googling for a particular problem. It might still make gripping reading, though, for those of you interested in the internals of email protocols…

Most email programs nowadays allow you to specify the folder in which you want to save your outgoing messages, and choose whether that should be stored locally or on your email server. (Assuming you’re using IMAP to fetch your mail, that is. If you’re still using POP, you should get another mail provider. And if you’re using Exchange… well, you have my sympathy…)

But different apps have traditionally had different names for this folder: some call it ‘Sent’, others ‘Sent Items’ or ‘Sent Messages’ and some will use a folder with one name and display it as something else to the user. (The same is sometimes true of ‘Drafts’, ‘Trash’, and ‘Junk Mail/Spam’). So, over the years, I’ve tended to standardise on ‘Sent’, and when I set up a new mail app or a new machine, I configure it to use that folder.

But recently, that setting didn’t always seem to be stick, and I found some of my mail would end up in different folders when sent from some devices. Still, I persevered, until I installed Mavericks on my Mac, and found that the setting wasn’t even available on Apple Mail, at least, not for my main account – it was greyed out! What could be going on?

Screen Shot 2013-11-16 at 08.37.45

So I started to investigate. I dug into the file that Mail uses to store information about its accounts (currently ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist) and I came across a setting which gave me a clue: it was called HasServerDefinedSentMailbox, and for this account it was set to YES. Mmm…

In the past, IMAP basically just provided you with a smart filing system for your mail, and it’s proved a remarkably resilient one, when compared to other formats. As an aside, I felt very old recently when I told a colleague in the lab that I had used the same method for storing my mail for ages, and had emails from 1991/92 in there that were just as accessible now as they had been then. He laughed, and said, “That’s the year I was born!”. Sigh… Still, compare that to data stored n tapes and floppies.

Anyway, a few extra features have been added since then, and one of these came just a couple of years ago. RFC 6154 describes ‘new optional mailbox attributes that a server may include in IMAP LIST command responses, to identify special-use mailboxes to the client, easing configuration’. In other words, the server can tell your app which folders to use for these key functions. This makes a lot of sense, particularly when your email provider also has a webmail interface, for example. I use Fastmail, which has a really good one, and, of course, it needs to know what you want to use for sent mail, drafts, etc when you’re using it via the web. Fastmail reflect these folder choices in the IMAP protocol, to keep everything consistent. Which is fine by me: I now simply stick to using the ‘Sent Items’ folder that the server recommends, and all is well on all my devices.

Anyway, all of that is a long way of explaining why you may find the ‘Use this mailbox for’ menu items are greyed out, and why on iOS devices you may try changing the ‘Sent Mailbox’, only to find that your new setting doesn’t stick. If your server is specific about which folders should be used, Apple will take that setting seriously, which I think makes sense, but they aren’t yet very clear in the UI about why you can’t then change it yourself.

Hope that’s useful to somebody!

Time, the final frontier

Here’s a list of actors, who have something in common:

  • Charles Seel
  • Judith Anderson
  • Morgan Farley
  • Richard Hale
  • Anthony Jochim
  • Felix Locher
  • Celia Lovsky
  • Leonard Mudie
  • Abraham Sofaer
  • John Warburton
  • Ian Wolfe

What ties them together?

They all acted in Star Trek.

And they were all born in the 19th century.

I think that’s quite cool.

Thanks to this page for the info.

Reviewing peer review

Those of us with a firm belief in the scientific method need to read this Economist article about how easily it can fall short of its ideals.

The good news is that this is being brought to light… In fact, I would propose the term Metascience, if nobody has already coined it, to describe this kind of work: the application of the scientific method to the scientific method!

Atomkraft? Ja, bitte.

I’m sitting in a traffic jam behind a car bearing a sticker, “Atomkraft? Nein danke.” (Nuclear power? No thanks!)

I’ve always liked this design, which has been around for some time – the sun with the smiley face makes it into a nice, happy, positive statement. It’s a clever bit of marketing.

However, the sun is, of course, powered by… ?

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser