Yeah, I know, most people are thinking, “Who?” To me he was the R in K&R, but that probably doesn’t clue many people in either.

Here’s his Wikipedia page.

Basically, co-creator of the C programming language and key designer in the early days of Unix which puts him at ground zero when it comes to modern operating systems. Sure, they’re not all written in C these days, but at the core they are. BSD, Linux, OS X, and the Windows NT kernel are all C based for the most part.

SHOT Show’s going on so what am I blogging about? Batteries. Go figure. I’ve got some things to say about the products coming out at SHOT this year, but it’s mostly “WTF!?” type of stuff.

Anyway, batteries:

Back in April I had a couple things about NiMH batteries buried in a random update post. In it I gave the thumbs up to the Energizer 15 minute charger ($30) but I’ve learned some things since then which has changed my opinion on it.

Next I added this Targus charger ($10-$15) that’ll do 4 batteries in 2-3 hours, give or take a bit. It’s pretty useful but it suffers from only having two circuits between the 4 compartments. If you’re not anal about keeping your batteries in pairs all the time this causes problems.

Which brings me to this week. I just got the La Crosse BC-700 ($30) and I’m dorking out over it. This does everything except charge batteries in 15 minutes, but that’s not something I’d advise people to do anyway, unless you’re in a pinch.

As far as batteries go I’ve been very happy with what I found at BatterySpace.com. You can get AAA and AA cells for about $1.25 a pop there. They seem to be holding up quite well for me and the price is much better than the typical $3/cell that you usually find.

So, if you really trust me and think you want to jump into NiMH whole hog just go buy everything I already linked to and start figuring out what works for you. If you want to know more keep reading.

First, a little background on NiMH batteries. Just like the older NiCd technology they’re only putting out around 1.2 volts per cell. Your typical alkaline batteries are going to put out 1.5 volts per cell. You won’t really notice this in most devices. Flashlights will be a little less bright, your flash will take more time to “charge” between shots on a camera, and your rumble pack might not kick as hard in an XBOX 360 controller but they’ll work. Usually. I’ve never really ran into a device that they wouldn’t function in but some manufacturers (like GunVault) say you should absolutely not use 1.2V rechargable cells in their products.

The next thing number related to NiMH is that you’ll see a mAh (milliamp hour) rating on every pack. If you don’t see a rating run away. Don’t buy them. For AA cells they’ll usually be in the 2400-2700 mAh range. Alkaline AA batteries usually have around 3000 mAh in them, for what that’s worth. The old NiCd technology only nets you around 800-1000 mAh in the AA sized batteries. So, if you remember using NiCd technology and how fast they’d run down now you’ve got some numbers that tell you the NiMH really isn’t that far off in longevity from standard alkaline batteries. The other thing NiMH has over NiCd is there’s no “memory effect.” With NiCd if you only used half the battery’s capacity before you recharged it, and kept doing that, you’d effectively half the total power available eventually. That sucked and with a “dumb” charger you’d never really be able to quantify what was happening during recharges.

Now, the chargers. What’s really nice about the BC-700 with respects to charging is that it tells you what’s going on the whole time. For instance right now I’ve got 4 batteries in mine and I’m charging them at a rate of 500 mAh per cell. It’s been running for 2 hours and change and it’ll tell me that I’ve shoved about 1040 mAh into each battery. When it cuts off charging it’ll give me just how much juice each one actually took up before the charger deemed it full. So, when I’m done if I see that three of them took up 2000 mAh of power but one stopped at 1200 mAh hour I can scratch my head and wonder if that fourth battery just wasn’t as dead as the others or if maybe it’s going bad. Since I know the four batteries in there are all the same age, they’ve always been used in the same device, and always charged at the same time I can assume that cell is going bad. But, if I’m not sure, I can throw that cell back on the charger in ‘CHARGE TEST’ mode and it’ll drain the battery at a rate of 100 mAh until it’s damned near dead and then restart a slow charge cycle at 200 mAh until it’s topped off. If it charges back up to around 2400-2500 mAh then I know it just wasn’t as dead as the others when it went on the charger and it’s still good. If it comes back at 1200 mAh again then I know it’s dieing and I can toss it into the “crap battery” pile.

That’s why you pretty much “need” something like the BC-700 if you’re going to go all battery dork like I am. But, besides that, it’s just a damned good charger. You can pick between 200, 500, and 700 mAh charging cycles depending on how impatient you are. Just remember: The faster you charge them the less life they’ll have. You should get around 500 charge/discharge cycles out of a decent NiMH battery before it goes tits up. If you’re only going to get one charger I’d make it that.

But the cheap-o Targus isn’t bad to have around either. With that I find it very useful for my XBOX 360 controllers and Logitech VX 470 mouse. Since each device works on a pair of AA’s and I’m the only one changing them out I know they’ll always run down at the same rate and I can just shove them on the Targus once a month to top them off. If I ever get them mixed up just put them back on the BC-700, which charges each cell individually, and then I can throw them back into rotation.

And even the Energizer 15 minute charger is useful, for obvious reasons, but not as your only charger. It’s a luxury item, I suppose. Just remember that every time you use it you’re risking damaging your batteries. It also seems like it’s very “cautious” about throwing up an error when you insert a cell that it doesn’t like, one that it might have “damaged” itself. That’s why it can’t be your only charger. You’ll end up tossing out batteries too often. What the Energizer reports as a dead cell might actually work just fine if you let the BC-700 run it through a good 2 day cycle of discharging and recharging until it’s back to a decent capacity.

OK, a little math is in order to explain just how whacky the 15 minute charger is. Let’s say you’ve got a 2500 mAh battery and it’s dead, completely dead. At a rate of 500 mAh (medium speed on the BC-700) it’ll take 5 hours to charge back up. At 700 mAh it’ll take 3.5 hours to charge. Faster chargers like the discontinued BC-900 and the Targus rapid charger I linked to above will charge at a rate of 1000 mAh which is about as fast as you’d really want to go and that’s going to take 2.5 hours. To fully recharge a 2500 mAh battery in 15 minutes you have to be shoving 10,000 mAh back into the battery which is 10 times the highest “safe” level. That’s why it kills them. Sure, it works 95% of the time (a number pulled mostly out of my arse) but the other 5% time is a real bummer. And then you have to figure out which of the 4 batteries it killed by pulling them out one at a time. Then let it sit for 2-3 days on the BC-700 if you want to try and save it.

But, it’s pretty handy if you’ve got a bunch of people coming over to play Wii for the evening or something like that. It’s also very useful if there’s a storm coming and you’re afraid you might lose power. Charge up all your AA and AAA’s real quick so that you can run flashlights. I’ve also got a AA to USB power device that’ll let me run my phone off it as long as I keep new batteries coming. Having a pile of (likely) good batteries on hand before a storm is a bit comforting to me.

All in all I’m having some fun with this stuff. That’s part of the enjoyment for me, but, I also like never having to run out and buy another pack of disposable batteries every month. Not only do I have a lot of “toys” that use them but the number of actual kid toys around here that powers through batteries is increasing and will keep doing so for the next, oh, 18-20 years I bet. I figure I’m just getting a little jump start on the whole topic.

About a week ago I got sick of the FR22D update Verizon pushed out to the Droid phones. Mostly it was the corporate Email app tossing up a notification that it had to modify my security settings every couple of hours but I also had issues where the phone would lock up during a call if I had Bluetooth on and tried plugging it in.

So I went and tossed Cyanogen 6.0.0 on my phone after rooting FR22D. I’m quite happy with it. It’s much better than their 6.0.0 RC3 release that I tried briefly before their final 6.0.0 build.

I’d suggest giving it a shot.

If you’re not up for the full task of rooting and flashing a new ROM onto the phone I’d highly suggest dumping the stock “Launcher” app and trying ADWLauncher instead. I find it much more responsive than the stock Launcher on Verizon’s FR22D build and really like the ability to set my screen so that it holds more than 4×4 icons.

I swear some day this will end.

I might have been a bit harsh on the WiFi thing. The laptop I’m on just lost WiFi connectivity a while back so what did I do? Pull out the Droid and fire up the Wifi Spectrum Analyzer app. Turns out my neighbor has an AP working on channel 1 just like mine is. Odd, since mine is configured to channel hop to the cleanest area of the spectrum.

Switched channels. Laptop works, giving the Droid’s WiFi stuff another shot.

I took some heat in the comments about reading SMS messages while driving and found something that I think will work for me: SMSReader. When the app is running incoming SMS messages are read aloud. Problem solved. Sorta. I’ll get to the later when I talk about the Locale app.

This has also made me realize I only get an SMS message every 2-3 days when I’m actually driving. I used to get a lot more on the old phone because I used Google Calendar to set all kinds of reminders for myself and it was configured to send me an SMS. Now that the phone runs the calendar app natively I get a totally different tone and know that it’s just an automated reminder, I look at the clock, and I know what the reminder is for.

I’ve also enabled Google Latitude on my Google account. So now my phone has me LoJacked. I did it so that my wife can see where I am at any given time. My idea, not hers. Figure it’ll prevent calling to ask how far out I am on the drive home, not that I mind it, but I like automation. I’ll see if it proves useful or not. Right now I’m just having fun with it. A good friend of mine with a Droid uses it too so we can both see where each other is at any given time. That’s been kind of fun for me. And I know I can always turn it off for a bit if I don’t want to be tracked by the two people that have access to the data. Well, aside from Google’s staff.

Speaking of GPS there’s an app that has me really tickled pink: Locale

This thing lets you change the phone’s config based on things like time, location, being plugged in, battery status, orientation, and a couple more. I’m just using time and location right now.

Example: Default config for me is to have the ringer on, GPS on, and update my GTalk status to “Mobile.” More on the GTalk thing later. This is the status that is set on the phone whenever I’m not in an already predefined condition.

Then I have another condition for “Home” which flips the GPS off (saves power) and resets the ringer to be on and at full volume.

Then I have another condition for the office I work at which again flips the GPS off, GTalk status to “On Site” and sets the ringers all to vibrate only mode. As soon as I get within 100 feet of their building, boom, it all happens automatically.

I leave and I go back to “Default” and the ringer comes back up, GPS is back on, and my wife is able to chart my progress home. And anybody on GTalk (which I use for work in one case) knows that I’m on my mobile handset and not at a computer.

I just added a new condition today that says if I drive through a particular intersection between 4 and 7pm it’ll send her an SMS message saying I’m on my way home.

I’m in love with that app. Unfortunately it cost me $10, but I think it’s worth it to never worry about forgetting to my phone on vibrate while in a meeting. I’m also hoping they add a few things, maybe plugin developers will do it, maybe it’ll be in the main app, who knows? Hell, maybe I should start writing plugins.

I want it to launch applications when certain conditions are met. I’d also like it to be able to detect when I’m driving. Both should be pretty easy. That would allow me to make sure that SMSReader app I mentioned before is always running if I’ve been traveling faster than 25mph within the last 5 minutes. When I no longer meet those conditions kill the app because I don’t want my SMS messages read aloud if I’m standing around at Home Depot.

I’d also like to be able to set multiple locations for a single configuration. I work in many areas, so it’d be nice to have one “Office” config with the 4-5 places I tend to be working at. Likewise I can take a number of routes home from them so being able to add them all to the “I’m coming home” SMS message thing would be helpful.

I know I said I was going to talk more about GTalk but I’m not going to. I need to make that in to a whole new post because I’m going to diverge into a new area. I want to keep this one about the Droid, the next will be about the future.

I think it’s pretty much required that when you get one of these things you have to post about it, Uncle has so that’s what I’m going to do.

I picked one up 5 days ago and I’ve been beating the snot out of it since then. Overall I like it but I have a couple of complaints.

The big one is WiFi support. Worked great for two days and then it got spotty. At home over that first weekend I’d see that it lost the WiFi connection and reverted to the 3G connection. On Monday night things got really crazy and it’d remain connected to my WiFi network but refuse to actually communicate unless it was one of the Google applications. Strangest thing in the world. Usually I can make sense of the WTF issues in consumer devices like this but my mind boggles at what is going on there. Gmail works, Pandora, Last.fm, Facebook, dead. Maybe, sometimes, kinda sorta, works one minute fails the next. Not cool. I even plugged in a 10 year old 802.11b access point of mine to see if it worked better with that instead of my 802.11n router that everything else uses. No dice. Same goofy experience there.

I’ve given up on WiFi and I’m just going to roll with 3G connectivity until I hear about an update being pushed out or WiFi is my only choice for getting data. It’s that bad, and I’m not the only one out there having problems with it.

Also, the physical keyboard sucks. Not that any keyboard that size is going to be great but this is worse than trying to type on my LG nV2 There’s no space between the keys which makes it hard to tell if you’re on the right button or not. I realize they have space constraints but shrinking the buttons 10% in each direction would have helped and that pointer thingy they have on the right side of the keyboard has no use to me. I’d imagine it’s pretty big for gaming though. Dropping the pointer control would have given them a lot of room to make it more friendly for business users. In addition with no room between the top row and the display means typing with my thumbs is kinda pointless. Even with my tiny girl hands I trouble wedging a thumb in there so I hunt around with a single index finger on the thing. I’ll probably adapt quickly.

The default on screen keyboard is decent though. Well, for an on screen keyboard. Plus you can get different plugins to change how it works. A good friend suggested ShapeWriter and I’ve started to tinker with it. I kind of like the idea but I’m not so sure about it. Still, nice to know there are options out there.

And, for all the griping I did above about the WiFi connectivity the 3G support has been pretty good. I pull about 1.5Mb/s out here in the country where I live. Inside an office building in town the signal degrades to the point where I only get 256Kb/s (sometimes closer to 128Kb/s) but that’s enough to stream music over it which is all I really need it for aside from synching up calendars and such.

Speaking of which, it hooks up to Exchange just fine. No hassle there at all. Email, calender, and contacts come over great. Likewise with the Google services that fill a similar role that I make use of in my personal life.

Speaking of contacts I’m greatly annoyed that Verizon doesn’t have an app to sync up to their Backup Manager stuff. I transitioned seamlessly between two LG phones because I always used their Backup Manager to keep my contact list on their server but they didn’t bother writing an app for the Android system to pull that data back down. Consequently I’m going to have to pull up my contact list on the Verizon website some night and start plugging phone numbers back in. But, that’s a Verizon issue and not a Google/Android/Motorola Droid issue. Wife had the same problem when she got a Microsoft based smart phone from Verizon. There’s no app for that. :(

Also of note is that this thing sucks on the battery hard. If you actually use it as anything besides a simple cell phone and have that display light up on a regular basis you’re going to have to charge it every day. The nice thing there is that the charger is a simple micro USB cable so I can just jack it into my work laptop during the day without any fuss. While it’s a gripe of mine I cannot fault anybody for this. Making the thing any bigger to hold a larger battery would have been suicide-by-market-demand and there’s not much you can do about toning down the power consumption.

Aside from the physical keyboard and the battery life every other issue I have can be addressed via a software update. I like that and I’m optimistic that Google will fix up the OS eventually. It’s still kind of new and already works way better than the Windows Mobile 6.0 device my wife was torturing herself with for the last 18 months and with that one she only wanted it to work as a phone. I’m getting way more functionality out of the Droid than she ever had with that.

Now, one thing I really like about the Droid is the ability to set a “swipe pattern” on the screen to take it out of sleep mode. I’ve seen enough Facebook status updates that read, “I have a buttplug in my behind today at work!” published by a Blackberry to understand the importance of not having an easily unlockable phone.

Problem is while I like that feature I want this thing to be really easy to work with while driving. Yes, I’ll read an SMS message or email header while going down the expressway if traffic is light. Hell, even if you’re just doing it at a red light it needs to be fast. The security, or even the default “wake up” procedure, gets in the way of this. With the GPS capabilities of the device it has to be possible to simply drop the thing into the “I’m driving, show my my stuff” mode. If my phone chimes that I have an SMS message, and I’m doing north of 25mph within the last 60 seconds, I should be able to pick up the phone and see the message. No unlock required. Not everybody would like it so just drop it on Android as an option: Easy access on the go. You tell me I got an email while I’m moving? Pull up that email for me if I’m driving. Keep it there until I dismiss it when I hit the next red light or empty stretch of the highway.

Oh, and if you made it this far in my blog post you’re probably interested in the Droid so here’s a random tidbit for you: If the phone is on mute but you have the dial pad on the screen your cheek will hit buttons on the phone and they will transmit DTMF tones to the call. Learned that on my first conference call with the thing. You dial in, dial pad goes away, you call it back up to enter the conference number, hit mute, and your coworkers wonder who the idiot was making the beeping noises.

… and he posts Call of Duty videos online.

A while back I discovered “Hutch” and his Youtube channel where he posts Call of Duty gameplay videos with commentary. He’s actually pretty entertaining and a rather like-able guy. In his most recent update he lets us in on his personal life a bit:

- Moved to San Fransisco a while back to live with his girlfriend. This was a very happy time.
- Found out she was with another dude around Christmas. It didn’t work out. This was not a very happy time.
- Moved back home
- He’s 26 and has been waiting tables for the last 6 years.

The good news: Machinama flew him to their offices, gave him a tour, and then offered him salaried position with benefits to do what he likes doing. Play FPS games and talk about them. Cool beans, dude. I’m happy for you.

Well, with the MacBook dead I decided to do what all the cool kids are doing and get an Asus Eee PC.

So far I’m liking it. It works alright as a little web browsing box and that’s really all I ever use a PC for in the evenings when I’m on the couch. Kind hard to beat it for $320 I think. For what it’s worth I went with the 1005HA model, 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 10.5″ screen and a 1.6Ghz Atom processor. Performance is fine so far but playing Flash under Linux maxes out the processor pretty bad. If more than one thing is going on the video gets choppy. No problems with that in Windows though.

RIght now I’ve got it dual booting Eeebuntu and the copy of XP Home that came loaded on it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the default XP install came with only half the 160GB drive allocated to the OS and the other half was an NTFS volume just for data. So I dropped the Linux install on the 2nd half of the disk. It all went pretty smooth. The only that really pissed me off with the Linux install is that it didn’t support my wireless network card (or the wired Ethernet port!) out of the box. Seriously. It’s a distribution made for the Asus Eee PC series and it doesn’t even support stuff like the stock network card? Argh. So, I slammed a USB wireless dongle into it and used that to grab a freaking kernel package that had back ported kernel drivers in it. It’s a known issue, has been for about 6 months, and they still don’t have the drivers in the freaking install image. That just doesn’t make sense.

My in-laws were in town this weekend and we went and saw Star Trek as a group together. The wife and I had already seen it, but they hadn’t, and if I’m going to watch a movie twice this summer Star Trek would be the one. It’s a fun flick.

Thing is, I notice a common trend in my thinking when watching any movie with sci-fi based technology in it these last couple of years: Where the frick are they getting all this energy from?

Yes, I know it’s not real, but my inner nerd wonders just how we’re going to be able to accomplish some of this stuff, because mark my words: We will eventually.

The Iron Man movie is what started it. That goofy little ‘arc reactor’ is really the only thing we need to make that idea real, aside from it actually flying. The ground-pounding aspects of it are entirely possible though if we could create an endless energy source inside the suit.

As for Star Trek there’s a bunch of things we’d need to get there, and I’m comfortable with the idea that we’d be able to use some sort of massive nuclear reactor on a star ship, but what about the shuttles? Those things are nifty: They just hover above ground and slowly ascent into space. That’s going to require some kind of energy source we can’t even imagine yet.

Energy is a big topic right now, and when I look at the Sci-Fi world I realize that’s our next big hurdle in achieve some of these dreams.

We’ve already accomplished a heck of a lot when it comes to actually doing what Sci-Fi predicted a while ago. We’ve put men in space and on the moon. In Star Trek it’s a given that we can instantly communicate with anybody else we need to by simply pressing a button on our lapel and speaking into a microphone. On the anniversary of Gene Roddenberry’s death a few years ago I received a couple of ultra-cheap Bluetooth headsets in the mail and it hit me: We can do that now.

Hell, Transparent aluminium was fiction but it’s real now.

Mankind’s development of technology is increasing at an exponential rate. As a species we’re about 200,000 years old. Around 6,000 years ago we got keen on cooking our food and development really sparked up. Writing, language, religion, and governments sprang forth from that. We learned, we grew. It wasn’t more than 600 years ago that Columbus sailed the ocean to re-discover America. After that we figured out that Earth was round, and in today’s world what was once thought unthinkable (circumnavigation of the world) was almost achieved by the 17 year old younger brother of a former co-worker a decade ago.

Within 100 years of the first flight at Kitty Hawk we broke the sound barrier.

We are going to conquer space travel. I have no doubt about that. The only question is how long it will take. and I predict it’ll come about the same time we make a massive advance in energy production.