Nov 07
PPUG’s Bob Snow emailed me the following advice on battery chargers for low discharge batteries:
Smart chargers indicate the state of charge, monitor temperature and voltage curves and adjust the rate of charge. They charge a fully discharged battery fast and then throttle down to put a small trickle charge on the battery once fully charged. This is not needed for low discharge batteries. Just take them out and store them for a year a more once fully charged.
Sanyo Eneloop is the most well known low discharge NiMh batteries. Rayovac makes some called “hybrid” and Duracell just calls theirs “pre-charged” because they are sold with a full charge in the package and are ready to use. You can really treat these like Alkaline batteries once they are charged, just put them away until you need them. A trickle charge will just reduce their life and waste electricity. These chargers use independent channels for each battery so you can charge just one and when you charge several, each battery is monitored separately.
Although I wish could have bought it alone, I ended up buying the La Crosse BC-900 bundle. I got it from Thomas, because they ship it with 2400 mAh AAs (vs. 2000 mAh on Amazon) and they stock the latest version (33) which is important to me. I like that it has four individual circuits and with separate displays for each one (doubles as an excellent battery tester too).
I’ll continue to rotate out my older AA recyclables and buy low-discharge cells the next time I need more cells.
Dec 05
This is a great YouTube video predicting the next tech bubble. Pretty funny, actually!
The YouTube embed code isn’t working in WP 2.0.4 so you’ll have to check it out using the link above.
Aug 21
Have you seen the Ambient Orb?
It’s kind of expensive at US$150 just to monitor the stock market but I read a cool story in Wired magazine about how they’re using Orbs to monitor the power grid “to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power.”
I kind of reminded me of a cool gauge that my friend Shaun Redmond showed me that monitors your energy usage in your house.
Ideally, I could keep tabs on my home power consumption from my computer or iPhone from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Even wilder it the EnergyJoule (pictured) which is currently only available to Consumer Powerline customers in New York City.
Apr 30
Jason Calacanis has posted an excellent piece on “linkbaiting” that you should read. Linkbaiting essentially involves egging someone on with a blog post so that they link back to you. The concept is that if you do it enough, you get tons of links which can lead to tons of relevancy and if you can monotize those clicks you can turn them into cash.
Calacanis is best known as the creator of Weblogs, Inc. (which owns Engadget) which was acquired by AOL for US$25 million in 2005.
Calacanis is sometimes referred to as one of the pioneers of blogging, but I have to take exception to that. Although I’m certainly jealous of his financial success (kudos, my brother) my PowerPage.org was launched in 1995 almost two years before Dave’s Scripting News and Slashdot were a glimmer in Dave Weiner and Cmdr Taco’s eyes.
What’s funny is that Calacanis is a vocal critic of Digg gaming, black hat SEOs and PayPerPost yet he’s making a game out of gaming Google! Is he Hypocritical? Or does it fall within the bounds of satire? I’m not entirely sure, but it certainly worked on me.
I took the bait Jason. Where’s my link? 
