Cold Battery Blues

Thanks again Dal-e

On Radio Humberside talking about cold batteries. Apparently Tick Tockers (whatever they are) have been noticing that they can’t make as many videos on their phone in the cold weather. This is what I said:

• Low temperature increases the “internal resistance” of the battery. This limits the amount of power you can get from it.  It also means that to get a certain level of performance it takes more power out of the battery.

• Electric cars are affected too. They heat up the battery in cold weather. If you have the car plugged in at home you can “pre-condition” the battery to warm it up. This can improve the range, which is a good idea in winter because cold substantially reduces range (at least by a third).

• Always Be Charging. There’s no advantage in running your lithium battery right down before charging it (in fact flattening a lithium battery can destroy it). Keep your battery charged every chance you get. The only reason to let the battery run down is so that the phone can work out the battery life.

• Keep your phone in an inside pocket so that you keep it warm.

• If you give your phone something hard to do this will warm it up (although of course it will also flatten the battery). There are even “hand-warmer” apps that do this – but they are not a particularly good idea.

• Charge the battery when it is warmer.

• Warm your phone up before you do something that consumes a lot of power.

Another year of Cubeness

Nice work Dal-E. Not sure about the number of door handles though….

Our Nissan Cube is getting on a bit. As are we all. He’s not perfect, but he is good enough to pass the MOT test for another year. I’m going to get his underside comprehensively clarted with wax and whatnot to try and stave of the inevitable onset of rust (poetic prose) but it is nice to have him around for at least one more year.

Superhuman

Looks like rain dear

Today I’ve filed my tax return and merged two branches in GitHub.

What a man…

Heavy Work

The computer is eight years old though….

What do you think I was doing to raise the CPU loading to the dizzy heights you can see above?

Well, I was moving some files from one folder to another. There were quite a few files, but even so.

I think I need a new computer.

Late Chair

Every time they failed to deliver the chair they added a new one to the order…

We needed a chair bed to put up a family member at Christmas. So we ordered one. The delivery came and went, and came and went again. Chairs were not delivered owing to “un-foreseen circumstances”.

There are worse things in life than missing out on chair deliveries. Although after four attempts where we had changed our arrangements to fit around their schedule we were getting a bit fed up.

The chair arrived today. Just three weeks or so late. It is very nice. They’ve sent me an email asking for my opinion of the service they provided. Every single person I dealt with, from the folks on the first call to the delivery team, has been lovely to deal with. But I’m forced to conclude that they are trapped in a system which is not working very well.

Percussive assembly

Built some shelves today. There were no nuts or bolts, the parts just needed to be slotted together and tapped into place. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve made something using a hammer.

Happy New Year

Guess which camera?

A happy new year to all (both) my readers. Here’s to many more test photographs of my favourite trees with an ever increasing range of interesting cameras……

Merry Christmas

I need to work on my exposure

Although I have a policy of not sharing family pictures, I thought I’d break that rule and post a picture I took of everyone round the table. This was taken with one of my large cameras and the best thing I can say about it is that the bits you can see are quite sharp….

Merry Christmas everybody.

Murder Mystery Night

Well, that was fun. Tonight we had a murder mystery event; “Death by Chocolate”. We all gathered together and tried to work out who dunnit. Nobody guessed the guilty party. But it was hilarious. I thought I’d managed to map the folks attending onto roles that I thought suited them well. Me, I was a ventriloquist’s dummy….

Computer Science Christmas Party

We had a splendid time at the Hull University Computer Science departmental Christmas party yesterday. David handed out a quiz from Instant Quizzes which was excellent fun, including a round where we had to identify chocolate bars from pictures of their interiors. And I was part of the winning time - whose chocolate bar knowledge eclipsed even mine.

Renaissance Man

Today, amongst other great achievements, I fitted a toilet seat and bought some pies. And I did thoroughly wash my hands in between.

Remember what this is?

So many buttons, so little time

Just bought a super-cheap camcorder. The low price is reflected by the lack of battery and the fact that when you press the transport buttons the wrong thing happens. But it works. Now I can go back and explore old videos made over thirty years ago.

If they still work.

Heading to Birmingham

Tomorrow is Comicon at the NEC in Birmingham. In the olden days we used to drive there and back in one day. But nowadays we tend to arrive a day early and spend a night in a hotel. With that in mind I can strongly recommend the Premier Inn Solihull (Hockley Heath M42). The staff are lovely, the rooms are big and clean the meal out was great. Show day tomorrow.

Weighing cameras

Spent this afternoon weighing camera bags to help me decide which to take to Comicon tomorrow. Which is in no way sad.

AS an added bonus, the mole wrench is now very easy to find.

A while back I mentioned my sinking feeling, caused by a failing gas support in my chair. The chair company have sent me a replacement, which is nice of them. However, it has proved to be impossible to fit, what with the broken part having welded itself into position. I’ve come up with a solution though. My chair now holds its position perfectly.

Spelling with Alexa?

Our Alexa device keeps trying new things to get us to interact with it. Today it came up with a display which said something along the lines of “Try asking me how to spell exfoliate (or whatever the word was)”. This struck me as a strange thing to do, what with the word I wanted to know about being spelled out right in front of my eyes.

New Beatles Song

They’ve just released a “new” Beatles song created, of course, with the help of AI. It is said that if you listen very, very, carefully to the track you can hear in the background the sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped….

Curse you British Summer Time

You’ll never guess where I bought this

The good news is that my Agile Octopus Tariff Display (which tells us how much electricity will cost us each day) handled the clock change yesterday with aplomb. It just worked. The bad news is that one of my clocks can’t be adjusted because the little knob that you turn to move the hands has broken. So I’ve taken the battery out for an hour.

In March next year I’ll have to take the battery out for 11 hours. Perhaps I should make a “time corrector” device. You plug it into the clock in place of the battery, tell the “time corrector” the time the clock is showing and over the next day it makes the clock correct.

Back in the saddle...

I’m going back to university. Just a little bit. I’m helping out with a MEng project. It will be nice to be back in the hallowed halls of learning once again. And the best thing is that, what with the turnover in students over the years, none of them have heard any of my jokes yet….

Network isolation

I hate it when hardware manufacturers spoil their products by skimping on one, crucial component. Take NetGear for example. They make quite good network hardware, but then they add the cheapest possible power supplies they can find. This means (for me at least) that every few years I have to buy a new 12 volt power supply to replace the one that just went pop.

I’ve just had to do it again. One of the routers in my network failed. The good news is that when this happens my eero network converts one of the Wi-Fi repeaters into a network receiver and so the network keeps going - just a lot slower than it used to. It can take me a while to discover that the network is broken in this way, I usually discover things are not right when I have to do an update to Microsoft Flight Simulator.