Black & Decker Storm Station

The rechargeable battery is not supposed to be user replaceable, so I feared I would have to recycle the unit. Fortunately, I found brief instructions by greenpower101 on Epinions.com that inspired me to try replacing it myself.

The procedure below will take you 15 to 30 minutes, not counting the time to pick up or order the replacement battery. All you need is a Phillips screwdriver. Please note that this procedure will void your warranty, but if it is already expired and you have a battery that won’t hold a charge, you have nothing to lose.

1. Disconnect the AC adapter and turn off the Storm Station
   
2. Open up the Storm Station. There are eight Phillips screws located on the back of the device. None are hidden or tricky to remove. Some are different lengths, so keep track of which screw goes where.
   
3. Carefully pull the back off of the device. There are several wires connecting the back to the front. Take care not to pull them off of their solder joints.
   
4. Disconnect the black and red battery wires.
5. Remove the six screws holding the white battery compartment cover.
6. Purchase a replacement battery. The battery in my unit was a B.B. Battery model HR5.5-12. I easily found a replacement on Amazon. Make sure that you order a battery with the correct type of connector. The connectors on my battery were type F2.
7. Prepare the battery to be reinstalled by adding some foam strips to the sides to keep it snug in its compartment. I just reused the ones that were on my original battery.
   
8. Place the new battery back in the white compartment with the positive (red) terminal on the right.
9. Attach the battery compartment to the back of the Storm Station using the six screws. Attach the black battery wire to the black terminal and the red battery wire to the red terminal.
10. Attach the back of the Storm Station to the front with the eight screws and you are good to go! My replacement battery had some charge in it, so I was able to test the Storm Station right away.
11. Recycle your old battery!

Now that I have the new battery, the storm light will stay on for more than 14 hours. A big improvement from before!

I just completed reading my first Kindle ebook! It wasn’t my first ebook, but it was the first one that I’ve read on the Kindle platform. I say “platform” because I actually read the book on a Kindle 3 device, Android phone and Windows 7 PC. I read a majority of the book on the Kindle 3 device and read occasional short sections on the Android phone. I was on vacation without a PC, so I only used the PC when I returned home and wanted to review notes I had taken on the Kindle 3 device.

I see a number of advantages and disadvantages to reading ebooks on the Kindle platform, and there are some features I would really like to see.

Advantages

1. The Kindle 3 device is small, easy to carry and comfortable to hold.
2. The Kindle 3 screen is very easy on the eyes.
3. All three platforms, Kindle 3, Android & Windows, have adjustable text sizes
4. Purchasing a book on a Kindle 3 device is insanely easy. In fact, if you have a version with 3G wireless capability, it is almost too easy to just click and buy!
5. There is a long list of devices that have applications that can display Kindle books.
6. A book purchased once can be read on all of the supported devices and applications. Even better, you can synchronize where you are in the book so that if you switch devices, the new device knows where you are.
7. Bookmarks, notes and highlights made on one device are automatically synchronized with the rest of your devices. I found this feature extremely useful because I was able to take notes on the portable Kindle 3, then review the notes and copy them to Evernote on my PC.
8. The text-to-speech capability works surprisingly well, given that it is still an experimental feature. We originally purchased the family Kindle 3 for the text-to-speech capability to help my son read particularly difficult books.

Disadvantages

1. Kindle does not support the standard EPUB format. EPUB books without digital rights management (DRM) can be converted to Kindle format, however.
2. The Kindle format is not supported on non-Amazon devices or devices that don’t run the Amazon software. If you purchase a Kindle book, you won’t be able to transfer it to a device that lacks Amazon support.
3. My local public library cannot loan books in Kindle format. My library uses OverDrive to power its ebook lending service. OverDrive says Kindle support is coming this year. I hope it is true! Update 21 Sep 2011: You can now borrow books from local libraries!
4. The Kindle 3 device can only display a limited range of gray scale text and diagrams.
5. The Android app currently does not allow note taking. Update 2 Sep 2011: Version 3.1.0 now supports note taking and highlighting.

Wishlist

1. Evernote support on the Kindle device and Kindle apps. I have just started using Evernote in earnest and I would love to have a button to send a note I take to Evernote. I was able to copy individual notes from the Kindle PC application to the clipboard and then into Evernote, but it was cumbersome.
2. An improved web browser. Amazon describes the browser on the Kindle 3 as experimental.
3. A standard ebook format that will work on just about any ebook reading device or application. We have the MP3 format in the music world. Hopefully the day will come when we have the same thing in the ebook world.

Conclusion

Overall, I like the Kindle platform. Books are a breeze to purchase and easy to read on the Kindle device. Anyone who needs or wants to carry a lot of books will appreciate the Kindle device’s 3 Gbyte capacity. Likewise, anyone who would like to always have their current book with them can have it right on their smart phone. Even though Kindle is Amazon’s proprietary format, there are enough Kindle devices and applications available that I am sure I’ll be purchasing books for the Kindle platform in the future.

Lego Duplo Locomotive

I figured I could find a replacement on eBay, but the prices on locomotives were running high enough that I decided to call Lego to see if they had a recent set with a compatible locomotive. The customer service rep checked on the computer and found they had the 10-year-old part in stock and shipped it to me at no charge. A week later, the locomotive is back in action!

I have had to recycle or trash countless devices because spare parts either weren’t available or cost more than a new replacement device. Lego not only had the part, but didn’t charge me for it!

The next time a four-year-old visits, we are ready for Lego railroading action!

I recently had to travel in an elevator in a Chicago high rise. What would normally be a mundane event instead turned into an introduction to a new way to select your floor. Instead of the usual up and down buttons outside of the elevator bank, there was a keypad to enter your floor number:

Once you punched in your floor, the display told you which elevator to enter. Inside the elevator door, another display listed all of the stops to be made by that car. After you entered the elevator, there was nothing more to press, other than the close door button:

I was curious about this new way to ride an elevator and a little research turned up this presentation about Compass destination management by Otis Worldwide.

Otis claims that travel times are reduced by up to 50 percent using this floor selection method. Based upon a few trips up and down, that figure seems reasonable. Most rides only had a handful of stops and I never had to ride an elevator that stopped at every floor.

The one drawback I see to this system is the inevitable rider mistake: If you get on the wrong elevator or you select the wrong floor, you have to get out of the elevator to select a new floor!

On my recent first-ever visit to the Walt Disney World Epcot theme park, I was excited to see Segways in use. The parking attendants rode Segways up and down the parking lot aisles, directing cars and people to where they needed to go. Unfortunately, the guests couldn’t skip walking for the day and ride the Segways instead!

I can finally report that the battery drain issue that my iPod Touch second generation had been having with iOS 4.0 & 4.1 is solved! I had previously worked around the issue by using airplane mode, but I wanted a permanent fix. Using advice found in the Apple Support Discussions forum, an article on cnet and some helpful commenting from Sean Sullivan, I was able to fix the iPod Touch iOS 4.0 & 4.1 battery drain issue.

Here is the procedure that worked for me:

1. Connect your iPod Touch to a USB 2.0 port on your computer, rather than through a USB hub. I had always used a hub in the past. This time iTunes ground to a halt when using a hub and was only happy with a direct connection.
2. Make a note of all of your important settings because you are going to need them later. [Update 1 Jan 2011: As Bill points out in the comments, some app data may not be able to be restored, so be sure to verify that it is possible to save and restore your app data before the attempting a factory restore of your iPod in step 3.]
3. Do a factory restore of your iPod Touch. Even though iTunes saves a backup of your iPod’s data and settings, do NOT restore the backup of your data. I did multiple factory & data restores and none of them worked. Avoiding the automatic restore is painful, but it turned out to be the critical step for me. [Update 3 Feb 2011: Apple has instructions for doing a restore. Be sure to only restore the OS, not your data.]
4. Load your applications and data back on to the iPod Touch. I was able to load all of my applications at once without issue.
5. Make sure push notifications are turned off on all of your applications. I had turned mine off before running this procedure, but forgot to turn them off on one application after the procedure.

I only needed to do this procedure once when I upgraded the iPod Touch from iOS 4.0 to iOS 4.1. The upgrade from iOS 4.1 to 4.2 worked without issue and my iPod Touch is working as well as it did on iOS 3.1.3!

I previously wrote about a usable workaround for the iPod iOS 4.0 battery drain issue. I had high hopes that iOS 4.1 would fix the issue, but no luck. I still have to put the iPod into airplane mode to avoid the battery draining while the iPod sleeps. While it is not an excessive amount of work, it is easy to forget to do. I wind up not being able to check the weather on my iPod in the morning and I have to fall back to 20th century technology: the clock radio!

Ask.com recently announced that it will shut down the Bloglines RSS Feeder service on October 1, 2010. Although I am not a regular Bloglines user, I found it interesting that Ask.com said that

being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow.

I am a regular user of RSS feed readers, mainly Google Reader and Mozilla Thunderbird, and I actually use those readers to manage the information flow from sites like Twitter. Without feed readers, my ability to filter through large amounts of data for the information I need would be greatly reduced and I would not visit nearly as many information sources as I do now.

I think that Ask.com is missing out on an opportunity to turn Bloglines into a social media aggregation tool. Every social media platform generates an information stream and people need help managing them.

If you are a Bloglines user, don’t give up on the utility of RSS feeds because their are plenty of alternatives out there!

This summer brought me an opportunity to experience the power of unplugging life’s digital information fire hose. I wasn’t trying to study the effects of unplugging like a group of neuroscientists recently did. Rather, I was helping my son and the other Boy Scouts in his troop earn some merit badges and enjoy a week of camping.

We didn’t camp extremely far from civilization, but we didn’t bring a television, DVD player, radio, iPod or video game. I had my cellphone, but the cell signal was weak and the phone had to stay off to ensure that I had enough battery power left in case an emergency arose.

Three significant things happened during this electronic-free week:

• We completed tasks
• We communicated
• We had fun!

Without the electronic distractions, my son had the time to complete a rank advancement, the environmental science merit badge and the archery merit badge. I also had the time to help him with the work and encourage him through the tough parts.

We walked almost everywhere during that week. Walking is a great time to chat with people and get to know them better. My son and I had time to talk about matters great and small, he got to know his fellow scouts better and I got to know the adult leaders better.

Finally, we all had a lot of fun! There was plenty of time to enjoy the summer weather, do some fishing, canoeing, or just watch the sun set.

When we returned, I was actually reluctant to turn everything back on. It took me a day to fire up the email and many days to open up Google Reader to see what had queued up in my RSS feeds. Eventually, I was back up to speed with my digital life, but I had a new appreciation of the power of turning the digital distractions off.

The next time you have an important task to finish, try turning off the distractions. Shut down your email client, instant message client, web browser and cell phone for a few hours. Then, focus on the task at hand. You will be surprised at how much you can accomplish!

I recently decided to violate my “never install a dot zero release” rule and installed iOS 4.0 on my iPod touch. The features that I could use on my second generation hardware were nice, but I immediately noticed that the battery drained in a couple of days, even though the iPod was in sleep mode.

Apparently there is a bug where the Wi-Fi will stay on even when the iPod is asleep. That does no good because none of the applications that could benefit, like email, stay on.

I’ve found that the workaround which does the best job of preserving the battery’s charge is to switch the iPod into Airplane Mode. The switch to turn on Airplane Mode is right at the top of the Settings screen.

In practice, I turn on Airplane mode and then hit sleep. When I unsleep, the Settings screen is still there and I just turn off Airplane mode. It is a couple of extra steps, but it is doing the job for now. I had high hopes for a fix in iOS 4.0.2, but no luck there. Hopefully iOS 4.1 will have a fix!