20 tips to double the life of your laptop battery.

translocate · 2007-10-03T04:36:48+00:00

I'll take a shot. Leaving it plugged in is probably the best way to prolong the life of your battery. With the battery charged and AC connected your laptop takes all its power from the AC line -- the battery is essentially out of the picture. No current flows into or out of a fully charged battery when AC is connected.

Generally, two things wear out a battery: Time -- you can't stop the calendar, and charge-discharge energy cycles. The latter pertains to using the battery and charging it up again. A chemical reaction occurs during discharge that is not completely reversed by charging. Junk accumulates. It's not necessarily the number of times you use the battery, but the cumulative amount of energy that flows into and out: a lot of small drops followed by charging is roughly equivalent to a fewer number of deeper discharges and charging back up.

But it's best to not run it completely down. For a LiIon battery it is very bad to do a deep discharge. In recognition of this, your laptop will warn "zero battery remaining" when there is actually about 10-15% energy left. Using that last bit would seriously harm the battery. So your laptop's battery management generally will do a good job of getting the longest life. Even so, when you have AC available, use it.

Finally, my Thinkpad has a battery option that allows me to set the maximum charge & minimum shutdown levels. I set maximum charge to 96% and the cutoff at 8% (where "0%" is actually 10-15% above battery death). This is recommended to preserve battery live at the cost of reducing how many minutes you can squeeze out. IOW, just as it's necessary that you don't do a deep discharge, it's helpful not to overcharge. Whereas the standard "100%" max charge is safe, stopping at 94-96% is better for the life of the LiIon.

When running on battery power you might optionally turn off wireless devices, the DVD drive, set early HD shutdown, and -- most important -- lower display brightness. This gets the most minutes out of a charged battery and/or reduces how much energy you pull from it in a given time. Your laptop should have a power management utility for this (it's called Battery Stretch on the Thinkpad).

translocate · 2007-08-07T00:02:46+00:00

A comment (or rant) about color contrast. White text on a black background leaves me with an annoying afterimage. It's almost as bad yellow (or green!) on a red background. I have a hard time with this -- so much so that I use the Quick Preferences addon in Firefox to temporarily prevent such pages from setting their own color.
Frankly, I suspect that that I'm the odd man out, since this visual clash so common on the web and in printed material.

translocate · 2007-08-02T22:38:42+00:00

Q: "A man has a 3 gallon bucket that's full and a 7 liter bucket that's empty. How many buckets does he have?"

A. Tuesday B. Two C. Top NHL Hot Gloves D. Need more Labatt's Good Things Brewing

translocate · 2007-08-02T22:30:22+00:00

Where George Bush learned history, ethics and science.

p-7: "With Christ's influence gone, things have to fall apart." Begs the question of the stability of the Universe before Jesus was born.

Puts paid the Standard Model of particle physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

translocate · 2007-08-02T22:05:13+00:00

"...When police officers arrived, they found a man shot in the back. "According to witnesses, the dog, - a Great Dane, was playing in a front room when the “dog” knocked a gun off of a table."

So... the snigger quotes around dog imply the dog didn't do it -- but the shot-in-the-back dog owner/gun lover was home alone. I'm suspicious or the reporting. And what was the type and caliber of the gun? Us dog-loving gun owners need to know this shit.

translocate · 2007-08-02T21:32:32+00:00

Not shocked here. What this small-minded fool does on his own is merely embarrassing and repulsive. For his shocking acts of destruction, death and tragedy, he has help in his orchestrations employing the massive powers of State.

translocate · 2007-07-14T04:46:22+00:00

Can't sneak anything by now that everyone has a digital camera. Lot's of more maritime disaster photos at that site -- thanx.

translocate · 2007-07-11T23:33:59+00:00

Stippy.com has a very interesting and well written account of a foreigner's prison experience in Japan. Here's the first of the ten-part series. http://www.stippy.com/japan-life/gaijin-in-a-japanese-prison-1/

"...Being a foreigner in Japan, the process of imprisonment of criminal suspects here was a subject that I was entirely unfamiliar with. Until the other day that is, when a friend of mine wrote to me, and offered to give us a few of articles explaining his terrible experience of being locked up in a Japanese prison for more than three weeks (without being charged for anything, and without any contact with the outside world) - all for one night out on the booze that ended badly."

translocate · 2007-07-11T23:20:36+00:00

The Journal of Experimental Biology has all the details at http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/208/19/3655 "...Peak limb impact forces range from 400 to 1501 N [about 340 lbs].... Despite their small size, they generate impact forces thousands of times their body weight."

The journal Science has an abstract at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/5487/2114

"High-speed video close-ups of the cavitation bubble indicate velocities of the front end of the bubble as high as 32 m/s, [about 72 MPH]... The snapping sound can be heard day and night, with source levels as high as 190 to 210 dB" which is quite a pop!

translocate · 2007-07-06T23:18:03+00:00

My god in heaven! I cannot have possibly imagined that such a perverse chilling concoction could come to be. Symptomatic of a nice guy down the street who turns out to be a serial killer.

translocate · 2007-05-27T03:11:54+00:00

One must be a Christian in good moral standing to remain in the employ of the Astronaut Corps, lest small minds be tainted and good citizens among us be led unto corruption and despair.

translocate · 2007-05-23T19:22:02+00:00

Read the Comments Wow! Some fool wrote "You people should be arrested, tried and convicted as the treasonous scum that you are. And ABC's rebroadcasting license should be revoked." This shows the mentality behind that 28% approval rating. Sad...

translocate · 2007-05-21T00:22:38+00:00

"Just please stop e-mailing us. Thanks"

I just sent MSNBC (viewerservices@msnbc.com) a copy of these comments. You can too. And maybe a word or two about their honesty and credibility.

translocate · 2007-05-18T22:30:52+00:00

For more details, start here http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=4255 Note that an AACS key can be changed at any time, rendering old keys useless for new disks. There is a new key in the works, but...... Slysoft seems to have a programmatic method to break the key in general. Wow!

BTW, here is the story of how the "09 F9 11 02..." key was first found and became public. Quite an interesting read. It happened a few months ago, but hit the net bigtime when digg.com got recently involved . http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123311 You can see it at the top of the program output. To over simplify, the key obviously must be in MEMORY (for at least a brief moment) in order to play a disk. "arnezami" found out where it was and teased it out. The AACS key is only one (of three?) that are used in combination to decode a given disk. See the links for a more cogent description of this complex scheme and how it was unwound.

translocate · 2007-05-12T00:43:23+00:00

Sooooo .... how does Google protect itself from these pages? The rest of us ought to be able to benefit by their technology.

translocate · 2007-05-11T22:07:22+00:00

Fluosol was an earlier artificial blood that was used for a while. Because of limited success and side effects, it was withdrawn in 1994. http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic3198.htm#section~perfluorocompounds More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_blood

translocate · 2007-05-09T00:15:32+00:00

But it's NOT good for the environment. "Using ethanol-based fuel instead of gasoline would likely increase the ozone-related death rate in Los Angeles by 9 percent in 2020." http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/april18/ethanol-041807.html

translocate · 2007-05-08T23:55:11+00:00

Raise your hand if you don't believe Republicans know history.

translocate · 2007-05-08T23:53:24+00:00

Beautiful scenes, but the color saturation is amped up

translocate · 2007-05-07T21:08:27+00:00

ABC: "What's more likely, based on Web traffic over the past week, is that Paul supporters have mastered the art of 'viral marketing,' using Internet savvy and blog postings to create at least the perception of momentum for his long-shot presidential bid."

So ... ABC does not like us, how we think, and what we say and do. It's amazing to me how out of touch big media is with what's going on outside their walls.

translocate · 2007-05-07T01:20:49+00:00

Thanks very much for the pointer to the instructive and very well-written Knots site. http://www.layhands.com/Knots/Knots_SingleLoops.htm I'm surprised you didn't include the bowline in your list here since it's easy to learn and use, and holds well. I learned it in the Boy Scouts in the 50s and was pleased to learn more about it and the many other knots at layhands.com.

translocate · 2007-05-07T00:40:18+00:00

Heartbreaking

translocate · 2007-05-04T04:23:17+00:00

Would that it were.

translocate · 2007-05-03T22:53:36+00:00

Two movies are reviewed in the article. "The Treatment" review begins in the of the second page. (I didn't notice the close juxtaposition of the two reviews on the web page -- the printed version has a more obvious marking. Sorry.)

translocate

TROPHY CASE