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Pint-Sized
Power Packs
By Daffyd Roderick
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Will
fuel-cell technology boost portable gadgets to the next level?
I always seem to be suffering a personal energy crisis. I can drain
my mobile-phone battery dry in a day, my PDA craves a charge after
48 hours and my notebook computer beeps plaintively during the shortest
airplane flight. The situation isn’t getting better. Portable
devices continue to spout power-hungry features such as colour screens
and wireless communications capabilities. Yet the humble, overtaxed
battery, without which no device would be portable, is evolving
too slowly to keep up.
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To anyone hauling around spare AAs
and an emergency power cord, it’s obvious that energy-storage
technology needs a rethink. Fortunately, one is under way. Within
the next 18 months, consumer electronics manufacturers, including
Casio and Sony, plan to start marketing personal portable devices
powered not by batteries but by fuel cells.
The impending shift is pretty radical. Unlike batteries, fuel
cells don’t store electricity. They generate it, via a
chemical reaction between a hydrogen-containing fuel and oxygen.
Fuel cells have been around for decades in exotic applications,
powering satellites and spacecraft. They are being developed
for commercial use in electric cars and to provide back up electricity
for buildings (a truly “green” technology: their only
emissions are water vapour and heat). Strapping a power plant
to a mobile phone once seemed a silly idea, early prototypes
for portable fuel cells were as ungainly as a pair of clogs,
but miniaturization has reached the stage where consumers might
buy into the concept.
Casio, for example, recently unveiled a prototype of a fuel-cell-powered
laptop that looks acceptably normal. The power supply weighs
half as much as existing laptop batteries and can run the machine
for 20 hours at a stretch, quadruple the longevity of a fully
charged lithium-ion battery. Medis Technologies, a NASDAQ-listed
Israeli company, has designed a tiny, 80-g fuel cell that can
sustain 20 hours of mobile-phone conversation.
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| Fuel cells promise to unhitch us from
the electrical grid, and that’s good. We’ll never have to
grope for a hotel-room outlet again, and no more waiting for batteries
to recharge, either. But details on how costly the devices will be
to own and operate are scare, and there are potential drawbacks. Will
there be maintenance hassles? (Batteries are, after all, wonderfully
simple.) Casio’s laptop power plant is fueled by small methanol
cartridge that are replaces when the liquid is spent. Will we want
to carry spare fuel cans around with us? Will airlines allow them
on board? The answers to those questions will determine whether my
power outages continue. Until then, intermittent blackouts are excepted. |
A Time To Clean (No Mops)
Frank Pellegrini
The messiest place in your house may
be your hard drive. You don’t do Windows?
It’s time to fix that. |
It is time to
do some serious cleaning. I’m not talking about the
fridge, the attic and the shoe closet. If you’re
like me, your PC is basically your backup brain, and if
you really want that warm feeling of renewal that comes
but once a year, you’ve got to clean up your computer.
The most visible messes are the easiest to deal with.
A moist paper towel will freshen up your monitor; a cotton
swab can scrape the crud off the rollers in your mouse;
a good burst from a can of compressed air will get the
dust out of your keyboard. If your computer desktop is
as messy as your real one, that’s easily corrected
too. You just have to be merciless Dump those obsolete
document.
Delete old e-mails without looking back. Trash any program
you haven’t used since the last millennium.
Unfortunately, out of sight is not necessarily out of
mind. Operating systems have a way of surreptitiously
backing up everything you do, and some programs tend to
grow roots. Just because you put something in the recycling
bin or ran an uninstall program doesn’t mean you
got rid of it. On Windows machines there are several different
files associated with each program, and to do a thorough
cleaning job, you have to root out every one.
The problem is that deleting the wrong files can give
your computer serious fits, so tread lightly. There are
several popular utilities that will do the work safely
for you. As a rule, you should stay out of the real guts
of the machine, the files and settings that run your operating
system, unless you really know your stuff. |
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You may still have to get rid of the temporary
backup files that your computer made when you didn’t hit
Save often enough. Windows users can try to find and delete
all files that end in. tmp. You’ll be surprised how many
hundreds have piled up; just don’t delete any that the
system says it still needs. After that, run your build-in mop-up
programs, in Windows, look in System Tools for Disk Cleanup;
with Macs, it’s Disk First Aid in Utilities, and let the
computer check itself for errors.
Now it’s time to deal with everything your Internet browser
brought home from its travels on the World Wide Web. Use Options
or Preferences to get rid of unwanted cookies and clean out
your cache files. Give your computer a blood test by going on
the Web and downloading the latest in antivirus software. Then
run a disk defragmenter to straighten out the tangle of files
stored on your hard drive. This can speed up your computer’s
performance. But as with any major renovation, you should back
important documents beforehand, just to be safe.
The last step for desktop-computer owners is often the most
satisfying. Grab your can of compressed air, unplug and open
up your computer’s box and behold, without touching anything,
the dust bunnies that have been breeding in there ever since
you brought it home. Eek! |
A
Leatherman For All Seasons
Lev Grossman
The original all-in-one tool faces lots of competition.
Can the granddaddy of all multitools still cut it?
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Everyone has a
dream, and Tim Leatherman’s dream was simple: he
wanted a single tool that was both a knife and a pair
of pliers. In 1983, after years of tinkering, he created
a distinctively double-jointed multitool that looks like
two Swiss Army knives caught in the act of mating; in
addition to a knife and pliers, it had a dozen other doodads
on it to boot. Since then it has become a cult classic,
with 25 million units sold; Sunday night’s Oscar
presenters got them in their gift baskets. And, yes, Leatherman
is his real name.
Purists scoff at multitools as gratuitous gadgetry, unfit
for serious jobs, but they’re missing the point.
Multitools are about expecting the unexpected. When you
and your buddies find yourselves locked out of your Honda
Civic in the parking lot of TGI Friday’s at 3 a.m.,
you want to be the guy who can fashion a crude lock pick
using only a beer can and that wire-crimper thingy on
your Leatherman.
If only it had a patent lawyer on it too. The multitool
market has been flooded with knock-offs, leaving loyal
Leatherman owners to wonder, Is the original still the
best? To find out, I put four high-end, fully loaded multitools
through their paces: the Leatherman Wave, the Gerber Multi-Plier
800 Legend, the Victorinox SwissTool (by the makers of
Swiss Army knives) and the SOG PowerLock. Be warned: prolonged
exposure to multitools can fuel the dangerous delusion
that you secretly are Batman.
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Measured by the sheer number of
doohickeys on board, these tools are about equal. They also
weigh about the same, and locking mechanisms are standard across
the board, so the blades won’t close by accident and sever
a finger. But look more closely, and you will see trade-offs.
The SwissTool has a metal-saw blade, great for prison breaks,
but it lacks scissors, a deal breaker in my book. The Leatherman
has the most balanced selection, but it lacks the useful mini-ruler
that’s etched into the casings of the SwissTool and the
PowerLock.
There are trade-offs in design too. The PowerLock is built around
a pair of gears that give you extra leverage when you’re
plying your pliers; they also give the whole tool a deliciously
smooth unfolding action, it’s the only one you can actually
flip open one-handed. (The gears also give the tool a complicated
look find irresistible.) On the downside, the PowerLock has
its blades positioned along its inside edges, so you have to
unfold it into pliers mode to use them. Awkward.
Bottom line? They’re my children, and I love them all,
but it’s still Leatherman by a needle nose. Why? Better
engineering. The parts fit perfectly, the locking mechanism
is simple but effective, and the blades are top-quality high-carbon
steel, the saw really saws, and I know from experience that
the blades hold their edges over time. So when the unexpected
comes along, you’ll be prepared, diamond-coated file, wire
stripper and lanyard attachment at the ready. Batman always
is. Hey, we all have dreams. |
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