Wire Fraud

 Posted by on July 4, 2007 at 2:40 pm  true stories  1 Response »
Jul 042007
 

Forget the hype around the iPhone for a second. All those wireless features and net surfing and music playing and picture taking features are all very nice. But let’s get back to basics for a minute.

I’d really like a phone that I could reliably recharge. Yes, that’s not a feature that’s going to make it into the TV commercials, but it’s a feature that will greatly reduce my angst with a phone, and a bunch of other gadgets for that matter.

Because I have to admit, I’m a gadget guy. I like my electronic toys. Mobile phones, digital cameras, Palm Pilots, digital recorders, video cameras. I love to play with them. But the Achilles heel on all of them is the battery. They all have batteries that have to be recharged far too often. This means carrying around with you lots of chargers and wires.

In the past week, I’ve had no less than three batteries go bad on me. It started with my cell phone. I have a portable charger at my desk at home and my normal routine is to plug it into the charger as soon as I get home. In theory, it can go a few days without needed a recharge, but I like to keep it charged up whenever I can, just in case. So I was surprised to see the battery was dangerously low the other day and I discovered that when I hooked it up to the charger, I no longer got the friendly “optimized charging” message. I fiddled with it and fiddled with it. Occasionally I’d get the connector at just the right angle that it would start charging again but I couldn’t put it down without it losing the connection. For whatever reason, the plastic connector had just worn out.

Same thing with my iPod. One day my iPod simply would not turn on. I was freaked out thinking that I had broken it somehow the the thought of being without my iPod and being able to listen to the many podcasts I subscribe too was a downright frightening thought. But after I managed to get my panic under control I figured that it might be the battery. Sure enough, when I hooked it up to the portable charger, nothing. Fortunately, I had a back up el cheapo charger that I’d bought on a business trip when I accidentally left the charger at home. But the main charger was downright busted. The problem this time seemed more on the wall plug side than the iPod connection side. And it pisses me off. I had to spend $30 on this charger at the Apple store when the third gen iPods came out because I only had USB connectors and the out of the box charger didn’t support USB. $30 bucks. Down the drain. For no good reason.

The third and final straw came from my portable XM radio, which lives in my car so I can listen to decent music as I commute to work. One day it simply would not turn on. Because this was the third incident in a week, I quickly got savvy to what was going on. The plastic portable charger simply could not keep a decent connection so when I thought I was recharging the radio I actually wasn’t.

If you walk into a retail store like the Apple Store or Best Buy you’ll pay $20 or $30 for these chargers, which is highway robbery as far as I’m concerned, given that the materials for these probably costs less than a dollar and they are assembled by very cheap labor. Fortunately, on eBay you can find portable chargers for just about everything. And while they advertise them for being just 2 or 3 dollars, by the time you add in all the shipping charges and other fees, you’ll end up spending at least ten buck.

The reason I bring this up is that it’s not impossible to design a wire connector that works reliably with constant use. I cite as exhibit one, the humble RJE45 connector, also known as the Ethernet connector. When you insert an Ethernet connector into an Ethernet port, it *snaps* into place and you get a reassuring little tactile feedback that lets you know that it is securely connected like it should be. It doesn’t come out unless you take deliberate action to take it out. I’ve never once plugged in an Ethernet connector, gotten that little feedback click and then subsequently had problems with the connection. Not once.

Why can’t we have gadget rechargers that work as reliably?

Quraneyeens

 Posted by on July 3, 2007 at 7:23 pm  cultural phenomena  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Jul 032007
 

At lunch I was doing my usual foraging of blogs looking for something interesting to read and ran across a pointer to this blog post at The Big Pharaoh. It was about a sub sect of Islam known as the Quraneyeens. Seems that 15 practitioners of this brand of Islam had been recently imprisoned in Egypt What? Muslims persecuting Muslims? You bet. Why? Because they’re Muslims who believe in the Quran, and only the Quran.

According to the blog post, there are two key religious texts that are the foundation of Islam, the Quran and the Hadith. As I understand it, (and correct me if I am wrong), the Quran was, according to tradition, written directly by The Prophet himself. Whereas the Hadith is a set of observations about his opinions and actions and lessons that were preserved orally for over 150 years before they were written down, raising issues about whether or not the preservers of the oral tradition either deliberately or unintentionally injected their own biases, opinions, and political agendas into the Hadith.

update: Commenter rayhaan tells me that “Hadeeths are sayings, actions and endorsements of the Prophet.” But agrees that they were preserved orally because very few could read or write at the time.

One can see analogous issues in other religions. According to a comment on the blog post, Judaism has the Karaites, who reject the Talmud and rely on the Torah. And in the United States, there is a Christian denomination known as the Church of Christ who believe in modeling their life only on the words and actions of Jesus. In the more extreme Church of Christ congregations, they do not even celebrate Christmas because Jesus didn’t celebrate Christmas. (well, maybe with ice cream and cake and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but only when he was a kid, but I digress…)

The reason this has any relevance at all to anyone outside the religious scholarship community is that, again according to the blog post, many of the more odious aspects of Islam that we deplore, such as the status of women, and the justified killing of non-Muslims, originate from the Hadith, and not the Quran.

So by focusing on the Quran, the Quraneyeens have a path for continuing to be faithful Muslims while rejecting violence, the oppression of women, etc. In the United States, there is an organization called The Free Muslims Coalition which is led by some of the leaders of the Quraneyeens which has actively demonstrated against terrorism, anti-Semitism.

Very cool. I hope more and more people learn about these folks and I hope they are not persecuted into oblivion.

SIT003: evidence, media neutral, next diet

 Posted by on July 1, 2007 at 11:46 pm  podcast  1 Response »
Jul 012007
 

July 1, 2007: evidence and privacy, media neutral living, and the next big diet craze.

Listen: sitp003.mp3

Current Events: Evidence from the Nifong Hoax and it’s implications on privacy
Durham In Wonderland: The best source of information on the Nifong Hoax scam
Seligmann’s Evidence: The motion for recusal in which Seligmann’s evidence is laid out.

Cultural Phenomena: Media Neutral Living
carbon offsetting: Wikipedia on the concept
carbon neutral company: Wikipedia entry on a company that can help you buy offsets
indulgences: Some people say carbon neutral living is like buying indulgences
insulin pump demo: A friend shares a bit of life with an insulin pump
Obachan’s Kitchen & Balcony Garden: a “middle aged woman” in a remote area of Japan shares her kitchen and garden with the world.
Discovering Planets: A amateur astronomer uses photometry to help discover two new planets. From the Salt Lake City Tribune

True Stories: The Next Big Diet Craze

Music Feature:
George Soule: The legend from Muscle Shoals

Legal:
The theme music for SIT is by Derek K. Miller and is used with permission.
The bumper music is called “Plain Loafer” by Kevin MacLeod and is licensed licensed under Creative Commons
This episode’s music feature is “Take a ride” by George Soule and is used with permission.
The podcast as a whole is copyright 2007 by Calvin powers and all rights are reserved.

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