How a Leather Cover Crashes the Kindle 280
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has started offering refunds to Kindle owners who own the unlit leather case who claim that it causes their Kindles to reboot, but are playing dumb on the cause: "our engineering team is looking into this." People have been wondering how a leather cover could possibly crash an electronic device, and why is Amazon offering money back if they don't think there's a problem? It seems that some of the folks over at Connectify have figured it out, and it's a doozy!"
Not unprecedented (Score:5, Interesting)
http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/html/magic-story.html [sunet.se]
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That really was "magic" compared to this, though. This is just a plain old short circuit.
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Re:Not unprecedented (Score:5, Interesting)
So much for magic.
Re:Not unprecedented (Score:5, Funny)
I have a similar experience when we were installing some computers in a hydro power station control center. The old control system used electromechanical relays, so it was quite robust, but the digital computers kept crashing. There were some 500 kV lines right going over the control center, so it was assumed they were causing enough interference to crash the computers.
After months of studies, it was decided that shielding the control center was the only solution. However there was a problem, the large glass window to the observation hall. Someone mentioned that there existed a transparent conductive paint, so they called a paint supplier:
-"Hello, I'm looking for some invisible paint, to paint glass"
They hung up without an answer at the other side...
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Well there's your problem. They must have spilled some of the liquid they were pouring over the mainframe.
The RF shielding obviously had the side effect of waterproofing the circuitry case.
The old AS400 and the Elevator (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work on an old IBM AS400 which provided about 150 terminals (5250) to a bank. At random times, all of the terminals would lose connection to the AS400 which was located in the datacenter which was located in the floor below where everyone sat. The connections would only drop during the daytime, we could hook up all sorts of diagnostic equipment at night and almost never saw a drop.
After about 2 weeks of troubleshooting we determined that every time the elevator passed the cable infrastructure which was run down the elevator shaft, it would cause the terminal sessions to drop...
Imagine everytime you left the building at 2am after not being able to find a problem; to have someone call you and say "just as you were leaving the terminals reset..."
Another IBM/Radar story. (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM 4341 mainframe in our data-center that would just shut down regularly every Friday night, around the same time ... shutdown coincided with the approach of the USS Lexington ... Apparently the radar from the ship was strong enough to ... trigger a shutdown.
Another IBM radar story (Third hand: CE involved -> my brother -> me.)
Shortly after the "Foreign Attachments" suit required IBM to allow other companies' equipment to be directly connected, there were a number of multivendor projects, of which this was one.
Each component worked fine in the respective labs. But the first integration of the whole system took place at the final site. (Why rent some space, hook it all up, get it running, tear it down, move it, and hook it up again, when you can do it once at the final site?) So they hooked it up and nothing worked right.
Several weeks of hair-tearing and finger-pointing by exasperated CEs from several companies ensued. At one point my brother's buddy had time on his hands and decided to fix the really annoying flickering fluorescent tube. He turned off the lights - and the tube kept flickering. WTF?
He called the other CEs over and demonstrated this. Then they all took a quick look around the environment to see what might be causing it. It was a short look: The wooden building was right next to the antenna for the airport's search radar.
Lined the room with conductive material. Everything started working just fine. Handshakes all around, exit stage left.
Something we need more of (Score:4, Insightful)
We constantly hear about needing to "program defensively" and test for "can't happen" conditions.
Here's one for defensive engineering.
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Now, I can imagine the organizational dysfunction where the guy speccing finishes might be told "low cost, attractive, applies to metal and aesthetically compatible with
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Shouldn't there be something (like a current limiting resister) so that even if a mistake like this DID happen, it couldn't draw too much current and cause these kind of problems? Surely you could detect how much current is being drawn and shut it off if it's too much. Other devices do that.
Also, if the brownouts are the problem, why doesn't the Kindle notice the voltage getting low and complain? At this point, why would any electronic device be able to get to such a low voltage point where it can't contin
Metal hooks? (Score:2)
It seems to me the design flaw is with the cover rather than the Kindle. Who in their right mind would put a metal hook into an electrically "live" slot unless they intended to draw electricity? Polycarbonate would do the job, or even hard rubber.
But I have to admit I had never even noticed those side slots on my Kindle 3 - until I read this story.
Re:Metal hooks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Being a product manager, I would guess that whomever wrote the spec for the cover latch, specified dimensions, and what is required for it to be a sturdy fit. But that they forgot to specify that there was to be no electrical connection or conductivity between the tabs.
The Winning bidder probably chose to make the bracket out of brass (guess here) to ensure dimensional integrity, and because a plastic mold for a thermoplastic injected part would be a couple tens of thousands of dollars.
But, I would bet my last dollar that someone at QA at Amazon figured this out, and specified that the bracket had to be painted with a non-conductive paint as a band aid.
This is how trivial, serial bad decisions come back to bite you in the arse
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Or, you could design the product not to have connections to it's battery exposed like that. How about a simple physical switch (not unlike those in headphone jacks) that prevents power from going through the latch slots unless a little switch is pressed in.
That way, if the latches are full you could have the current on, and if they had a little cutout slot in them or a notch, the power could be off. Then you could use a piece of metal, even without paint, and it wouldn't cause this problem so long as it ha
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
He's got it all wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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With a multimeter with only one ohm setting, no frequency, HFE or cap tester, he's just a glorified plug-tester.
Now, can someone with a Kindle cover and a proper meter please test for us to settle it.
Re:He's got it all wrong (Score:5, Informative)
It's the hooks. I just took my fiance's mother's Kindle and pulled her non-lit leather cover off.
Paint worn to SHIT, metal exposed. Metal is brass.
I didn't even use a multimeter, I just used some new equipment from Nichia's yesterday visit to see if it would actually work as a full conductor.
Lit the LED up without any problem.
Quite conductive.
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Thanks for the confirmation. Glad I didn't buy one with my Kindle.
Now, did he stumble onto the real problem or was he just recreating the scene for the pics?
Every other person who commented is dumb (Score:3, Informative)
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
That was the first thing I thought of when seeing the picture as well... Thank goodness he posted the full res version of that so we can very clearly see the M on the meter. What a maroon.
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First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
He would get about the same resistance if he skipped the whole leather cover thing and just held the meter probes. You'd think they'd notice something like that.
And Connectify earns their spot on "57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010"
seriously though pretty much any tightly fitting leather case will probably put the device under some continuous strain, probably leading to something internal flexing, then a reboot. With those nice strong metal clamps gripping the case tightly, I could imagine it.
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He would get about the same resistance if he skipped the whole leather cover thing and just held the meter probes.
He may well effectively be doing just that. Given how difficult it is to make reliable electrical contact with a small area of metal using standard multimeter probes, together with the general level of competence displayed, I wouldn't be surprised to find the probes aren't in contact with the metal at all.
Re:He's got it all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of the Garmin Edge reboot and USB connectivity problems. They didn't use a flex to connect the rear case electronics to the front case electronics, they used a riser with flexible fingers. Fair enough, but they integrated this riser with the mini-USB port jack, and because of that surrounded the case opening with a thick gasket of stiff rubber. See what's coming? When the case is closed, the gasket puts a high spring force between the two circuit boards right where the fingers are mounted, reducing the spring force the fingers can apply to their mating contacts. When using the unit in a vibrating situation (you know, like on a bike, especially an MTB in typical MTB terrain), intermittent loss of contact results in power-bus glitches, which results in inadvertent power-cycling. And these things boot slower than a netbook running Windows Vista, so not only is it wearing on your data-gathering sensibilities, it's fracking boring waiting for the thing to come back to usable state so you can sweat while you wonder if it'll blow itself out again.
Also, repeated insertion and removal of the USB connector leads to loose USB connectivity, and reboots while plugged into the computer.
It took Garmin nearly a year to "figure it out", while everyone online who knew what the insides looked like knew within seconds what was going on. And Garmin's solution was to introduce the next model (at 3X the price). People owning the buggy model were offered a chance to mail in the device for a fix, but most were out of warranty, and the fix was not reputed to be a sure one.
Moral: Never -- ever -- trust a corporation when the potential for money flow is negative to them.
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First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
And unless the metal we assume exists between the hooks were exceedingly thin, or the spots where the paint was rubbed off exceedingly small, 2 ohms would not be a reasonable resistance for a wire of that length. If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the
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If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the distance between the two hooks in the Kindle cover, has a resistance that is below the threshold of measurability on the meter (0.1 Ohm).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge [wikipedia.org]
Lets assume the metal wire in the kindle case is copper and a foot long (makes it simpler), you'd need a wire gauge quite a bit below 40 AWG to get 2 ohms in a foot. seeing as thats about as small as commercially available, yet is till way too big, and yet is only 3 thousandths of an inch across... doing some reasonable extrapolation thats a piece of copper about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. That will snap before it falls off the assembly line.
I su
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Regardless of that nitpick, it is still showing 2 MOhms, which shouldn't draw nearly enough power to do anything he thinks it's doing.
Purely speculation, but does it look like the black probe is even touching the metal...?
Re:He's got it all wrong (Score:4, Informative)
My son's Kindle has this problem... I removed the cover the other day and it has not had it sense. I just broke
out the multimeter, I was unable to get an electrical path even when scraping the paint on the hooks.
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Re:He's got it all wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person"
Maybe he's not much of a "Photography Person". It's not easy to snap the shot while holding two probes in contact with the metal hooks. The photo is there to give an idea of how it went, it's not supposed to be an accurate document of the measured value.
The "non-electronic" persons are those who calculated the electric resistance of the metal hooks. I got my EE degree in 1979 and have been an electronic hobbyist since 1969 and I know that 2 ohms is typical of what you may get from measuring a short circuit. There's always some dirt and oxide around, it's not usual to read the true resistance of the metal itself.
Three words. (Score:2)
Phaser on overload. (Depending on the short-circuit current capacity of the Kindle's battery and the resistance of the shorting bar,that is.)
2 Ohm or 2 Megaohm? (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article at Connectify says they measured a resistance of 2 Ohm, but on the picture I read 2 MOhm!
Check yourself with the large version of the picture.
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The upside (Score:3, Funny)
The line starts there (Score:2)
The line starts over there to bash on Amazon and/or the Kindle.
Don't worry, you don't need a valid or even sensible reason to get your chance. Just be frothing mad and they'll let you in.
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Where is the line for bashing the "expert" at Connectify who in the same sentence derides anyone who doesn't know what an ohm is, and demonstrates that he doesn't know how to use a multimeter... That's the line *I* want!
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Next door over and there appears to be no waiting.
KaWow (Score:2)
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Whomever designed the case should be fired with extreme prejudice. They're lucky they didn't fry a significant number of very expensive ebooks with something this stupid. If I were a victim of this I'd demand a replacement kindle while I was at it... no telling what long term affect this had on the device.
The article pic shows about 2 megs not 2 ohms of resistance. Thats not too unlikely for a persons dry skin. If you think about what leather is made out of, it makes sense that a human body and a leather case would have about the same resistance. I think it would be safe to assume the kindle engineers designed it to survive dry skin contact, so the case designers building their case out of dry animal skin is not exactly the dumbest intersection of the fashion designer and electronics world I have ever see
Re:KaWow (Score:5, Interesting)
How exactly do you fry an ebook?
A demonstration for you:
1) Purchase Kindle
2) Purchase and download 1000 ebooks to Kindle
3) Throw kindle into incinerator
4) Purchase new Kindle and click "Sync"
5) 1000 ebooks "magically" appear on new kindle and more remarkable show no signs of fire damage.
Re:KaWow (Score:5, Funny)
You overlook something we've discussed here... (Score:4, Insightful)
1000 minus, of course, the number of those ebooks that Amazon has decided can no longer be downloaded since the time they were downloaded into the old Kindle. Now, depending on how your tastes in ebooks line up with Amazon's whims in maintaining their public interest, that difference might be zero, or 1000, or anywhere in between.
They're lucky it ONLY crashes (Score:2)
Disclaimer: not a Kindle owner, just sowing a bit of FUD.
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Had an interesting issue with my iPad cover (Score:4, Interesting)
I got a Marware cover for my iPad and love it. One issue it had though, was that the iPad's compass simply never worked. It always gave me the Figure-8 Shake warning, and I eventually thought that perhaps my iPad was defective... Then one day I noticed that the flip out "foot" in the cover is held in place by two magnets. Whoops. Really only an issue if you use a compass app or if you want to figure out directions while not moving, but an interesting design issue none-the-less.
Free lit case? (Score:4, Funny)
So all you have to do is scrape the paint, and wire in a little LED and resistor, and you have a free lit case? Thanks Amazon !
Amazon press release? (Score:4, Funny)
Jeff Bezos: "You're reading it wrong."
:)
It's a doozy (Score:3)
The paint on the hooks wears off and shorts out the device!
There now was it so fucking hard to put that in the fucking summary?
Blog owner has face palmed (Score:4, Informative)
As already mentioned above, the multimeter in the picture is reading 2.164 megaohms which is quite a high resistance and would make no difference at all to the operation of the Kindle.
It seems that the blog owner has realised their mistake and replaced their blog entry with the content of another, but not before it made it's way into Google Cache [googleusercontent.com]
For those interesting in seeing the high-resolution "Oopsie" image, it is here [blogspot.com].
Am I going blind? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm on the Connectify blog and I don't see anything about leather cases or flaws. When I search the page for "leather" I only see the tag and nothing else.
They changed the page (Score:3)
But you should be able to view a cached copy here:
http://connectify.blogspot.com.nyud.net/2010/12/why-leather-cover-crashes-kindle-3.html [nyud.net]
Not sure if the change was intentional or what.
No (Score:3)
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Re:Yikes! (Score:4, Insightful)
They are not powering a lamp, they just keep the Kindle attached to the leather case.
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Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you RTFA, you'll see the hooks are totally different. You're in the right vein, though. The unlit case looks like it uses a single strip of cut metal for the attachment hooks, a pretty simple design, and much cheaper than making hooks that aren't shorts.
My guess is the only reason they're painted black is because they were aware of this problem and thought that would fix it good and cheap. Or the paint is simple corrosion prevention and they didn't know...
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I've got a Kindle and case from before the new version, with the possible lighted case, existed. Obviously I can't know whether or not the lighted version had been conceived when my case was designed.
But the hooks on my Kindle cover ARE metal, and ARE painted black. I assumed (& still believe) they were metal instead of plastic due to the increased strength of the metal hooks, and that they were coated/painted for esthetic reasons - the hooks feel more comfortable if you touch them, there is less chance
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Interesting)
His fingers appear to be touching both metal probes of the meter so 2 meg-ohms seems about right for his internal resistance.
Only on one side (Score:3)
It looks like his finger might be touching the negative (black) probe, but on the positive (red) probe his fingers are all above the plastic ridge.
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But that would be a completely different design. Not only would they have to put paint on the hooks, but they would intentionally have to tie the two hooks together with a piece of wire or something, which obviously is not done in the lighted version. That makes no sense.
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I am confused (being a Nook owner). Does the Kindle have contacts on the side, so that a light can leech power from the Kindle itself? If the case on the Kindle is simple, solid, unconductive plastic, this should NOT happen...
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Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Informative)
Breakdown: The lighted case gets its power from the connectors that hold the Kindle in the case. The unlit case has these two connectors physically connected even though there is no light. Putting the Kindle into the unlit case where the metal contacts are clean causes a short between the two connectors.
The ability to get power through those connector points was by design in the Kindle or the lighted case never would have been able to be designed the way it was.
It sounds to me like the engineer(s) involved with the unlit case did not communicate well with the Kindle engineers or vise versa.
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2 ohm is not a ahort circuit. (Score:2, Insightful)
If it connects directly to the battery at about 4V, it will only draw 2A, or 8W. This should be enough to warm the case, but not to make it or the device burst into flames.
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Chances are it was just difficult to get a stable reading for the photo?
To crash a kindle, it just needs to be low for a faction of a second.
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Or they could just have the two hooks not part of the same piece of metal.
Get a sufficient air gap, and there's no circuit.
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It looks like a flaw on the part of the cover maker. Amazon could put some amperage limiting circuitry, but I imagine it would raise the cost.
That'd certainly be a more permanent and universal fix...
But I think something easier would simply be to require that manufacturers use plastic for those clips instead of metal.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Insightful)
If amazon didn't think about it, or naively thought that a thin layer of cheap paint would do, they fucked up. If the cover maker looked at a design document that said "Connecting hooks must be electrically separate" and said "eh, one painted part is cheaper than two physically disconnected parts, paint'll do." then they fucked up.
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But that case was designed for the Kindle 2, which (I think?) *doesn't* put power across those pins. If that's the case, this is mostly a Kindle 3 design flaw - they should have made the slot spacing different so you couldn't use a Kindle 2 case.
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Instead of physically changing things, I wonder if they could use a software tweak to determine if there is a short, and just shut off the power to the connections if there was.
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I don't know if software can solve this problem if it pulls down the voltage rails so much that the CPU doesn't operate reliably, remember, it is causing stalls and reboots. They probably would have to change hardware to add more robust power protection to those connectors.
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Looking at the closeup of the hook you can clearly see the leather cover under the hole, so it doesn't look like the two hooks are connected with anything at all.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like a flaw on the part of the cover maker. Amazon could put some amperage limiting circuitry, but I imagine it would raise the cost.
Look closely at the dudes meter, its 2 megohms not 2 ohms. Lets guess its a single cell li-poly at 3.7 volts. Thats a smokin' current of 74 microamps. What, a quarter of a milliwatt, something like that?
Good luck building a 74 microamp fuse. I once built a microwave preamp in the 80s and static fried the active device, that probably was a 74 microamp fuse, in a weird sort of way.... Active current limiting at that level is kind of a mystery to me... I suppose you'd need a mosfet off resistance in the hundreds of megohms since the load impedance is in the single megohm range, but PC board leakage currents are going to be a problem at that level. Leakage currents thru the plastic kindle case would probably be in the microamp range?
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Look closely at the dudes meter, its 2 megohms not 2 ohms. Lets guess its a single cell li-poly at 3.7 volts. Thats a smokin' current of 74 microamps. What, a quarter of a milliwatt, something like that?
You do have to look pretty closely (and RTFA in the first place of course :) but there's definitely an M there. That doesn't seem enough to induce any sort of fault in the thing, especially if it's a power output to drive a light where the resistance of the light bulb would be much less. Maybe scraping more paint off lowers the resistance significantly...
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Yeah sure blame the cover maker - but someone had to approve it.
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Or... blame both?
Re:Yikes! (Score:4, Informative)
If you run your batteries between 20% and 80% charge, you get orders of magnitude more life out of them compared to running them between 10% and 95% charge.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, it`s not the cover which is at fault, but rather the jumper between the power and ground when putting it on ;)
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they can substitute the metal now connecting the hooks with extremely fine steel wool. Then everyone will remember it's the Kindle.
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1 volt is enough if you can source enough current....
remember folks, VOLTAGE != POWER
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"If you can source enough current..." as if you have any control over the current. It's a simple damn equation, people. V = I*R. For a given conductor, if you put one volt across it, a current V/R will flow through it. No, you can't magically wish for a higher current at the same voltage. Nor could you achieve an arbitrary voltage at a given current. If you can control both current and voltage, then BY DEFINITION you are changing the resistance.
Another one of my least favorites: "It's the current that kills
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Steel wool will catch fire with any battery. When I was a kid I used to do it with 9 volts because the terminals are both on the same side, but I experimented with a 1.5 V C cell and a bit of wire and it worked.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Interesting)
You suppose wrong.
We used AA batteries in prison to light cigarettes when they took away access to the wall sockets.
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http://www.metacafe.com/watch/866007/how_to_light_a_cigarette_with_batteries/ [metacafe.com]
I don't know if you've heard of this website, it's kind of up and coming, called Google. You just type in something you don't know, and in about 10 minutes, you'll know it.
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While the ex-inmate above hasn't replied so far, I'd take his story above your Google result video any day.
Some things are best left to Google ("What's the capital of Assyria" etc), but turning that into "anything should just be Googled" is pretty counter-productive.
The thing about humans is that while they're slow they tend to give context and other random details quite readily. In this case I could perhaps get information on how to get the necessary steel wire/wool in prison, how to smuggle batteries, how
Re:AA batteries light cigarettes (Score:4, Informative)
Some things are best left to Google ("What's the capital of Assyria" etc), but turning that into "anything should just be Googled" is pretty counter-productive.
I've never disagreed with a sentiment so much before online. The internet is an incredibly vast wealth of knowledge and I feel that any time you have any question, it should be used accordingly.
It's amazing how much information you have access to, it is not difficult to self teach yourself computer programming, car mechanics, advanced physics, art techniques, or almost anything else using just internet information sources, and supplies at home to get you started. Obviously if you want to do car repair you should have a car and the tools necessary for the job, but understanding what to do and whats needed can easily be found online, with step by step guides!
The simple question "How does one do something" is the BEST kind of question the internet handles. There is even a popular site dedicated to it, howto.com - and Youtube will have tons of videos on topics like that.
The problem is that handy did not ask for backgruond information on where it comes from, he did not ask how to acquire those materials in prison, he did not ask about smuggling or manufacturing equipment - he merely asked how to light a cigarette with batteries. The video addresses that.
If, perhaps, he's interested on how to Smuggle items into prison - he should google "How to smuggle items into prison" and he can see the news reports on how people have tried to smuggle things in before.
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Yep, in Mississippi, basically I was charged for having a cell phone and not reporting a crime I was present for because I was too goddamned drunk and passed out in the back of their truck.
What's fucked up is if I had actually stolen something from the vehicle in question, my charge would be dropped down by 3 years.
Mississippi needs to be nuked from orbit, just to make sure such obvious problems never happen again. Wipe out Sheriff Riley in Hernando County, Wipe out Judge George B. Ready for his corruption.
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Wow. That's a pretty major design flaw.
Yeah. At least it doesn't start a fire? Hopefully there's something between the battery and the terminals to limit the current to a safe value. I wonder if people could cut the strap or whatever is connecting the two hooks? I suppose then they might fall out or something. At least an external cover is easily replaced and they're willing to do it.
I suppose later some may complain that the occasional shorting of the power shortened the battery life so it should be replaced for free...
Queue the people rea
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I think Amazon (or the vendor) is realizing now that a $0.02 resistor is cheaper than using paint as a resistor.
I am biased I admit, but this also might be what you get when you engineer products using the lowest paid bidder. I mean by the time you get thru all of the layers of middlemen down to the designer, it ends up being a kid just out of college saying "oops.... Sorry about that boss. I never thought about what would happen if the paint came off"...
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Ha, my Nook just keeps looking better and better! :P
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I wouldn't know, since the earlier blog entry has been retroactively changed to advertize Connectify, censoring the original content. Whether doing this on an article about the aptly named Kindle for Remote Book Burning is purposeful irony or not I cannot say.
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Probably because they never took that class. I can imagine management saying, "This one doesn't have a light, so we don't need electrical engineering to approve the design, only mechanical." That sort of thing happens at my work more often than I would expect, going both ways.
And also break off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastic has the virtue of being non-conductive, but my guess is that such a tiny part made in plastic could be problematic in terms of strength.
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It's not a small current, it's the "Magic" (TM) :-)