Rubber Boots Charge Your Phone 111
andylim writes "UK wireless provider Orange and renewable energy experts GotWind have come up with a prototype pair of power-generating rubber boots. Inside the power-generating soles of the boots are thermoelectric modules constructed of pairs of p-type and n-type semiconductor materials forming thermocouples, which are connected electrically to form an array of multiple thermocouples (thermopile). They are then sandwiched between two thin ceramic wafers. When the heat from the foot is applied on the top side of the ceramic wafer and cold is applied on the opposite side, from the cold of the ground, electricity is generated."
Waders are back in style (Score:5, Funny)
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Corrections:
Wellies are back in style for men. Supermodels and grannies have never left the fold.
And of course, you can now look goofy, have cold feet, and get electrocuted all at once.
Nice. The British, ever helful. Spot on, I say!
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The British, ever helful
I'm not sure if that was a typo or not, but bravo, sir.
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Fools rush in...
Typo. My bad.
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Say: "That's not a bomb. That's a charger for my iPhone." and see how fast you get tackled to the ground...
These Boots Are Made for Talkin (Score:2)
I'm too lazy to mangle the lyrics accordingly. Perhaps someone else can?
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Periodically someone will come out with one of these "Clothing that generates electricity" (usually based on kinetic energy, in this case on body heat) inventions and the press will briefly cover it as a novelty item, then forget it. The clothing product in question will always be expensive, uncomfortable, prone to break and malfunction, and unable to generate enough electricity to be of any practical use. People either don't buy it at all or stop buying it the second the newspaper story fades from view. They stop buying it for the same reason that I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle when I was a kid (you remember, the one that attached to the tire and used its kinetic energy to power the bike's headlight)--because it doesn't work worth a damn.
I just hope those much-touted wind turbines that are all the rage now work a lot better than my old bike light at converting kinetic energy to electrical.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Informative)
a) You had to ride relatively quickly to generate much light
b) It added a significant amount of friction to your wheel meaning you had to ride harder and
c) The light stopped when you stopped.
That said, a few modifications such as adding a capacitor to even out the light (acting as a voltage regulator), changing the light bulb to LED, and lowering the friction caused by the generator wheel and it would probably work phenomenally well. I was happy even back then though.
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Indeed. Today's LEDs are vastly more efficient at producing light from low current sources than yesteryear's incandescent bulbs. Furthermore, capacitors are far better at storing larger amounts of energy and discharging it evenly than those of years gone past. Look at the Faraday light, (which I can't call anything other than a WanikLight) which uses a capacitor, magnet and coil to produce light. If they were built with decent build quality, they should be able to last several decades without malfunction.
To
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Today's tech would make bike dynamos work so well that I have no idea why they don't make them any more. Perhaps battery tech is so good that there's little advantage?
Around here (Sweden) they're generally replaced by a generator integrated into the front hub resulting in far better efficiency (thus much less drag) than relying to force a small diameter wheel to spin by gripping against the possibly wet/muddy/snowy tire.
With a small integrated battery/super-cap you also get light while stationary (at least for a while).
Not that totally battery-powered lights are uncommon, but IME rechargeables tend to die rather abruptly and Murphy will assure it happens just when you n
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Dynamos still exist; in fact, new models are being produced all the time:
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/shimano3n70.asp
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/schmidt.asp
They tend to have pretty good efficiency (~60%), generally use a clutching system so there is no drag when the lights are turned off, and have capacitors that will run the lights for at least five minutes. The problem is the expense - a good hub-mounted generator system runs around $100 and requires a rebuild of the wheel to install (around $50 in
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If you built it into the bicycle's hub, it might not cause nearly as much resistance.
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My wife has one of those. Specialized brand made the "Vienna Deluxe" [specialized.com] line last year. You can feel the drag when you hit the switch, but it's very subtle.
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Two years ago I started cycling to work (I realised it was faster than walk+train+walk). Of course, I bought lights. Come winter, my parents gave me a big pack of batteries. I didn't realise why, until I found my dad's 1998 bike light in his garage: it sucked, and while sucking it sucked batteries dry. My LED lights need new batteries about every nine months, and are brighter.
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They stop buying it for the same reason that I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle when I was a kid (you remember, the one that attached to the tire and used its kinetic energy to power the bike's headlight)--because it doesn't work worth a damn.
I wonder why wheel-powered bike headlights don't use regenerative braking to charge a battery that runs the headlight. It might work better.
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Regenerative braking is a bit more expensive to engineer than a small DC genset. The genset has to create a lot more power, since you are only braking 1% of the time compared to when you are moving -- two orders of magnitude difference.
Might as well go full e-bike, though even some of those do not have regenerative braking, mostly because bicyclists are very efficient about choosing the paths with the least braking.
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It's an interesting idea, but I can see 2 problems with it:
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So, those cyclists I see running stop signs are "serious cyclists". It seems I've been calling them the wrong names.
I wouldn't say I rarely use my brakes, but I use them far less than most car drivers seem to use theirs. Going faster on a bicycle requires physical effort, so if I see the lights turn red ahead I'll stop pedalling (or at least slow down) and freewheel up to them. There's very little point going fast up to the lights. Similarly for when I go round corners, or approach junctions.
(Of course, sometimes I feel unhealthy and cycle home as fast as I can.)
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I think you would have more luck appealing to self-hating middle aged people with plenty of money who only use their cycles twice a year.
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There are several flavours of serious bicycles. You roadies seem to think that you're the only ones, but touring folk also like to kit out their bike. Indeed we do use steel frames and kickstands, and always have good lights.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because regenerative braking would be several orders of magnitude more complex and expensive to implement than a simple permanent magnet generator.
Just to be clear, we're talking about adding a button to the brake lever, and a battery and a diode to the design. Done. If you integrated the dynamo into the brake assembly such that the dynamo was applied when the brake was applied, you wouldn't even have to do this. If you want to use a nice battery that is optimally efficient you will need some electronics to handle charging; I suppose any design ought to have some sort of voltage regulation. This is still minimal. Further, dynamo lights blow anyway; la
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Oh. Sounds pretty simp
le.
Oh sorry, I thought you said we were done.
That doesn't seem hard to make (Score:1)
The generator is on a small spring that keeps it away from the wheel until you apply the brakes. The brakes are cable operated. You add an additional cable that pulls the generator hub to the wheel simultaneously with the braking action. Just a lever and a pivot. It would be a typical idler/simple clutch looking arrangement.
It's actually a good idea, combined with rechargeable batteries. Of course I am also in favor or just having an integrated small solar panel someplace to keep the batts topped off while
Just this, only that, a simple matter of the other (Score:2)
Could you build one? Could you build a reliable one, such that the friction kicks in seamlessly when necessary? More to the point, could you produce them for a price that people were willing to pay?
Yeah, just this, only that, a simple matter of the other.
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Maybe it's not something you could retrofit, but at the manufacturing stage, it wouldn't be that hard to include an electric signal when the brakes were applied.
You couldn't completely eliminate the friction, but the majority of the resistance comes from the generator, so you'd have some loss of power all the time, but only a significant loss of power when you're breaking (when you actually want it).
The show-stopper is that it would produce bugger-all power, coz bikes don't travel fast enough and stop way t
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I think that's what the button in the brake lever is for.
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As long as that is in addition to drawing power from normal pedalling - otherwise when you're out on the open road cycling for miles with no need of braking, you're going to have no power. Then you have to consider the extra weight of a regenerative braking system and a battery..
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As long as that is in addition to drawing power from normal pedalling - otherwise when you're out on the open road cycling for miles with no need of braking, you're going to have no power. Then you have to consider the extra weight of a regenerative braking system and a battery..
It's dumb to do at all. It's solar that should be used to charge bike lights. Dynamos are heavy, thin-film PV is light. Charge during the day, and you can ride at night. Even if you need to plug in to charge it's still going to save you weight.
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Dynamos are heavy, thin-film PV is light.
Batteries are...
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Batteries are...
...not made with big lumps of iron, and thus lighter than a dynamo when you're talking about powering an LED bike light. The dynamo has a certain minimum size if you want it to be durable. But a bike light can easily be powered by a couple of AAA batteries these days, or some even smaller solution. For example I have a 5 LED hand-crank flashlight that has a battery pack that looks like three cells half the size of a AAA each. It runs for many hours on a full charge. To be fair it has a very small and light
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going, and going, and going...
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It's dumb to do at all. It's solar that should be used to charge bike lights. Dynamos are heavy, thin-film PV is light. Charge during the day, and you can ride at night. Even if you need to plug in to charge it's still going to save you weight.
While this might work in many places (I still like hub generators better because they're awesome), it would probably suck in northern (/southern) places. In the winter it gets dark enough that solar energy is very close non-existent. I suspect only lead-acid batteries would survive living in the cold for that matter (and aside from being heavy, those too are happy to die when the temperature goes down to -30 C).
A generator is a pretty smooth concept in that it only requires the rider to be there for power.
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I really doubt they're going to provide enough power even for an LED headlight, especially when the soles are not in contact with a cold surface.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Interesting)
I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle
Those are not a temporary fad that doesn't really work. In Holland (where there are more bicycles than people) those dynamo's [wikipedia.org] are the standard way (at least were before LED lights) of powering bicycle lights.
It was the next progression after the carbid lantern, so I guess that started around WWII, maybe even earlier. At least I'm from 1957 and I can't remember anything else.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Insightful)
...yes, and essentially only inexpensive white LED put an end to them.
The battery-powered lamps were a gimmick, too expensive in use (expensive batteries, note rechargeables were scarce, expensive and poor capacity back then too!) and too short-living (bulb energy draw) for any longer routes. The dynamo was the standard, sure it put extra friction but finely tuned the friction was well within acceptable standards and the light strength was unparallelled.
A dynamo gives about 5W at 5V on standard use. That is 1 Ampere, which means state-of-the-art(then) 1000mAh rechargeables, or a set of standard 3 bulky A-size 1.5V batteries could run the lamp at the same strength for about a hour. Which was pathetic.
Even today dynamo still has its place - as a backup. If batteries die in your LED lamp, you can switch to dynamo. If you ride downhill, you can ride faster because the faster you ride the stronger the light is (and it's much stronger than your average bicycle LED lamp), and it gives an extra braking power. And normally you switch it off.
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Actually I just carry a spare battery powered light for my road bike in the winter. I just ride for fun so I get to pick when I ride. My off road bike has a monster gel cell powered setup and I leave that battery when it is daytime. It is a beast.
In Holland I can see why a dynamo could still be of use.
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And how does it work? Well, you put it into water which is inside of a copper lamp and one of the the resultant compounds is a gas named acetylene which you light on fire as it squirts from an opening in your lamp. The burning acetylene is the light for you to coal mine by.
I have my grandfather's carbide lantern. Can you imagine being a coal miner? Can you imagine being a coal miner with an open flame on your head your whole work
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Note also that it relies on a heat difference between your foot and whatever is outside. So on a hot day, you're going to have a hard time generating much of a delta-T, and your efficiency will drop even further.
Despite the fact that my nickname is one of these devices, I'm not very hopeful. A piezo-electric based device that uses the me
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Or a scaled-up version of the generators used in Seiko's kinetic watches.
Trickle Charge (Score:1)
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Sadly, piezo generators are not great either for any serious tasks like charging phones or plugging laptops into your shoe. (Disclaimer: I'm an EE at one company that makes these things.) They would power a shoe-embedded pedometer / sensor mote, or maintain the realtime clock of some device, but you only get 10s of mW average from a typical device under ideal lab conditions. (Plus, in a shoe-generator scenario, that 10mW is coming right out of your body's forward-motion power budget - probably not noticeabl
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They stop buying it for the same reason that I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle when I was a kid (you remember, the one that attached to the tire and used its kinetic energy to power the bike's headlight)--because it doesn't work worth a damn.
You mean a dynamo? What do you mean “it doesn’t work”? It works great. In rain, snow, everything. And with it, I don’t look like an idiot who’t replacing batteries or having to recharge the thing all the time, while still only having three weak flickering LEDs.
What? But it goes off when you stop, you say? Not anymore. That’s solved with capacitors since at least a decade ago.
And no, they don’t slow you down like in the olden days anymore.
Also, they don’t slip,
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I'm freezing already! You insensitive clod!
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A current example of this are the crank up flashlights. We recently lost a nice one we've had for a few years and started looking for a new one. Let me tell you, that are _not_ all the same. I now see so many which just have a little DC motor inside wh
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These prototype boots sound like a great idea to me. However, rubber boots don't keep my feet very warm. That's why I plan to wear battery powered heated socks at the same time to alleviate the problem!
Hey...I've got a great idea, why don't we rig the battery powered heated socks to the power generating boots so I don't have to replace the batteries in the socks all the time.
Patent time!
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I'm even surprised how it is taking so long for people to make up an all-metal, torture-equip-looking gadget that you use with "your partner" while making "love" to seamlessly charge your iPad.
Can we cover people up with thermopiles? (Score:1)
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And they keep your feet cool! (Score:1, Insightful)
Assuming the laws of thermodynamics are still intact, they also keep your feet cool. So, not so good for cold climates - which is unfortunate, because that's when the temperature gradient is highest and they'd work the best.
For further reading... (Score:5, Informative)
The term for this type of electricity generation is the Seebeck effect [wikipedia.org]. Typically a very small voltage is generated per pn junction, so many hundreds of junctions are placed in series to generate a significant voltage.
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Guy in bar to babe: "Hey. My phone died. Would you like to go and charge it?"
Re:For further reading... (Score:4, Informative)
Would it be possible to put them on a condom?
Guy in bar to babe: "Hey. My phone died. Would you like to go and charge it?"
The effect uses a temperature difference to generate power, so unless you are doing a dead fish, it wouldn't help much.
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Would it be possible to put them on a condom?
Guy in bar to babe: "Hey. My phone died. Would you like to go and charge it?"
The effect uses a temperature difference to generate power, so unless you are doing a dead fish, it wouldn't help much.
This is \.
'she' is made of vinyl.
Re:For further reading... (Score:5, Funny)
And then the frigidity of her response helps to create the thermal difference required for charging your phone? Good idea!
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The quantum well stuff they are playing with should allow the piles to be strung on-chip aa well as improve the K value significantly.
If we can ever get these things or thermophotovoltaics up to 35% or so conversion efficiency we might see some natgas "solid state" power plants for plugin hybrids, but I think we are still short of that even with current lab bench prototypes.
Hehe, kind of like child labour (Score:1)
Why not fill a bag and charge your phone? (Score:1)
this [gizmodo.com]
then you could warm your feet and charge your phone. Or fill a fanny pack with the mix, so it is contained.
If you leave out the word "boots" in the story . . (Score:2)
. . . the story becomes slightly more amusing.
Power from rubber boots (Score:2)
Unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
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in the summer the difference between warm sidewalks and the inside of the boot will not generate any electricity.
You haven't met my wife. Her feet are ice cold in any weather.
I've been telling her I'm going to use her feet as a sink [wikipedia.org] for a heat engine. It looks like today is the day!
Oh good, just what I need (Score:5, Informative)
Boots that don't keep my feet warm because they depend on heat flowing across a thermocouple as quickly as possible to produce electricity? That sounds great! I'll take two.
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Boots that don't keep my feet warm because they depend on heat flowing across a thermocouple as quickly as possible to produce electricity? That sounds great! I'll take two.
There are many inventions like this that suggest you can pull energy from nowhere. Of course you can't, it has to come from somewhere. In this case, it's your body heat powering the phone. You'll have cold feet and you'll have to put more energy into yourself everyday to power the phone in the form of calories. No such thing as free energy, just different ways to transfer it about.
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Ooh, weight loss boots! Get some washed-up overweight celebrity to market them, and this idea can't fail!
So pathetic (Score:3, Informative)
So pathetic. This is not a way to generate electricity, but to destroy it.
You see those "p-n" junctions did not appear out of thin air-- they're the result of using scads of electricity to heat silicon to the melting point, extract it into perfect crystals, then slice it, anneal it again in an electric furnace, then more hours at 1200C to diffuse in minute amounts of p and n dopants, then more electricity to slice, dice, solder, and cement these into usable devices.
And in the end you have some very expensive, in both dollars and energy used, heat to microamps of electricity converters. And you can easily compute exactly how much electricity you get back given say a 10 degree temperature difference between the warm and slightly less warm sides. It's miniscule. Microwatts per square centimeter. Even if you wore these for 10,000 hours, you're nowhere near making back the amount of electricity, not to mention the $$$, it cost to make these things.
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Yeah, but the difference is, you don't have those "scads" of electricity with you wherever you go. This is sponsored by Orange, who run a mobile phone network; they're to charge mobile devices.
To the unthinking out there, sure, it *looks* environmentally friendly, and we all know that the energy costs associated with their creation mean they'd be lucky to break even. But that's not the point. Really it's a convenience product so your phone doesn't die out.
To the unthinking out there, sure, it *looks* like it'll recharge your phone. But those microwatts per square centimeter aren't going to generate enough power to even run the phone in standby, let alone recharge the batteries at any usable rate. And they'll only even pretend to work in winter (by cooling down your feet), or maybe a very hot summer on ground exposed to full sunlight (by warming up your feet), and will do nothing at all during moderately comfortable weather. So, it'll require scads of energy
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So pathetic. This is not a way to generate electricity, but to destroy it.
You see those "p-n" junctions did not appear out of thin air-- they're the result of using scads of electricity to heat silicon to the melting point, extract it into perfect crystals, then slice it, anneal it again in an electric furnace, then more hours at 1200C to diffuse in minute amounts of p and n dopants, then more electricity to slice, dice, solder, and cement these into usable devices.
Yes, yes, we are all aware of the laws of
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If you want a valid argument on environmental costs, compare the environmental cost of using a thermogenerator to the environmental cost of the batteries it replaces. Balance that against lifetime: thermogenerato
Obligatory Forrest Gump quote? (Score:2)
My momma said these are my magic shoes...
SOTP TEH PRESSAS! (Score:2)
So, under ideal conditions (exercising in a cold wet environment) you get 1 hour of "charging" - say, how much is that in use time? - for 12 hours of activity?
It's a sad state of affairs when you can't even market your snake oil convincingly. Heck, if you're going to get some free advertising from a joke product that you have no intention of making, you might as well push the boat out and claim that it heals the ozone layer and turns CO2 into unicorn burps.
Electronic Stilsuit... (Score:2, Funny)
Location, location, location (Score:2)
Power is less than 50mW! (Score:1, Informative)
In my own experiments with themoelectric generation, I was unable to get more than a few tens of milliwatts from such a setup.
I connected up a cheap peltier module (TEC1-12709), 4cm * 4cm (1.5in * 1.5in), to a heatsink+fan with some heatsink paste, and pressed my palm against the other side, the maximum power output was a few milliwatts, and additionally my palm got cold very quickly (I altered the resistive loading to ensure I reached the maximum power point.) When I used a metal tray of boiling water ins
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You got a few milliwatts of output using a heatsink and a fan. How much power was the fan using?
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On my old phone, I measured its idle power consumption at 8mA @ 3.7VDC between RF bursts, which spiked up to just over 1A even in close proximity to the tower. That's about 30mW neglecting the RF consumption or actual use (backlights, game playing etc.). So the GP's setup is within the ballpark of feasibility as a charge extender, but I'd go out on a limb and say filling the boot with an equivalent mass of fresh batteries will be much more comfortable than the boiling water.
Footnote (Score:2)
Perfect For Washington (Score:1)
>> Rubber Boots Charge Your Phone
They would seem to have locked up the footwear market in D.C..
Gotwind.... (Score:2)
oh dear, I had pictures of a pipe from the boots into your trousers when the firm's name of Gotwind was read....I must get out more :-)
Compatibility with the Dune universe (Score:2)
Thats cool and all, but can they power my stillsuit, will they alert the sandworms of my location, and are they compatible with the foot controls of my ornithopter?
They work backwards in AZ (Score:2)
>> heat from the foot is applied on the top side and cold from the ground is applied on the opposite side
Cold from the ground? I live in Phoenix you insensitive clod.
schweaty balls? (Score:1)
"Rubber shoes in motion!" (Score:2)
"Charging up!"
Now we know what power source the Tesla Troopers used.
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Came here for this, leaving satisfied. Thank you.
As a vendor who used to have the know-how (Score:1)
Nokia [nokianfootwear.fi] should have made these.
Obviously marketed to the ladies... (Score:1)
---PCJ
And the payback is? (Score:1)