Tag battery

I Still Don’t Like Batteries

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Battery Power

I’m sure I had battery powered toys as a kid. Back then, recharging the batteries meant throwing a tantrum until Mom or Dad replaced the dead ones. The first battery powered gadget that sticks in my memory, however, is my cassette tape player & recorder. Do you remember those things? You could fast forward & rewind them “offline” by sticking a pencil in the sprocket & twirling it. For ages!

The biggest problem with this battery powered thing was that the batteries always died when I was recording that hugely important song from the radio. The one I’d waited weeks to catch. Recording was a sloppy business back then. You had to time starting & stopping the recording process to eliminate as much of the DJs chatter as you could. Without clipping too much of the track’s intro & tail off. And yeah, the recording quality sucked. But at least you had a tape of your favourite songs to take along on that beach picnic.

Later, I moved to LPs. Vinyl records. These weren’t battery powered machines, but the quality was much better to record from. My big hang-up with LPs was that you had to pay for 15 or 20 tracks, but I really only wanted 2 or 3 of them. I dreamed that, one day, you’d be able to walk into a record shop & select the tracks you wanted. Stick your money in the slot. And out would pop your very own custom LP, with 20 tracks you really liked. I also dreamed that I would be playing my homemade mixes on my tape player. Powered by batteries that lasted waaaaay longer. Like weeks or months. Not just hours.

Fast forward to today & the ceiling on some of my dreams have been totally & utterly smashed. Way back then, I could not have imagined the convenience & flexibility of today’s streaming music services. There wasn’t even a glimmer of the potential for streaming, not only audio, but moving pictures too! Who could have imagined watching a movie or a concert on a little mainframe computer, like our phones.

The technology leaps that allowed for such amazing capabilities in sound & vision were not matched by equivalent improvements in battery technology.

I’m not saying things haven’t improved but, today, I continue to worry about my battery dying. So much so that half the electrical sockets in my house have power bricks & USB cords. Our cars, bars, airports, trains & planes all sport USB charging ports now. Bearing testament to our mass societal worry about our batteries dying. It’s just overwhelming proof of our collective dissatisfaction with the advances in battery technology, isn’t it?

Do you think I’m going to buy an electric car any time soon!?!

Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 1 Comment

Smart Way to Open a Blister Pack & Store Batteries! 

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Safe & Easy Blister Pack Handling & Battery Storage

I’m fed up talking about diet & weight loss at the moment so, today, I thought I’d share something useful instead. This is something I stumbled across recently. After decades of shredding my fingers & hands with the sharp edges of cut blister packs, I discovered this method purely by accident.

If you’ve ever found your hands in similar condition after doing battle with a blister pack, I hope this helps.

It had reached the point where I would take out the antiseptic ointment & some plasters ahead of opening a blister pack. Knowing that a sharp edge or corner was going to reef at least one digit during the process of extracting the ridiculously well-guarded product. This last time, I found the holy grail!

I’m using my favourite battery blister pack as the example in this case, because batteries come with an additional problem. Or at least that’s true when you’re OCD like me! I have a horrendous fear of a couple of batteries bouncing around in a drawer, in the company of a couple of paperclips & a tissue. I can’t but imagine the paperclips perfectly connecting the battery terminals, so as to complete the electrical circuit & to then create sufficient energy to set the paper on fire & burn my house down. I know, I know! But it’s just how I am. And there are stories out there.

Anyway, I like to preserve the condition of the formed blister pack, in order to safely store the batteries in it. Since they are already all nicely aligned, with the positive terminals all facing in the same direction, they stay that way if you can store them in the original pack. And they are protected from any potential contact with those dreaded paper clips & tissue paper!

If you hunt down online solutions to blister pack challenges, you’ll find people suggesting all manner of techniques. But many result in the destruction of the blister pack, rendering it useless for long term storage. They also suggest the use of tools ranging from tin snips, through scalpels, & on to box cutters. I’m almost surprised there aren’t more recommendation for power tools! Not only do you have to worry about cutting your hands, now you’ve got to worry about cutting through your kitchen counter top! You can even buy a custom tool, designed specifically for cutting blister packs. I have one. It’s useful but it’s not as good as this little technique.

In this instance, I just used my favourite scissors. I decided to cut off the big useless piece of cardboard at the top, as you can see in the top left image. This was just to make the package easier to handle. But then, I accidentally broke the little strip of card that remained along the cut edge. You can see this sticking out on the bottom left pic. It’s the little white strip sticking up in the air. As I handled the package to pluck this little strip off, the blister pack, with all the batteries, began to slide out!!!

Flipping the pack over, I then realised that the backing card on the blister pack was now the perfect sliding cover for my little battery storage box! That the pic on the right hand side of the collage. All my batteries are now stored this way. Of course they are stored in their own little basket. On a high shelf. With no paperclips or tissue paper anywhere in sight!!!

Come on now, that’s a neat little technique, isn’t it!?!

Have a great weekend! 🙂