Usefully Useless

This post will focus on a large source of highly polluting chemical waste which households generate largely through incompetence.

No, not Gordon Brown’s underwear, but batteries. Disposing of them is difficult and highly polluting and most people spend more money on them and generate more chemical waste than they need to.

It’s almost a scandal that battery companies go to great lengths to avoid disclosing the actual capacities of their batteries. I’m yet to see a primary cell (non-rechargeable) state its capacity in either packaging or on the unit itself. All rechargeables state their capacity both on packaging and on the cells.

We measure capacity in milliamp-hours (mAh), a battery with a capacity of 1,000 mAh can deliver 1,000 milliamps for one hour, or 100 milliamps for ten hours.

Zinc Chloride

The first kind of battery, and the most common, is also the least suitable for almost everything. It’s the zinc chloride battery, also known as “heavy duty”, “extra heavy duty” and “super heavy duty”. They’re the ones you can buy at markets and get 20 for £1.

They typically have capacities around 300 to 700 mAh for AA size. They’re the biggest selling batteries and also by far the most expensive, both in terms of your wallet and in terms of environmental impact.

A pack here, labelled “Panasonic” and in red and black have a 670 mAh capacity as measured by me and cost me £2.99 for 12. That’s a total capacity of 8,040 mAh or 2,689 per pound.

Zinc chlorides are best suited for shop shelves and worst suited for any electrical device. They’re especially bad suited for lighting (e.g. flashlights, torches) and cameras, especially digital cameras. The capacity of a zinc chloride in a digital camera may be as low as 100 mAh.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 37.2p

Alkaline

Alkalines have very high capacities, usually 2,000 to 3,000 mAh for an AA cell, but are also a little more expensive. They’re always labelled as “Alkaline” somewhere.

A pack of 12 AA alkalines from Boots in black with orange text and Boots own brand will set you back £6.84 and I measured them to 2,400 mAh each. That’s a total capacity of 28,800 mAh or 4,211 per pound, around half the price of the zinc chlorides above.

Alkalines are best suited for remote controls, flashlights and torches, kids toys, and almost any other electrical appliance. They’re not suited for digital cameras, the high power draw of a digital camera reduces an alkaline’s capacity to around a quarter of what it should be.

Price per 1,000 mAh: 23.8p

Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)

These are rechargeable batteries and vary in capacity from those cheap Energizer things in Tescos at 1,300 mAh to the more expensive 2,500 mAh units which can be bought from electrical stores.

Some places still sell nickel cadmium batteries, which have capacities much lower, often around 400 – 800 mAh. They’re still a fairly good deal and I’ll include them in the final cost summery.

The single most important thing to do is to buy a smart charger, these are often marketed as “intelligent”, “smart” or “automatic”. The number one cause of rechargeable battery death is overcharging. If you don’t have one and can’t yet get one, then undercharge; You’ll do no harm.

A pack of four 2,100 mAh cells set me back £8.49 and they’re rated for 1,000 cycles, improving their life to an “effective” 2,100,000 mAh. Of course their capacity does decline in time, reaching about 75% of its initial capcity before the battery fails completely. So I’m going to list them as 1,800,000. I’m also going to add the price of a four-cell fast smart charger (two hours charge for most batteries, four hours for these) at £12.99.

For the NiCd batteries, I picked up a set of four 800 mAh cells with their own charger (not a smart charger, but the instructions were clear enough as to how long to charge for) for £4.99 from the local Netto.

Of course the price of mains electricity is a factor, so I’ll include that too. 1,000 mAh is 1,500 mWh (the amps being replaced by watts once we factor in the voltage), which takes about 2,000 mWh to charge up, or just 2 Wh. The price of 1,000 Wh is about 14p, so each type has 0.028p added to it.

Rechargable batteries are very well suited for digital cameras (and other cameras) and for all other electrical devices. They’re less well suited (but still acceptable due to their phenomenally low price) in remote controls

NiMH Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p
NiCd Price per 1,000 mAh: 0.02801p

In Closing

We can all do our bit to be greener. As seen above, for every £1 that you spend on a rechargeable battery, you’d need to spend £8.50 on alkalines for the same amount of power. You’d also generate the waste of 4 batteries for rechargables but over 20 for alkalines. Those numbers are even worse for zinc chlorides.

So not only do you cut down on highly toxic chemical waste, but you also save quite a fair amount of cash. Works for me.

Go on, click the link. Read it. My analysis is below.

English Heritage are doing entirely the wrong thing. Now amateur archaeologists (metal detector users) WOULD certainly go through the proper channels if they could, but they can’t. Farmers invariably are in anonymous office blocks fifty miles away and any find made belongs to the farmer or to the state. Why bother? The Government has all-but outlawed this pastime with strangling regulation.

Can anyone be surprised when a black market appears?

My last blog post on the Internet Watch Foundation’s incompetence isn’t likely to be the end of the story. Like all good, sensible and reasonable people, they took another look at the available evidence and its impact on our fragile society.

What did they do? If you’ve guessed “realised they’re utterly stupid and cleared Wikipedia from the ban list” you’re wrong. They’re instead considering adding Amazon! Hopefully this whole thing will be seen for the sham it is and the IWF will lose any semblance of credibility they once had.

Now perhaps I’m not a reasonable person, but I’m really, really stretching as to imagine why anyone would see a picture of a naked girl, about 10 years old or so, as in any way sexual or pornographic and obscene enough that nobody in Britain should be allowed access to it. The Internet Watch Foundation must be staffed exclusively with paedophiles for them to be able to reach such an absurd conclusion.

When will it end? If the Scorpions’ album sleeve is ruled illegal, will we have police storming HMV? Will we see officers raiding public libraries nationwide? If someone owns the album, will they be arrested and charged, becoming a sex offender? All of the above is possible and, if we apply the laws fairly, inevitable.

Alright, alright, yes, it’s all over the bloody web. Doesn’t mean I can’t throw my tuppenceworth in too.

Chrome is Google’s take on a web browser, or rather, Google’s reinvention of the web browser.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, they’re all good at indexing and displaying hypertext. They do what we wanted to do in 1998. They show Wikipedia and BBC News really, really well. They’re built for doing just that.

Google don’t care much about that – Google care about web apps. iGoogle, Blogger, You Tube, all owned and operated by Google. They want that to work well. So they started from the beginning. They’re not showing hypertext (though they can), they’re managing applications and workspaces.

Google’s Chrome is built more like a file manager or window manager than it is a web browser.

They started from scratch. They asked “What do we do with a web browser and what will we be doing in future?” and from a blank sheet they added only what needed to be added. There’s none of the massive bloat of Firefox. There’s none of the totalitarian “My way or no way” of Safari. Even the raw speed of Internet Explorer is under threat.

The key features to me are these:

1. Process model. Chrome sessions are not one monolithic process. In such a process, if one worker thread (e.g. a tab) crashes, perhaps because a buggy plugin crashed then the entire browser session has to close. Chrome spins out an entire new process for tabs – If one crashes, it just gets discarded normally and the session remains with all the other tabs intact. This also helps with memory management, tabbed browsers in threads can never *completely* reclaim all the memory a tab has been using, but destroying a process reclaims every last bit of memory it was using. Better yet, plugins are in a new process too, if they crash, then not even the tab will crash most of the time!

2. Asynchronous javascript. Normally the page could not continue rendering until javascript had finished doing whatever it was doing. A page would hang if buggy javascript was in an infinite loop which wasn’t caught (surprisingly easy to do). Chrome spits THAT out into another process too. If the javascript then goes loopy, the browser isn’t deadlocked waiting for JS to finish, it can just put an end to it. The V8 JS VM is pretty sexy too, but nothing spectacular.

3. Memory handling. Tabbed browsers are like their own little operating system. They have to manage memory and execution by each tab, each plugin, each worker thread. Chrome has spun this around – “Why should we do that? The OS is there to do that” and instead lets the OS handle memory and execution by spitting out so many processes. This makes Chrome all but immune to memory leaks and threads stuck at 100% CPU. Chrome even takes this far enough that it will destroy and recreate a process between domains. If you click one of those links in Chrome, the process that Chrome was running in is completely destroyed and a new one, waiting behind the scenes, handles it instead. Browser bugs or plugin bugs then cannot steal your personal information by persisting across sessions or influencing other tabs. Plain ol’ OS memory protection and management, which Linux, OS X and Vista (alright, yes, Vista better than the others, but they are catching up) do extremely well and in hardware, handles it all.

Chrome is about being a web browser, not being an operating system on top of an operating system. It’s about being a shell to the web, not about doing what the OS is already there to do on the local machine.

It’ll either succeed massively or fail horribly, but it’ll certainly be extremely influential. And scare the pants off Microsoft and Apple.