That does raise another issue: some of the retail-grade chargers are pretty terrible and may have led some people to a bad impression of how rechargeable batteries perform.
A charger should charge cells individually, at a reasonably fast rate, and terminate correctly to prevent overcharging. Yours hits two points out of three: it’s individual and correct, but slow.
I had NiMH batteries in mind since we’re talking about types that come in alkaline, and low-self-discharge NiMH batteries (e.g. white Eneloops) are generally fine to fully charge before storage.
You might end up with a bit shorter runtimes storing charged batteries for years than charging them right before use, but it doesn’t matter much when your runtimes are measured in years.
There’s one potential snag with certain low-power devices though: a few only work in the 1.3-1.5V range. That’s terrible design since it doesn’t use most of the power in an alkaline, but some of those won’t work at all with NiMH.
Wait until you hear about 21700s.
As for rechargeable it’s twice the effort to find the charger every two years instead of just using the one time batteries.
I recommend keeping some charged spares and the charger in the same place.
I’d much rather see modern rechargeable batteries (Li-ion, maybe Na-ion in the future) in standardized, field-replaceable form factors.
This is already common in flashlights. In my pocket today is a flashlight running on an AA-size 14500 Li-ion. There’s a magnetic pad to recharge the battery with a proprietary cable, but I can also unscrew the tailcap and replace it with a spare, as most people expect from a flashlight. I can use AA in a pinch with reduced performance, though I’ll note supporting both voltage ranges takes extra work on the manufacturer’s part.
Being complex and energy-intensive doesn’t preclude batteries being standardized or field-replaceable. The issue with smartphones is that they have a highly optimized form factor.
Primary cells are easy and cheap to manufacture, and hold much more charge than rechargeable equivalents.
This is half-true at best. Consider these tests of an alkaline primary, lithium primary, and NiMH rechargeable AA battery.
The alkaline has more energy than the NiMH at 0.1A load, but not above that. It will last longer in something like a TV remote or wall clock, but not in something like a flashlight with even moderate output or anything with a motor. Low-self-discharge NiMH, which has better shelf life beats alkaline once the load reaches 0.5A, which represents a device that will drain the battery in 4 hours of continuous use. Lithium primaries win the benchmark here until reaching a very heavy 3A load, but they cost as much as NiMH and only work once.
Allow a different voltage range in the same form factor and lithium-ion rechargeable 14500 cells now equal or slightly exceed the 5Wh capacity of lithium primary AA.
Yes, the Kel-Tec KSG bullpup shotgun has two magazines and a manual control to choose between them. In addition to twice the capacity of a single tube magazine of the same length, it offers the user the option to switch between two types of ammunition - a more significant advantage for a shotgun than most firearms due to the variety of ammunition available.
media.wmf.zero-copy-nv12-textures-force-enabled
This option is Windows-specific.
I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.
I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.
Right, I do understand that’s a limitation. I think I’m more puzzled that many people find the presence of ads in a device they paid for to be a minor issue rather than intolerable.
I haven’t moved to a privacy OS on Android yet because of money.
That’s entirely reasonable. You can still block most ads if you want to:
“But personalised ads are really convenient!”
Not seeing ads is really convenient, and I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t block ads aggressively on every device they spend much time using in 2025.
To cover a couple common objections:
It’s a corporate/institutional device and I can’t
Then it’s the institution’s IT department I’m puzzled by. If I was running corporate IT, ad blocking would be part of the standard install. The FBI recommends it for security.
The device is too locked down for that
Why would you buy such a device, or continue using it now that you know better?
She says on social media.
I think it’s important to draw a distinction between places people go to talk to each other and places people go for a quick fix of content just entertaining enough they don’t need to do something harder.
The former is healthy, at least in moderation. The latter is probably harmful for most people most of the time.
Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal’s other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.
Whenever The Verge interviews people from companies that have something to do with photography or image processing, they ask “what is a photograph?”. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus.
As a photographer, I’ve thought a fair amount about it. Many of the most famous pre-digital photographers did a lot of adjustment in the darkroom, and all digital photographs involve decisions about how photoreceptor data gets transformed into a viewable image, even if the photographer didn’t make them intentionally. Most of the time, most people still consider it photography and “real” with significant editing.
Where it becomes something else in my mind, or “fake” is if the image doesn’t reasonably represent light that reached the lens in the moment being depicted. There’s a whole lot of wiggle room there of course - photography is art, not math. Adding fire to something that wasn’t burning using editing software, however clearly crosses the line into “fake” for me if presented as a photograph, or digital art if it’s not.
I think the distinction is that in a fake photo, something you can see in the photo wasn’t really there. In a staged photo, the story the photo tells isn’t true to life.
The headline is unfair; the photo is staged, not fake.
Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.
He’s clearly not an alien lizard like a Clinton.
Trump was friends with the Clintons before he ran for president against Hillary Clinton.
Trump also became friendly with Kim Jong Un after they met, having previously threatened him with nuclear war.
Google has partly backed away from this plan, and it was only announced for “certified” Android devices, which yours isn’t after rooting.
It does affect you indirectly though. If open source on Android gets harder, fewer people will do it.