the tweney review

Here’s a 5-minute video showing what happens when a laptop battery ignites: It sets off a chain reaction, where successive battery cells ignite, each one releasing more heat and increasingly big jets of flame (up to 6 feet high). Amazing and scary.

As the narrator points out, you need to be careful with lithium-ion battery fires, since they’re electrical fires, chemical fires, and metal fires all wrapped up into one hot little package. Trying to put out the fire with the wrong substance (like water) could just fuel the fire, or spread it around. The video’s producers recommend a Class D fire extinguisher.

(via Engadget)

This is kind of cool: TextMarks is a service that lets you create your own custom SMS quick-response codes. People enter the code and send it to the TextMark short code (41411), and then they get the text that you specify, in return.

I set up the keyword haiku to deliver the current day’s haiku from my other site, tinywords; TextMark’s simple screen-scraping tech did a pretty good job of pulling out the correct content once I gave it the right prefix and postfix to look for.

Check it out: Send an SMS containing the word “haiku” to 41411 and you should get the current day’s haiku in return. Or try the simulator on TextMark’s site. Neat!

Memo to Britney: SMS is no way to break up with the father of your children.

Not because of my bluegrass banjo-pickin’ talent, but because I’ve just been selected to go take part in The Climate Project’s next training session, Dec. 1-3.

Along with about 200 other volunteers, I’m going to get trained by Al Gore, so that I can go out and give presentations on the global climate crisis and what people can do about it.

As a volunteer, I’ve already got my hands on Al’s entire 329-slide PowerPoint deck, which is the basis of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. This monster weighs in at nearly 300MB, compressed. I can see that my first challenge will be choosing which slides I will actually show.

I’m excited about this because it’s a concrete and direct way to make a difference on an issue that I feel strongly about–one of the biggest issues facing humanity today, in my opinion. I will get to use my public speaking and presenting skills before new audiences (and in a new subject). And I’ll learn a lot more about the science and politics of climate change.

One of my goals is to figure out how to interpret this science for kids, starting with my daughter. If I can explain it to Clara without scaring the bejeezus out of her, I hope I can do kid-oriented climate presentations at schools, too.

I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous about this… the last time I was involved in any kind of grassroots activism was in 1988, when I was going door-to-door in Seattle for WashPIRG. (There’s a reason I am not a door-to-door salesman today.) And while I’m comfortable speaking in public about technology, I’m less sure-footed when it comes to climate science.

But for now, excitement is outweighing nervousness. I’ll keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: climate crisis, global warming, climate, crisis, global, warming

Kevan Atteberry says he’s the guy who designed Clippy, the animated paperclip in Office. I wonder who designed Einstein?

This morning the poll workers in San Mateo offered me a choice of voting on a traditional paper ballot, or using their one electronic voting machine: an E-Slate system from Hart Intercivic. After looking at the machine and being assured that I’d have a chance to review a printed record, I chose the E-Slate.

It turned out to be less intuitive than I’d hoped: Instead of a touchscreen, you have to select items using a scroll wheel and an “Enter” button. Thanks to the huge number of initiatives on the ballot this time around, I had to make my way through 14 separate screens, each of which had 3 or 4 contests or initiatives on it. It didn’t take long to get used to the interface, but then, I’m no stranger to the iPod’s scroll wheel–someone who was less of a technology nerd might find it more difficult. One strange aspect of the interface: You can highlight sections of explanatory/introductory text, not just voting choices. What happens if you “vote” for the text of a proposition instead of choosing Yes or No? Nothing, apparently–but it’s still confusing.

When I was done I reviewed my choices on-screen, then got a chance to compare what was on the screen against a paper record that the machine printed out (the paper was hidden behind glass so I couldn’t touch it or remove it). After verifying that everything was correct, I pushed the red “Cast Vote” button and the receipt scrolled off into the bowels of the machine.

Thanks to the interface it probably took me twice as long to vote as it would have with a paper ballot. On the other hand, I felt reasonably confident that my vote was actually being recorded, and that it could be recounted by hand if necessary. A review of E-Slate machines on Kuro5hin goes into more detail and concludes “guardedly optimistic.”

The good: paper trail, multiple-step verification process, easy to go back and revise your vote before it’s confirmed, helpful “Help” system.

The bad: not a touch screen system, scroll wheel might be difficult for some people, no receipt that the voter can take home, time-consuming to use.

For the past year I’ve been toting around a USB drive that has a folder full of portable applications, such as Thunderbird and Firefox. That way I can run these applications (with all of my data) on any machine I plug the key into. (I set this up following PC Magazine’s instructions on creating the ultimate USB key.) The problem is that these apps are a bit tricky to configure, and upgrading them can be a pain.

Solution: The U3 standard, which greatly simplifies installing and maintaining a set of personal, portable apps on your USB drive. Several drive makers now offer U3-compatible drives; I’ve been testing a 1GB model from Kingston for the past few weeks and it works beautifully. It’s like adding a second “Start” menu to your computer: Just click on the U3 icon in the system tray and you can launch or install applications from the popup menu. That way your favorite apps (top of my list: Putty) are always there with you. Additionally, if you want to check your email or browse over a financial site from a borrowed PC, using a U3 mail program or browser is a lot more secure, since it won’t leave messages and/or browser history on the borrowed computer.

The limitation is that U3 drives only support apps that have been specially configured to plug into the U3 standard. Also, the apps only work on Windows (though you can still view your data when the key is plugged into a Mac). On the other hand, the list of apps is pretty long, and includes Firefox, Thunderbird, FoxIt PDF Reader, OpenOffice.org, Putty, and many more free programs, plus a selection of for-fee software. And once you’ve installed the app on your USB drive, you can take it (and all its data) everywhere you go. Pretty convenient.

Ever notice those “Free Speech Zones” that the authorities put up outside political conventions, trade summits, embassies, and basically anywhere else someone might feel like expressing an opinion? What’s up with that? Last I checked, the whole country was supposed to be a “free speech zone.” They think they can put some chainlink around a little square of asphalt and tell us we’ve got the “right” to express ourselves inside that tiny box but not anywhere else? I don’t think so!

The Constitution of the United States gives you, me, and everyone else the right to Free Speech — everywhere, not just where the local authorities designate. So I thought: let’s put the words “Free Speech Zone” on a T-shirt, as a reminder that wherever you go, you’re free to speak. I’ve been daydreaming about this shirt for years, and I finally created it this weekend. So here it is: The Free Speech Zone T-Shirt.

It’s available in patriotic, star-spangled red white and blue. There’s also a women’s Free Speech T-shirt as well as a long-sleeve Free Speech T in solid white lettering. Go on, buy one and sport your love of the Constitution! You know you want to!

Google’s newish Blog Search is a handy way to keep track of the “buzz” about a particular blog, in addition to posts from that blog itself. Just go to blogsearch.google.com and type the URL of your blog into the box. The resulting search results include posts from your blog, as well as other bloggers’ posts that link to your site. Nifty!

Even better, Google will help you keep tabs on that buzz via email or your newsreader. Click on “blog alerts” in the left column to set up email notifications about new items, or copy the RSS/Atom feed links in the same place and track them in the newsreader of your choice.

One caveat, though: Spam blogs (aka splogs) crop up fairly frequently in these search results. And Google doesn’t seem to capture every post from the blog URL you enter (sometimes not any of them, depending on the blog platform behind that URL) so you’ll still need to use the blog’s own RSS feed. Still, this is a good way to track what people are saying about you.

Thanks to career writer Penelope Trunk, whose blog generates lots of buzz, for this tip.

Clara, last night: “Daddy, do you know what the best part of Halloween is?”

“No, Clara, what’s that?”

“The part where the candy goes into your bucket.”

She confirmed that she likes that part even better than the part where you actually eat the candy. I have to say I agree.