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Lifehacker
I was taken to a Vegas house off the strip. There's a fluorescent green pool, a purple jacuzzi. No strippers in sight—it was time to set a fireproof hard disk aflame.
Today HP, Toshiba, and Dell issued a recall of 100,000 Sony battery packs found in their laptops sold between 2004 and 2006. Only 35,000 battery packs were affected in the U.S, with an additional 65,000 batteries recalled worldwide. Out of the 40 reported incidents, only 19 incidents have been in the U.S., thus affecting a smaller amount of people than in past Sony battery recalls. There have been reports of smoke and fire coming from the laptops. Sony issued a statement saying that the defective batteries are related to manufacturing line adjustments from 2004 to 2005. For a list of affected laptops, please head over to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website for more details. The CPSC asks that laptop owners should take the batteries out and immediately contact the manufacturer for replacements. [U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission]
Before the wireless instruments came bundled in Rock Band 2, users needed to utilise a 4-port USB hub to connect all of the instruments. It was inconvenient, but no big deal. That was, until one user had his adaptor catch fire randomly after being plugged in for just ten minutes. Had he left the system on without being home, there very well could have been a more serious incident.
When everyday devices become autonomous and start mating in the far future thanks to nanotechnology, items like fire extinguishers will become what designer Adam Scott has envisioned with the X Sting Wish. Mixing one part Dustbuster, one part machine gun, and a final part carbon fiber-wrapped fire extinguisher, Scott has managed to cook up a device that looks as at home in a kitchen as it would in Gears of War made real. There are even side-mounted LEDs for night missions. So, why make a lifesaving device like the fire extinguisher so, well, weapon-y? As the mock-ups reveal, it's all about easy recognition in an emergency situation. Apparently, when fire strikes, people are more apt to reach for their shotguns than that red cylinder marked "FIRE EXTINGUISHER."
Whenever our journalistic brethren get to set something on fire and douse it with water, we like to commemorate the moment. Wired's Gadget Lab just performed such a battery of tests on the SentrySafe fire-and-flood proof hard drives, ones we first saw almost a year ago. On one hand, the test went as predicted, but on the other hand, data doesn't seem as protected as you might think.
Fire extinguishers are damn handy, but hard to get excited about—unless they're cool flying ones—but these flower extinguishers from Japan should be weird enough to pique your interest. They're magnetic, so you just whack them on a convenient surface, like the front of your fridge. And if you're unlucky enough to get an oil fire on your cooking range, then you simply grab the flowers and fling them into the fire. You're probably thinking "Fighting fire with flowers? WTF?" right now. The flowers work by melting to create a film over the surface of the burning oil, cutting off its air supply and extinguishing the fire. See the video of them in action if you don't believe it.
