davidgagne.net

After several years of mostly neglecting my Flickr account, I have finally started uploading the tons and tons of photos I’ve taken. Flickr is – if you can stomach the missing “e” – an incredibly cool site. Everything is intuitive and as far as I can tell, they haven’t done anything “wrong” anywhere. It’s everything a good website should be.

I particularly like the way they do their best to determine the camera model used to take each photograph. The majority of mine were taken with my PowerShot S500. So many, in fact, that my battery has started to fade away. A full charge used to last days and days, but now it barely powers a day’s worth of snaps. Luckily I have the internet at my command.

It took me about five minutes to find a replacement battery on eBay for only $5.00 (with free shipping!) from a company called iTrimming. Their site isn’t brilliant, but they do have a ton of inexpensive cool little geek accessories. My battery arrived in three days and, as a “bonus”, they included one of those silly cell phone antenna boosters. Now, I’m going to guess that this thing is absolutely worthless. (How can a little sticker with some metallic ridges on it possibly improve my cell phone’s reception?) It was worth it to open the package, though, if only to read the Chinese instructions. “THE ANTENNA WILL WORK MOST EFFICIENTLY WHEN INSTALLED PRORERLY,” it exclaims.

I dig how the package lists “Elevators, tunnels, buildings and more” on its feature list. It doesn’t say that the antenna improves reception in these places or anything; it simply has those words in the list. The “Validity” section of the instructions is the best part. It states, “The Cell Antenna is generally not affected by extreme heat of moisture, however, users ate advised to protect the antenna from physical damage such as scratches. Under normal use, the Internal Antenna will have a 18 month lift span.”