Richard's Tech Reviews

Temporary solar and battery power options

Ottawa as well as a swathe of the rest of Ontario and into Quebec is experiencing power outages in May 2022 due to a derecho thunderstorm.

This is the second major event since the 2018 Ottawa-Gatineau Tornado power outages.  Although Ottawa-focused it also has general information about power options.

Short Term

These days the smartphone is the centre for information and contact, so one concern is finding sources of power for the phone.

Some power options:

• A portable speaker with USB out is basically a big battery
• A laptop is also a big battery that offers USB out
• Any modern solar or crank powered radio should have USB out
• Any Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is also, by definition, a big battery
• You might have some other devices like electric handwarmers or flashlights that provide a small amount of power via USB out
• You may also have some portable batteries / power packs / power banks that you usually use for travel

Sources of information:

• CBC Radio One 91.5 MHz FM has pretty terrible signal, at least for analog tuning radios in some areas of Centretown.
• If you have the power and signal and data plan, you're better off just using the Internet for info whether by streaming the radio or just reading news sites and Twitter.

Ottawa Radio

If you're not used to listening to the radio on the actual radio, you may not know the local station frequencies.

• CBC Radio 1 FM = 91.5 (MHz) has various news and talk related shows
• CBC Radio 2 FM = 103.3 (MHz) is the CBC's music station
• CityNews (Rogers) AM = 1310 (kHz) has continuous news with lots of ads
• CityNews (Rogers) FM = 101.1 (MHz) has continuous news with lots of ads.  I wasn't able to find it though; that area of the FM band has a lot of competing stations.
• CFRA (Bell Media) AM = 580 (kHz) has CTV news (typically on the hour) and lots of ads

You can find a better list from Ottawa Start - On the air in Ottawa and Gatineau.

CityNews provides basically continuous news coverage, for the other stations don't expect non-stop coverage unless it's a major emergency.

Ottawa Weather Radio

There is an entire North American system of weather channels that do nothing but broadcast the weather forecast in a continuous loop, along with any weather alerts.  You need a specialised weather radio to get these channels; most modern solar/crank emergency radios will have these channels.

• CZN626 162.550 MHz Ottawa-Gatineau (alert channel 7)

Long Term

Portable Solar Power

For small portable solar I like Power Traveller, specifically the Extreme Solar, which just has a standard USB (USB-A) output at 5V/1A,
but their products are hard to find these days; I think the ones I use have been discontinued.

Note that you will only get a trickle keep-alive charge directly from a small portable panel.  A better combination is to charge a battery from the panel, and then charge your device from that battery.

You can get solar power and batteries from Canadian Tire, although unsurprisingly they tend to be larger products for home use, not portable. 

Home Depot has similarly industrial scale solar options.

For Canadian Tire or Home Depot, try searching battery bank or power bank for small portable batteries with USB output.

Best Buy has a very small selection of Solar Panels and Chargers available online only, here are links filtered so that only Best Buy is the seller (rather than all of their marketplace sellers):

• Camping Lights and Outdoor Power
• Solar Panels and Accessories

The Source has a small selection of solar power options.

You can get an assortment of solar power gear and batteries from Mountain Equipment Corporation (MEC), if you don't mind the fact that they're now owned by an American hedge fund, a long way from their roots as a co-op.

In Canada you can get Power Traveller from Terra20:

Power Traveller Extreme Solar Charger

Note that the Extreme Solar Kit is a combination of an Extreme Solar portable panel and a 12000mAh battery with USB-C input/output.

Power Traveller Extreme Solar Kit

For more options see

https://terra20.com/pages/search-results-page?q=solar

Power Banks / Battery Banks

If you have a phone that can charge wirelessly (Qi wireless charging) consider getting a power bank that has this capability as it means one fewer cable you need to search for.

Aukey and Anker both offer a wide range of battery banks.  I've found it hard to find ones with wireless charging though.

Note that MagSafe is a specific capability for newer iPhones (iPhone 12 and above).  It basically means the charger uses magnets to get a good alignment and tight connection to the iPhone.  Unless you only want to charge newer iPhones, I wouldn't get a specific MagSafe charger.

The Problem with Alkaline Batteries

Many small devices such as emergency radios or flashlights use AA or AAA batteries.  The problem with standard inexpensive Alkaline batteries (e.g. regular Duracell or Energizer batteries) is that they don't last well when not in use, which is not good for emergency devices that may sit in a closet for months or years.  Also when left unused in a device Alkaline batteries tend to burst, leaving a messy and somewhat toxic white powder.

One solution is to never leave batteries in your unused devices; just take the batteries out and keep them in a e.g. a plastic ziploc bag.  But it's hard to remember to do this.

A much better solution is rechargeable nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries.  Not only do these hold charge much better, with some vendors reporting they can hold substantial charge unused for over a decade, but they also have a much lower risk of bursting.

You can get Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable NiMH batteries and chargers e.g. directly from Panasonic Canada.  The site is shopping.panasonic.ca or go directly to the Eneloop products.  There are of course other brands as well.

Emergency Radio

I like the Kaito Voyager KA500 solar/crank radio, with simple analog tuning and controls.  You can get it e.g. from Walmart or Amazon Canada.

In general for an emergency radio I would look for analog controls over digital controls.

Note you do not need to put batteries in the Kaito Voyager KA500; it already has a built-in rechargeable battery.

The classic crank radio was made by Freeplay, but they seem to have almost disappeared from the marketplace.

I want to warn against the Eton FRX5-BT (or the FRX3) solar/crank radio, with incredibly complicated digital tuning and controls.  The big solar panel may make it look like a good option, but the controls are so badly placed and designed I'm not convinced you could even use it to tune in regular FM radio in an emergency, let alone figure out how to use it for weather radio.

Solar Power Needs The Sun

It may seem obvious, but if you have an emergency radio with a battery that charges by solar panel, it needs to actually be sitting somewhere on a ledge in the sun all the time.  If you store your emergency radio in a box or on a dark shelf, its battery will never have power when you need it in an emergency.

Emergency Preparedness Power Recommendations

• Have some portable batteries (battery packs with USB out) and keep them charged.
• Have a portable radio, with appropriate batteries / charge.
• Have some flashlights, with appropriate batteries / charge.
• Have some (preferably NiMH rechargeable) AA and AAA batteries on hand if that’s what your devices use.
• Have a crank power / solar power battery that provides USB out.
• Leave solar powered devices in the sun (e.g. on a windowsill) so that they have a charge when you need them.
• Know where all your emergency devices are.

Note: For radios/flashlights that use AA/AAA batteries, you may want to leave any Alkaline batteries out of most of the devices, otherwise without a regular replacement schedule the batteries will eventually die and burst in the device.  A better solution is to use NiMH rechargeable batteries that are much less likely to burst.

You could consider e.g. having a box of emergency devices in one place, and writing the battery replacement date(s) on the box, and put a calendar reminder to check it once a year.

Expert Advice

You probably want to follow actual expert preparedness advice from the federal government and the provincial government rather than my cellphone-focused musings.

Apple updates 16 May 2022

Apple security updates

Updates released 16 May 2022:

• iOS / iPadOS 15.5
• tvOS 15.5
• macOS 10.15 Catalina Security Update 2022-004 
• macOS 11.6.6 Big Sur
• macOS 12.4 Monterey
• watchOS 8.6
• Safari 15.5 for macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 10.15 Catalina

Note that security updates are no longer provided for versions of macOS earlier than 10.15

Nokia Booklet 3G as location-aware netbook?

Some interesting thoughts from UMPC Portal

Location-aware.

One of the biggest issues with XP and Vista in the web2.0 world is that the operating system isn’t sensor-aware. GPS hardware remains as an unidentified com port and applications wanting to access it require user configuration. In Windows 7 that changes to make geo-aware apps a real possibility. It is possible that Nokia could deliver an interesting maps and social networking application through OVI on Windows 7. In addition to HD content, maybe Nokia will be selling navigation and maps through Ovi.

UMPC Portal - Nokia Booklet. Specification Update. Price. Thoughts on Battery life / Performance - August 25, 2009

Via Engadget, which reports "The Booklet will boast a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530, and will reportedly boast a 120GB HDD, plus integrated 3G, a swappable SIM card, A-GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi."

per-tweet location info coming to Twitter

Currently in Twitter there is a single location attached to a user's profile.

This is not really well supported or exposed in the web interface, and most people don't know that you can use near:location as a Twitter search parameter, e.g. near:ottawa or near:45.44,-75.62

There are ways you can declare location changes in a particular tweet, e.g. the l: syntax, a Twitter nanoformat, but these are only supported by a few tools, not by Twitter directly.

The applications that I have seen with the most support for location information are smartphone Twitter clients, they typically have an icon to let you set your profile location to the current location (as determined by the phone), and some will let you do "nearby" searches based on your current location.

Providing location information for web apps has been difficult in the past because there was no API to ask the web browser where it was, but now geolocation is supported in Firefox, Safari, in Google Gears, and on various platforms.  This is being enabled by a standard W3C Geolocation API.

Now Twitter has announced the rather more logical option of having a location attached to each tweet, rather than globally to your entire account.  This is another step in adding more metadata attached to the raw 140 characters of a tweet.  This will make possible lots of interesting tools, one obvious one being to display all of the tweets posted at a particular location.

This does of course have privacy implications - and I hope that the system will provide per-tweet opt-in to sharing of location, rather than a global opt-out.  We need systems that understand you may want different granularity of sharing depending on your location - a typical example is that you may want to share your exact location when you're at a pub downtown so that friends can meet you, but you may want to share only city-level location or no info at all when you're at home.

There are already examples showing up of embedded location giving away rather more information than someone probably intended, such as a thief whose photo of stolen goods has embedded EXIF-GPS (via @jblyberg).

The official word from Twitter is

We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.

from Twitter blog - Location, Location, Location - August 20, 2009

Widely reported, e.g. PC World, New York Times, CNet.

via Dean Giustini (@giustini)

Rogers iPhone tethering policy

With official support for tethering announced as a feature of iPhone OS 3.0

Image from Engadget WWDC 2009 coverage.

I thought I'd mention that Rogers does have a (not easy to find) policy allowing tethering

Tethering Policy

Tethering is the use of your phone as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet from your computer. For a limited time, if you subscribe to a data option which includes at least 1GB of data transmission between June 8, 2009 and December 31, 2009, you may use tethering as part of the volume of data included in your option at no additional charge. Tethering cannot be used with data options of less than 1GB.

from http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-plans/iphone_data_plans (scroll to the very bottom)

UPDATE 2009-06-09: The tethering policy has disappeared from the bottom of the above page, but it does appear at the bottom of http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-plans/iphone_smartphone_plans.  This means the tethering policy should also apply to the Android phones.

Also, the wording was a bit ambiguous, so I asked the Rogers social media guy, Keith McArthur, whether tethering would be free for the life of the contract: "am I reading the Tethering Policy correctly that as long as you have 1GB, tether is no additional cost for life of contract?".  He replied

What we've said is that tethering will be included at no extra charge until at least the end of the year.

http://twitter.com/keithmcarthur/status/2095921048

Some more links:

* Canadian Apple site on iPhone 3G S http://www.apple.com/ca/iphone/iphone-3g-s/

* US Apple site with iPhone 3G S tethering details http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s/tethering.html

I should also point out this note for those of you who may not have upgraded the OS in your Mac laptops... "NOTE: To use iPhone as a modem with a Mac computer, it must be running Mac OS X version 10.5.7 or later"

UPDATE 2009-06-11: Rogers has a link up about the iPhone 3G S, it leads to a FAQ with a few key items

The new devices will be available on June 19th 2009.

Is the new 6GB/$30 promotional plan available for all iPhone customers, new and existing?

The $30/6GB will be available to all iPhone customers on both Rogers and Fido brands starting June 9th 2009.

iPhone OS 3.0 update (which is free for iPhones) will come out June 17, 2009.

I asked Keith McArthur "does the $30/6GB plan last for the life of the contract (e.g. 3 years)?" and he answered simply "yes".

UPDATE 2009-06-12: I asked Keith if you can build your own "a la carte" voice + data plan and still get the $199 3Gs and 6GB dataplan:

and he said yes: "yes - any combination of voice and data"

Also I made a spreadsheet with my attempt to figure out some pricing options (NO GUARANTEES about whether Rogers will interpret the plans the same way - and NO GUARANTEES about my understanding of the Rogers plans - there are lots of question marks)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rIgdTdpVenCnRTLp_bz4nFA&output=html

As well I should mention that Rob Manne is also with Rogers and answers questions on Twitter.

UPDATE 2009-06-16: Perhaps due to the high volume of requests in advance of the 3Gs, Keith has set up dedicated Rogers Twitter accounts: @RogersHelps, @RogersKeith and @RogersRob.

Also here is the full set of "Tethering FAQs" from the iPhone 3G S page at Rogers.  It's pretty clear they are going measure tethering use and then decide how much to charge.

What is tethering or wireless modem?

Tethering or wireless modem functionality is the use of your phone (such as your iPhone) as a wireless modem to connect to the internet from your computer. You can connect your phone to your computer through Bluetooth wireless technology or the USB cable provided with your handset.

Can I tether on my iPhone?

To use tethering or wireless modem functionality you require the new iPhone 3G S, or an iPhone 3G that has been upgraded with the new iPhone OS 3.0 software. Until December 31, 2009, if you have subscribed to a data plan which includes at least 1GB of data you may use tethering as part of the volume of data included in your plan at no additional charge. Tethering cannot be used with data plans of less then 1GB.

Will data charges for tethering be free?

No, tethering data usage will come out of your existing data bucket.

When will I be able to tether on my iPhone?

Customers with an iPhone 3G S will be able to tether right away. For customers with an iPhone 3G, who have upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0, we expect tethering to be fully operational for all iPhone customers shortly after the OS 3.0 release.

What will happen on December 31, 2009 when the promotion expires?

Rogers will continue to enable tethering on devices that allow it, but data plans will be adjusted to better reflect the way customers are using tethering services.

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_faqs?setLanguage=en&cm_sp=Consumer-_-Wireless_iPhone3Gs_0609_Eng-_-3GsPrelaunch_LowerBadge

UPDATE 2009-06-18: Rogers has updated its tethering text yet again, here are the highlights:

by June 19th, 2009, Rogers systems will have been updated to make tethering fully operational for all eligible iPhone 3G customers.

How do I tether on my iPhone?

Please visit Apple.com for instructions http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g/tethering.html

When I try to setup my phone for tethering by going through the following steps Settings-->General-->Network-->Set-up Internet Tethering, I get the following message “Set Up Internet Tethering. To enable tethering on this account contact Rogers”. What does this mean?

This means that you don’t have the appropriate data plan on your account to support tethering, and require a data plan with at least 1GB worth of data for tethering to be enabled.

Note: The actual how-to text for setting up Internet Tethering is called, rather confusingly, "Using an iPhone as a Modem". The direct link is

http://www.apple.com/iphone/how-to/#basics.using-iphone-as-a-modem

Seems a rather odd choice of terminology. Modem, what's that? I'm guessing a fair number of 3G users have never even had a modem.