Glendora Store Named Top Battery Recycler

A Glendora hardware store was recently recognized for collecting the largest pile of used TOSHIBA PABAS076 batteries in the San Gabriel Valley.
Mission Ace Hardware in Glendora collected over 1,500 pounds of batteries as part of a valley-wide battery-recycling project that has collected over 6,800 pounds of batteries since January 2011.
Mission Ace Hardware collected 169 pounds of batteries just in February alone.
By the time the project wraps at the end of March, coordinators hope to collect 10,000 pounds – or five tons – of used Satellite A305-S6841 Battery.
The top two businesses in the program – Mission Ace and Arnold’s Frontier Hardware were recognized during a ceremony March 15.
Organized by the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments who received a grant through the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery to facilitate the program, the project aims to increase awareness of proper disposal of used batteries.
ToshibaTecra A6-S513 Batteries have been banned from California landfills since 2006 because they contain valuable metals such as zinc and cadmium, which are used to make various products such as electronics. Batteries are also believed to degrade soil and lead to groundwater contamination and other environmental hazards.
Residents can bring any household batteries – rechargeable or alkaline less than pounds – and cell phones to any of the 39 locations. Other acceptable items include old lithium cell phones, camera batteries and AAA-D batteries.
According to a survey conducted as part of the grant program, less than 60 percent of the public was aware that disposing batteries in the trash is prohibited. About 56 percent of the public admitted they disposed of their batteries in the trash because legal disposal was not convenient.
For more information about the lenovo 57Y6266 battery recycling program or to find a take- back location near you, go to http://www.buy-battery.com/ or http://www.great-batteries.com/ .

Ad-supported apps leave smartphones in high-power states, drain batteries

Apps can stick hardware into a high-power-usage state even when they're not in use, resulting in excess power use.

If you find your phone is often low on HP Pavilion DV1327AP battery, the free apps you use may be to blame, according to a new study. Using a monitoring tool they developed, the authors of the study—two researchers from Purdue University and another from Microsoft—found that serving ads and collecting data inside an app results in excessive use of the hardware components inside a smartphone. These parts of free apps will turn on components like the 3G chip or GPS and cause them to stay on well after an information transaction has been completed, resulting in unnecessary power loss.
Most smartphones can show a basic breakdown of which resources are consuming the LG LB52113D Laptop Battery life (display, Wi-Fi, individual apps, etc.), but the way in which individual apps use that power is more opaque. To unpack the details at this level of power consumption, three researchers developed a tool called "eprof," a "fine-grained energy profiler." Eprof can track power used at the level of individual threads as well as routines running in an app, and can also track what the authors call "asynchronous power behavior."
Tracking an individual piece of software's activity—when processes stop and start, for instance—is contained, so it's easy to say how much power they use in that regard. But the authors found that tracking the hardware was more subtle, as many apps seem to stir hardware into action without turning it off right away, or ever. For example, the authors note the Wi-Fi and 3G chips may start up to communicate an app's data, and then remain in a high-power state even after the app has closed.
Likewise, smartphone OSes also include "wakelock APIs," which allow apps to prevent different pieces of hardware from sleeping, such as an app that wakes the CPU to check for new messages or a video application that stops the screen from sleeping while playing a movie. Items like the camera and GPS presented a similar problem: the researchers found that apps that use these devices start them up and put them in a high power-consuming state, and the hardware will sometimes continue this way until explicitly turned off by another service.
All of these actions mean power consumption triggered by one app can extend beyond when an app is finished using a piece of hardware and overlap into another, making good power accounting tricky (the authors note that this kind of SONY VAIO VGN-FE45G/W battery consumption, known as "tail energy," is being studied to reduce its consumption). For the purposes of this study, the authors account for the energy use triggered by an app, even if it extends beyond the period of app use.
Using eprof to monitor app power use on an HTC Passion running Android 2.3, the researchers made a few discoveries. In a study of the free version of Angry Birds, the authors found that the third-party ad generator and data aggregator Flurry consumes 45 percent of the app's energy tracking the user's location and serving ads to the app. But of that 45 percent, uploading the information and downloading the ads over 3G was only a 2KB transaction, taking 1 percent of the app's energy.
After the data exchange, the researchers found that the 3G chip continued to eat up energy, and it consumed another 24 percent of the total. Meanwhile, the core CPU-intensive thread that actually runs the program consumed 18 percent. Once the app was closed, a thread called HeapWorker performed cleanup and closed a socket, pushing the 3G chip into action and creating another tail that used 28 percent of the total energy.
The app Free Chess showed similar energy use excesses. Fifty percent of the app's energy went to running the third-party ad creator AdWhirl, and of that 50 percent, around 5 percent was used to download and render the ads; the rest was tail energy used by the 3G chip.
In total, 80 percent of the energy Angry Birds used went to I/O components (3G and GPS), and 77 percent of Free Chess's did. Others, like the New York Times app (67 percent) and MapQuest (72 percent) used somewhat less on components that had been triggered into a high power state by a short task, but the difference these states make are significant.
One simple lesson here is that if you find yourself drinking your SONY VGP-BPS13/S battery dry by 7pm every day, springing for the paid versions of apps that don't need to use extra energy to serve you ads could help. The difference could be significant, depending on how much time you spend on ad-supported apps or, to a lesser extent, ones that perform frequent exchanges with GPS and data collection services like Flurry.
More importantly, there is some optimization to be done on the part of app creators. We can fault smartphones for skimping on  PA3399U-2BRS battery size, but all the milliamp-hours in the world can only do so much good when apps use two to three times as much energy to collect data and serve ads as to run the actual program, all because these services amp up hardware components to high power states and let them stick there for too long. The authors suggest that eprof could be combined with static analysis to optimize energy use, as well as with smartphone OS schedulers to make them more aware of when components are using energy, but not actually in use.

The Fixed Lens Comes Again

The modern camera is undergoing a transformation like the fashion lines of the world: retro is in.  As one who is usually oblivious to the changing nature of attire (what, men don’t wear hats anymore?) even I can’t help but be impressed. Not only do the cameras look like something Megan Gale would be proud to swing from her shoulder or Paris Hilton strap to her poodle, but some old ideas are resurfacing to give substance to all the style. 

Olympus  gave rise to this when they released the first digital PEN camera (of which the two current versions are the E-PL3 and E-P3) designed looked like the old film PEN camera that was originally released in 1959.  Even Ted’s itself only goes back to 1970 – probably explaining the hirsute moustache of the man himself.  The idea of the digital PEN’s was to recycle the same idea as the half-frame SLR that inspired them – to reduce the weight and size of the regular SLR’s and inject some of the fun back into the idea of photography.


Recently, at the Photokina trade show in Germany, Fuji unveiled the X100, which looks like something a Soviet spy might have left behind jumping back over the Berlin Wall.  It even has traditional dials for adjusting shutter speed and the aperture value.  It is, however, the fixed f/2 lens that generates the excitement alongside the nostalgia. The fixed lens, especially a 50mm,  was at one point  the standard "prime"  that went with your camera body. Today it is usually the 18-55 zoom. The fixed lens fell out of favour like floral shirts and bell bottoms. The zoom came in on the promise that you didn’t have to move to get closer anymore.

The difference, or the main one at least, like we touched on last time, is the amount of light a fixed lens can let through compared to a standard zoom plus the increased ability to manipulate depth of field.  Everyone with a DSLR should have a lens with a fast aperture, so much so that the majority of people who buy the ubiquitous “twin kit” packages would be better off if the second lens was something like the Nikon 35mm or Canon 50mm 1.8 instead of the telephoto lens.

Panasonic and Sony have recognised this with, for example and respectively, the Panasonic Lumix GF2 and the Sony NEX 5 that are driving their sale results.  It’s worth keeping in mind when you’re tossing up your next purchase because for anyone with creative results in mind will usually be better served by a fast lens rather a standard zoom.  Ask us at Ted’s if the idea is worthwhile for your situation, or ask me – I’ll be the one in the hat.  

now camera batery for related camera; there have canon camera battery, sony camera battery, panasonic camera battery, casio camera battery, nikon camera battery

Battery maker struggles to spend US funds

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The company is meant to draw its remaining $121m in funds from the Department of Energy by the end of the year, but is seeking to extend access to federal funds, because it only plans to invest $30m this year.
“This is a new business and it’s been difficult to accurately predict demand,” said Dave Vieau, A123’s chief executive. “We’re not looking to invest heavily in new capacity right now, and we’re optimistic the Department of Energy will extend the deadline for us to take up funds.”
A123, which develops laptop batteries used in the Fisker Karma electric car and GM’s planned Spark model, lost $37.6m in the last three months of 2011, up from $9.3m in the same quarter of 2010.
Unsold inventory doubled over the year to more than $100m after Fisker stopped buying camera batteries, as demand for its electric cars disappointed. Unsold inventory now accounts for almost a third of A123’s total assets, while unpaid customer bills account for another seventh. The company burned through $40m of cash in the last three months of 2011, leaving it with just $186m at the end of the year.
Shares in A123 fell 2.5 per cent to $1.56 and the company’s market capitalisation has collapsed since shares touched $25.77, shortly after its initial public offering in late 2009.
Another electric acer laptop battery maker, Ener1, which received $118m in stimulus grants, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, although it has since emerged from Chapter 11 proceedings, while GM has suspended production of its Chevrolet Volt electric car because of weak demand.
A123 says it anticipates to work off unsold inventory and expects Fisker to place orders for new dell batteries in the second quarter, once the company has sold enough cars to work through its unsold inventory.
After recently announcing deals with BMW and Tata for proposed electric vehicles, A123 also expects that no single customer will account for more than 15 per cent of revenue going forward, leaving it less vulnerable to another abrupt cancellation. But analysts were unconvinced.
“Battery makers are in a bind. They have no choice but to build out capacity to meet orders from carmakers, but sales may disappoint once products are launched,” said Theodore O’Neill at Wunderlich Securities.

A123 Develops Lithium Ion Starter Battery

WALTHAM, Mass. -- A123 Systems (Nasdaq:AONE), a developer and manufacturer of advanced Nanophosphate® lithium iron phosphate laptop batteries and systems, today announced production contracts for the company's 12V Engine Start Battery with three leading European automakers, including McLaren Automotive for the MP4-12C and a major German OEM that will use the battery in a 2013 model year passenger vehicle. A123's Engine Start Battery is designed as a replacement for absorbent glass mat (AGM) and other lead acid batteries, providing a lighter-weight, longer-lasting solution for micro-hybrid functionality that enhances vehicle performance, improves fuel economy and lowers total cost of ownership. A123 is also developing next-generation designs that are intended to further reduce the cost of its Engine Start acer Battery to make it applicable to a wider range of vehicle applications.
"The market for micro hybrids is growing rapidly, especially as automakers develop systems to help them meet higher government standards for fleet fuel efficiency. We believe that our lithium ion Engine Start Battery enables OEMs to maximize the performance and improve the fuel economy of their vehicles by providing a move advanced, lighter-weight and longer-lasting replacement for AGM lead acid sony laptop batteries," said Jason Forcier, vice president of the Automotive Solutions Group at A123. "We are gaining significant momentum in this market through our production contracts with McLaren and two other major European automakers, and we believe that we'll be able to further enhance our solution to enable additional automakers to cost-effectively deploy our Engine Start Battery across a wider range of passenger and commercial vehicles."
According to Lux Research, the global market for micro-hybrids is projected to reach more than 39 million vehicles in 2017 and create a $6.9 billion market for energy storage devices. A123's Engine Start Battery is designed as a drop-in replacement for AGM and other lead acid camera batteries, leveraging the company's automotive-class lithium ion cells to deliver a number of significant economic, performance and environmental benefits for passenger and commercial vehicle applications, including:

Greater Charge Acceptance Rate—A123's lithium ion Engine Start Battery is designed with a greater charge acceptance rate than AGM lead acid, enabling it to charge up to 10 times more quickly and contributing to a fuel economy improvement of 50 percent or greater compared with lead acid as reported by customers.

Reduced Weight—A123's Engine Start dell laptop Battery weighs less than half of comparable lead acid batteries, helping to reduce vehicle emissions and enhance driving performance.

Extended Life—The extended calendar and cycle life inherent to A123's Nanophosphate technology enable the micro hybrid to last at least twice as long as AGM lead acid batteries, resulting in minimal maintenance and lower total cost of ownership.

Minimal Environmental Impact—A123's Engine Start laptop Battery charger offers reduced total carbon emissions compared to lead acid and do not contain lead or any other hazardous materials. By replacing lead acid batteries with A123's solutions, customers can reduce the environmental impact of their systems, helping its customers promote their green initiatives and sustainability goals.