Worn Canopy » Technology

Battery Care Tips and Instructions

virayvibe — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:46:10 +0000

A new battery comes in a discharged condition and must be charged before use (refer to the devices manual for charging instructions). Upon initial use (or after a prolonged storage period) the battery may require three to four charge/discharge cycles before achieving maximum capacity.

When charging the battery for the first time the device may indicate that charging is complete after just 10 or 15 minutes. This is a normal phenomenon with rechargeable batteries. Remove the battery from the device, reinsert it and repeat the charging procedure.

It is important to condition (fully discharge and then fully charge) the battery every two to three weeks. Failure to do so may significantly shorten the battery’s life (this does not apply to Li-Ion batteries, which do not require conditioning). To discharge, simply run the device under the battery’s power until it shuts down or until you get a low battery warning. Then recharge the battery as instructed in the user’s manual.

If the battery will not be in use for a month or longer, it is recommended that it be removed from the device and stored in a cool, dry, clean place. This keeps the battery from losing its runtime and from possibly damaging the battery or device.

It is normal for a battery to become warm to the touch during charging and discharging. Only extreme heat should be regarded as potentially dangerous and examined by a battery professional.

A charged battery will eventually lose its charge if unused. It may therefore be necessary to recharge the battery after a storage period. A good rule of thumb is to charge the battery once every 2-3 weeks to prevent premature wear-down.

The milliamp-hour (mAH) rating of the Hi-Capacity battery will often be higher than the one on the original battery. A higher mAH rating is indicative of a longer lasting (higher capacity) battery and will not cause any incompatibilities. A Hi-Capacity battery will, in most cases, outperform the original by 30% to 50%.

Actual battery run-time depends upon the power demands made by the equipment. In the case of notebook computers, screen brightness, the use of the CPU, the hard drive, and other peripherals results in an additional drain upon the battery, effectively reducing the battery’s run-time. The total run-time of the battery is also heavily dependent upon the design of the equipment. To ensure maximum performance of the battery, optimize the computer’s power management features. Refer to the computer manual for further instructions.

Hunting Rangefinders, How To Search For The Best

virayvibe — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:44:49 +0000

Hunting rangefinders have improved the performance of many hunters and most of the better huntsmen these days use one of these devices. With a hunting rangefinder you get an accurate report of the distance to your target and no longer have to estimate how far away the prey is. As the advantages of using a hunting rangefinder are clear new entrants to the sport are now looking for the ‘best hunting’ rangefinder. The term best is hard to define as the best hunting rangefinder will be the one that best suits your needs and this will differ from person to person. Four of the main characteristics you should look at when making a selection are: Weight: If you are out hunting for a long period of time the weight of your equipment will play an important part in maintaining or sapping your energy levels. The electronics and optics of most modern hunting rangefinders are a similar weight, the battery is the main differentiator. On this point it is important to note that many manufacturers quote the weight of their hunting rangefinders excluding the battery. A rangefinder without a battery is useless and hence you need to be aware of the total weight when making a comparison. Controls: Whilst the concept of a hunting rangefinder is simple some manufacturers manage to make the operation of their rangefinder complex. Test out two or three models to assess how easy they are to use in the field. An electronic hunting rangefinder which gives you a supremely accurate distance to your prey but takes you five minutes to operate and establish this information will not help you to have a successful day’s hunting. On this point also check the supplied manual, is it clear? do you need a PhD in electronics to interpret the instructions? Range: A hunting rangefinder will be accurate to a certain level over a specific distance for example accurate to 250 yards for a large size animal and 600 yards for a tree sized object. To select the best hunting rangefinder you need to decide which type of prey you will be targeting and look at the accuracy measurement for this size object. If it is quoted at say 100 yards, consider whether you will be able to get close enough to the target to use the rangefinder without being sighted and disturbing your prey. Image: The brightness of the image and field of view are important in making the hunting rangefinder usable. In poor weather conditions a low intensity image will make it hard to discern the prey from the background. A limited field of view will make it appear as though you are looking into a tunnel and you will find it hard to easily locate the prey. Overtime the performance of hunting rangefinders will improve whilst no doubt, as with all electronics items, the price will decline. Accuracy will increase through improved electronics and optics rather than increased laser strength which could carry some health warnings. You could wait for a better model but whilst you wait your hunting is not benefiting. When you are choosing the best hunting rangefinder it is important to consider how a rangefinder will operate in the field to improve your hunting, and not get distracted by the latest features and manufacturers claims. You are purchasing a hunting rangefinder for one purpose only and the most important factor is to improve your performance as a hunter.

virayvibe — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:41:26 +0000

Among the many video encoding tools available on the web we find the very useful Dr Divx, this application is simple to use and very powerful. The purpose of this tool is to convert almost any video container into AVI which can use any codec configuration you like such as H.264, DivX. If you want to encode an Xvid there are other tools which are freely available as well and can change from codec to codec.

A codec is simply the root program which has been designed to decode and encode a digital video signal, for instance when you have a large video file with great quality, the function of the codec is to help the application you use (Dr Divx in this case) to read information from the source in terms of frames per second “FPS” video container used WMV, MPG, MKV, etc. aspect ratio and many other technical data form the source, once the program has gathered all of this data it then uses the core program, the codec in order to realize adjustments to still and changing frames hence reducing the file size and keeping great quality.

When using H.264 you need to make sure the device you will use is capable of playing back videos which use this video compression, computers will always be able to read any kind of file you throw at them if you have the proper codecs installed, however portable video players and smart phones need AVI files which are very basic and don’t use so many video Quantization adjustments.

The main reason why many users like Dr DivX is because of the video format popularity, which is standard to many video players and the many options you have in terms of video encoding. As good as it is there is still some room to keep improving this tool in terms of the way it handles subtitles and the many extensions (SSA, SRT, etc)

This application also gives you direct access to the codec itself (DivX) in order for you to change the configurations, this way you can select the bit rate to be used and the number of passes to perform in order to achieve the quality desired.