Ahead of the Crowd

I opened a multi-CD jewel case (colloquially, a fatbox) album of three 25+ year old audio compact discs (CDs) today, preparing for the annual audition of Handel’s holiday masterpiece. A nasty surprise: open-cell polyurethane foam sheets, part of the original fatbox packaging, had spontaneously bonded to the labels of the CDs. Drat.

Peeling the foam off the CD was easy. But the label side was permanently pockmarked beyond repair. The foam had damaged the CD lacquer layer. You might succeed in playing a CD with this kind of damage, but the disc is doomed because the fragile reflective layer that carries the music is no longer protected. My three discs were barely playable.

The fix: Use audio CD rescue software to create new discs. (Data CD rescue software probably won’t work because audio CDs employ a different format.) The free cdrdao package recovered 100% of Handel’s glorious music. I kept the original discs in case of trouble with the copies.

I let my fingers do the walking through the other fatboxes in my collection and guess what? Many, especially those manufactured in the 1980s, contained foam sheets. Not all the foam sheets caused damage, but some of my CDs face reincarnation as coasters.

Have you fingered your fatboxes lately?

Battery management is the bane of every portable/mobile electronic device owner’s existence. So it is nice to see Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory solving the problems that prevent lithium-ion batteries from being widely used in electric vehicles. Venkat Srinivasan, one of the scientists working on the project, writes an authoritative blog about the practical considerations of rechargeable batteries. Judging from what I have “learned the hard way” about batteries, Mr. Srinivasan knows his stuff. And he writes well.

His advice on lithium-ion, NiMH, NiCd, and lead-acid batteries is poetry to my ears.

As I’m a sucker for just about every consumer technology that comes down the pike, I had to try Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) in my new house when they first appeared on the consumer market in 1995. I quickly discovered that the expensive (about $25 in today’s money) bulbs were not very bright, so I installed them in relatively inaccessible places like the basement crawl space, hoping that the manufacturer’s claims of long life would come true. Alas, the bulbs died young. Not recognizing the environmental hazard, I tossed the dead bulbs in the trash and forgot about them.

Fast forward ten years: I found CFLs at Costco for less than $3 per bulb. The manufacturer, Feit Electric, specifically claimed 8 times the lifetime of a 60 watt incandescent lamp. Do the math: 8 x 1,000 hours = 8,000 hours (11+ months, operating continuously). So I bought a pack and paired some of them with double-life (2,000 hour) incandescent lamps. Guess which lamps failed first: incandescents or CFLs?

Yup, another disappointment for me, the Green wannabe. Was it an industry conspiracy or was I just unlucky? Now Consumer Reports shines light on this dark enigma in its May, 2008 issue. Since 8,000 hours is a long time, CR’s tests aren’t finished. Still several brands have passed the 7,600 hour mark. But Feit Electric ESL13T bulbs “failed between 3,300 and 3,900 hours.” I would have been happy if my Feit Electric bulbs (not the same model) had lasted even that long.

Moral of the story: if you want to buy a long-lasting CFL, brand and model matters. Before plunking down hard earned cash, read Consumer Reports to find a bulb that’s likely to be reliable. So now I’ve got a pack of dead CFLs, each containing 3 to 5 milligrams of mercury, making them toxic waste. Anybody want to take these bad boys off my hands? I can’t get rid of them!