That's when I knew I'd screwed the pooch...

[NT2C]

I just sent my wife the following SMS:

When do we get the pilot?

Yeah, just the sort of text a guy who runs one of those "nutty prepper sites" should not send his Fed wife.  Especially not during a time of heightened security.




Dear kindly NSA agent/bot,

  I was referring to our new Honda Pilot, nothing else, and neither of us have any air travel planned. 

Patriotic and definitely NOT a terrorist,

NT2C

[MacWa77ace]

[NT2C]

I wear DTC Longtail pocket t-shirts daily even if I'm wearing a shirt over it.  It used to be that the pocket was where my cigs and Zippo lived but after I quit smoking that became my cellphone pocket.  In the bottom of that pocket for several years now I've carried a Nitecore Tiki LE mini flashlight, even when sleeping.  It's so small and lightweight I forget it's in there most of the time, and it's gone through the washer and the dryer multiple times, which is a lot scary given it has a lithium battery pack in it.

I've carried it for so long now that I've forgotten the instructions, which is why for over a year I've been carrying a dead one in my pocket.

Now I'm not taking all the blame on this.  Sure, I screwed up, but so did Nitecore IMHO.  Lemme 'splain...

Because I have forgotten the instructions, I usually forget that it takes two keypresses to wake it from its slumber mode, so I press it once, nothing, then press it 4x (what most flashlights need to wake up), nothing, so I think it's dead and I plug in a charging cord.  As soon as I put power to it a blue LED lights up and I think, "Okay it's charged up, must be operator error and I'll have to dig up the instructions later" and stuff it back in my pocket and forget about it.  I think this because this model has both blue and red LEDs, and surely Nitecore would use RED to indicate it was charging and BLUE to indicate it was fully charged, right?  Right?




No, of fucking course they wouldn't.


Blue indicates it is charging and it just goes out when it's charged.  So for over a year I've been seeing the blue LED and thinking it was charged and that I'd just forgotten how to turn it on.


It's sitting on my desk now, charging.


I'm still gonna forget how to use it again in the future, I know it.

[majorhavoc]

It's like a car manufacturer deciding to reverse the brake and accelerator pedals.

The proper scheme for charging status LEDs should be red for charging, green for fully charged. Period. All electronics.  The only exceptions should be more elaborate screens that show percentage of charge status or some equivalent graphical representation that's 100% unambiguous.

This rule needs to be in the US Constitution.  And probably in some UN Charter on Human Rights too.

[EBuff75]

Yeah, my Gyrfalcon 88 charger is backwards.  It shows blue for any battery that is charging and red when it's done!  And I've got several flashlights that "breathe" while charging - blue with a pulse every 5s or so until fully charged, when it switches to solid blue.  That means I actually have to watch them for a few seconds to tell whether they're still charging or if they're done...