Sons of Loki

Smartphones! Where were we without them? It seems unthinkable that a few years ago, we were getting by with Snake and FM radio as the killer apps. Now you can take a phone call while using GPS to find yourself and then use Wi-Fi to download a map of a YouTube video of your own head … All the while powering an OLED screen so bright it outshines direct sunlight, on a battery that a few years back was only expected to provide enough power to play your obnoxiously funky ringtone.

Unsurprisingly, then, one of the most disappointing things about modern smartphones is the battery life. Using Spotify on a data connection to listen to music during a long train journey, for example, I’ve found myself seeing that dreaded red bar before the trip was even over. And unlike the days when exhausting your iPod’s battery just meant you couldn’t listen to music, now running out means you’ve lost your phone, camera, and GPS as well.

Enter the Energizer AP650MC.

It’s small and smart, with a ring to stick it on your keychain (though I wouldn’t trust myself not to sit on it). There’s a micro-USB port to charge it using your phone’s charger, and a matching micro-USB plug to connect to your phone’s charging port. (Obviously you’ll need one of the Android phones that use a micro-USB charger rather than a proprietary connector.)

Once charged and the little LED is off, you can then take it around with you until your phone starts to run out of power. I tested it out on my ZTE Blade – a budget Android device that doesn’t have exactly stellar battery performance, so the Energizer device is ideal. I ran down the battery with a day or two of usage and finished it off with a few YouTube videos on maximum brightness, then let the Energizer get to work.

It’s a slightly awkward shape, as it’s designed to fit a number of different phones. On my Blade, it covered up the notification bar when facing straight on, and it was slightly difficult to use the touchscreen, so some kind of adjustable hinge would have worked better here.

From a dead battery, the Energizer booted up my phone and started charging. I downloaded a few programs from the market, using the Wi-Fi and display to some extent – the same sort of usage you might have in an emergency situation where you need your phone for just a few minutes. 30 minutes later, the Energizer’s LED went off and stopped charging at 12% as the below graph (sort of) indicates:

So, it won’t bring a depleted phone back to 100%, but 12% is enough for a few emergency phone calls or texts, and could last you a couple of hours (with careful usage) until you can get back to a charger. If you’re the sort who always forgets to charge their phone, it’s a great thing to keep at the bottom of your bag – just in case you ever need it.

Has it really been a month? 30 days since five confused and bewildered individuals, one of whom with a nasty case of the sniffles, boarded a 777 headed straight for the land of our dreams, this distant home of the rising sun, this Japan?

Apparently.

In honour of this momentous event, I have revamped the site banner, and also done some heavy thinking.

I think we are all of us beginning to wonder why on earth we started learning this damn language, and at the same time realising that if we could go home tomorrow, we just wouldn’t. It’s tough, yeah, but it’s what we have to do.

I don’t think it has to be this hard, though. We’re taught Japanese entirely in Japanese, and it’s absolute hell. Maybe some day we’ll be at the stage where we can understand convoluted explanations and examples of Japanese grammar in the language itself, but right now it’s just agonising lesson after lesson of trying to keep up with streams of Japanese that we just don’t get and just won’t get. They say you can pick a language up eventually just by hearing it, and maybe that’s what they’re aiming at, but I would just prefer a simple Minna no Nihongo style “This grammar thing is equivalent to ~ English” for everything in our textbook, and then I could learn it instead of stabbing in the dark at what it might mean, if I understood the examples. So I sit in the classes, and I don’t get anything, and my attention wanders.

I don’t know. Einstein said the only thing that interferes with learning is education. I kinda feel like I’d get better with a couple of months, a stack of Heisig’s lovely books, and a textbook that actually tries to explain things, than to be stuck in the classroom for a year.