Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(Answer requested by Gautam Naib) Because they did far less. Cellphones started as, well, phones. You used them to make voice calls or to exchange short-form (pager-style) texts. Period. With limited functions in intermittent use, the batteries on small-screen, low-power cellphones could and sometimes did last for days. But to do any of the myriad…
The working guts of Li-ion batteries start as flat sheets. For many heavier-duty and general purpose applications, these sheets are rolled into cylinders because a cylindrical battery can be safer than a flat one: Stacked cylinders allow spaces between them, which can be used to keep hard-working batteries safely cool and responsive. Tesla autos circulate…
(Answer requested by Gabriel Austria) Most Android phones use utterly-standard USB connections. Even if the phone’s screen is cracked or otherwise damaged, if you can still turn the phone on and log in (by any means — face, voice, fingerprint, pattern, password…), you usually can retrieve the phone’s user data via USB. Just plug the…
(Answer requested by Brandon Dotson) There’s no master “off” switch. But there an often-overlooked, semi-stand-alone applet within Android’s Settings that comes close: Permissions Manager. This is not the app-by-app Permissions settings you may have already seen and used in Settings/Apps. Android’s Permissions Manager sorts all your apps at once by permission-type, letting you see, at…
(Answer requested by Chandrakant Godhani) Assuming the battery is charged and OK, or the laptop is plugged in to a known-good power supply, the most common cause of “PC runs for a while and then stops” is heat buildup: Some component is running hot, and the PC is shutting itself down to prevent permanent damage…
(Answer requested by Ayesha Fatima.) Almost surely, yes. Most good-quality generators of recent vintage produce electronically-stabilized, sine- or pseudo-sine wave AC power that’s usually fine for any purpose, up to the stated output limits of the generator. (Check the owner’s manual.) But cheap no-name generators, and many older units, may use mechanical voltage/speed governors, and/or…
(Answer requested by Chris Parson.) Absent proprietary weirdness (e.g. nonstandard plugs or connectors), no. Charging speed is driven primarily by the charger and device’s battery. A “fast-charging cable” is simply one that’s rated to safely carry the higher voltages and amperages that fast chargers employ. That usually means the “fast” cables have somewhat heavier-gauge internal…
(Answer requested by Sameer Chakma.) No, if you mean your question literally: At its heart, a computer’s heat sink is usually just a piece of inert metal. There’s nothing to break or stop working. But I suspect you mean: “Is it possible for a PC’s heat-removal system to malfunction?” and that answer is a definite…
There are more New Zealand photos and text to come (see previous New Zealand posts), but the first batches generated some comments and questions like this one from reader Nikos: “Fantastic photos!!! What camera did you use?” Thanks! This was actually my first major trip were I didn’t pack a standard, self-contained,”prosumer” camera. I took…
(Answer requested by Roger Wilkey) The “ ஃ ” glyph is used in mathematics and logic to symbolize “thus” or “therefore” in the same way that the ” = ” glyph is used to symbolize “equality” or “equals.” But you’d never use ” = ” in a normal written sentence to replace the word “equality,”…
