Battery ahems

The battery in my laptop is down to about an hour of life from about 3 hours new. Replacement cost? AUD$270, or just under 1/7 of the new price of the laptop, or just under 1/4 of the price of replacing the laptop with a new equivalent. Sigh.

Now my camera (a Sony DSC-F707) has also spat a Li-ion battery. Within the space of about three or four sessions, the battery went from about an hour’s life to about seven minutes, From Sony, AUD$125; from a dealer, AUD$120; from a greymarketeer, AUD$89 + $10 p+p. Urk. Clone batteries are a “mere” AUD$53 or AUD$46 (plus $10 p+p).

That’s a good argument, right there, for a camera that takes AA or AAA cells. The NP-FM50 pack looks like it holds 2x 3.6v AA-sized cells, which retail for about AUD$5 each. Hmmm. Eyes battery pack, reaches for packing knife... is there anything morally repugnant about using a camera to take shots of its own guts?

The pack does indeed hold two AA-sized cells labelled US18500GR – apparently made by Fukushima – and a little SMD board. Might be interesting to see if I can get new cells locally.

On the up-side, the laptop has already well and truly paid for itself. The articles I’ve written on it during my limited air travel amount to more than double its value. Much more useful than watching the in-flight movie, methinks.

Don’t know if you could say that the camera paid for itself, exactly, but it's taken more than 16,000 photos (plus countless more deleted in situ), which amounts to about 17c a shot. So far.

Some of those shots have gone into articles or FOSS projects, so I guess you could say that the camera’s been at least partly amortised that way. About a thousand of the full-sized images are available in various places and so have no doubt been used by others, which is a bit more of what you might call social amortisation. Oh, yes, and more than one wedding was documented with it (Jane now has a couple of much better cameras and some “ooooh-aaaah” lenses which will pick out one person in focus from the other side of a backyard while leaving the others standing with them fuzzy).

If you flip Blogger into Compose mode, it will replace all of your HTML &entities; with nasty, non-standard directly embedded characters that Planet doesn’t deal kindly with.