Everything Old Is New Again

During my younger and pre-motor vehicle-owning days I spent a great deal of time on bicycles which were called "English racers;" bicycles with frames much like touring or racing bikes, but with straight handlebars. I guess they would be called "hybrids" now. We didn't do a lot of riding after dark, although we could have in our little 15,000-person town. And the best bikes didn't have the big D-cell battery-carrying headlamps (who knew when those batteries were going to DIE?); they had the frame-mounted generator and the spring-loaded switch. Throw the switch when the sun went down and you could still be seen ripping around the neighborhood. And the harder or faster you rode the brighter the light would become.

Who knew in the age of halogen lamps and lithium batteries those old generators would still be relevant?

My wife and I participated in a telecommunications conference in Singapore this last week. Her technology newspaper received complimentary passes. Since I've written the occasional tech-related article (Anything vaguely related to fitness and gadgetry? I'm there.) she thought some consumer electronics toy might catch my eye and justify my holiday.

I helped Suzanne interview a couple of exhibitors on Tuesday morning, after which she cut me loose to take a look at some of the exposition booths for "cool stuff." The overwhelming majority of the exhibits were way over my head...until I got to the Nokia pavilion. Angry Birds is one thing, but when I saw the blue-framed mountain bicycle on a stand...well, I had to take a closer look.

Once I showed the booth exhibitors my credentials - it never hurts to have business cards - I was allowed to pedal the bike a few cranks and figure out the fuss.

The phone, secured to the handlebars, lit up and showed a "charging" icon at two turns of the pedals. While the charger is specifically designed for Nokia phones with two-millimeter pin chargers, it's not a serious stretch to figure what could be done for other phones. The fine folks at Nokia probably developed the charging system for the benefit of phone owners who don't necessarily have access fo reliable electrical power, or spend quite a bit of time on bicycles, which in this case makes perfect sense when one thinks about the state of affairs in Asia.

But you probably could use the same kind of device to charge a phone without getting on the grid. Take one exercise bicycle, add one generator, and voila! It's nothing new, mind you. There were folks who joined pedal power to their television set in the late 1970s.

Everything old isn't necessarily new again, as much as it is that we start to think about new ways to use the old stuff.

It's A Mode - For The Plane - It's Super, Man...

I wonder how many persons, like me, didn't want to go all the way in on an iPhone because they either didn't care for AT&T's stranglehold on the market (until Verizon joined the fray this year), didn't want to spend lots of money on short-term obsolescence, or - in my case - didn't need THAT MUCH phone? How many of them, I wonder, might have purchased an iPod Touch as an "80-percent solution?" I was sitting at a pizza joint a couple of weeks ago and listened to two older couples talk; one of the gentlemen was talking about his new iPod Touch and all the cool things he could do with his new little gadget.

I couldn't help but smile as he raved about the features. When I first started playing with the iPod Touch (I own a 32GB model) I smiled at the thought of the neat things I could do without having the nasty AT&T data plan...and the nasty AT&T bills which came along with it. I could check most all of my e-mail accounts, keep in contact with the rest of the world on social media sites and use my Skype account to talk, as long as I had the fancy-schmancy iPod earbuds with the microphone/switch, and was in an area with WiFi.

There lies the rub. One of many. Once I learned the few scattered places where I could get WiFi reception in my town, (your town might be different; and hopefully better than mine!) I resigned myself to the comforting thought I had - at the least - a good emergency phone...if I were stranded at the mall or downtown. And if not that I had at least one hell of a big music player.

Even when you have WiFi available, using it can suck the life out of an iPod Touch's battery faster than my wife can kill a pint of Abita Andygator. You will have problems. Big ones. Even an after-market ($75) Mophie juice pack - which can provide up-to-75 percent additional power to a fully charged iPod - isn't going to help if you want to use any run-related applications for the iPod Touch, like iMapMyRun: GPS plus WiFi equals not listening to any tunes while you're running.

And, for most people, isn't that why we carry iPods on a run?

It got to the point where I could see the battery gauge slowly sliding "to the left" while I did training runs or cross-training at the gym. What good was this piece of equipment if all I could do was play "Eye of the Tiger" for 60 minutes or so before it threatened to die on me?

Thank heavens for geeks.

One of the things I never really took a look at were some of the more arcane (and hidden) settings in my iPod. I coulld figure out a few, but I truly was at a loss for what some of the things did...or did not accomplish. Finally, I got so fed up I decided to do a Google search on "extending iPod Touch battery life." Darned if there wasn't several YouTube video clips from geeks for the lumpenproletariat, yes, teaching the great un-washed (at least immediately after a run!) masses what levers to pull and buttons to push so we can keep from having to continually charge or recharge our devices.

Two words will save you, iPod Touch users: Airplane Mode.

The iPhone and the iPod Touch have a setting which (I guess) was designed for the benefit of airline travelers who ostensibly wouldn't need to make phone calls or surf the internet while on board commercial aircraft, but still wanted to be able to play with other applications, or at least iTunes. The Airplane Mode shuts off the GPS functionality and the WiFi antenna on the device; I guess the device still has some sort of stand-by mode for WiFi even when it's off which uses battery power. Turn on Airplane Mode, and voila! The drain on the battery is minimized.

It also doesn't hurt to not use the iPod's graphic equalizer; why we really need something which ideally was taken care of by highly-paid audio engineers in the recording studio is beyond me.

I've noticed that I can now plug my iPod Touch into the after-market adapter cord for my Scion xB and not have to worry about shutting completely down during the course of a day. Even if I use the device for an evening workout at the gym I might only have to recharge once every two or three days. This should make life a lot more simple for me when I'm on the road to our next race; I'll be less worried about having to arm-wrestle my wife in order to recharge the iPod when we hit Mississippi.

Every once in a while we runner-types need to tip our cap in the general direction of the geeks. I'd hate to think what road running would have been like without them...probably less than super, man.