Panasonic wants you to wear Li-Ion batteries. The ones that explode Panasonic says it's built a bendy Lithium-Ion battery safe enough to be built into “Card devices, devices attached to the human body, smart clothing [and] wristband wearable devices.” The Japanese company may not have picked the best month in which to launch the device, given the spontaneous combustion of numerous Galaxy Note …
I can see these being handy, stacked up for "user reconfigurable" battery packs where capacity can be added simply by slotting the cells into a pre-available card similar to a server backplane and assembling them into a 3-D printed case.
Or am I over-thinking this?
AC/DC
*While we're remembering PCMCIA cards, let's remember the acronym describing the venerable peripherals-for-laptops standards was often satirised as “People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms.”
Wow - PCMCIA and yes I do remember the snarky expansion of the acronym you mention!
Many years ago I had a Panasonic CF-41 laptop (The first to have a double speed CD-ROM drive built in!). I think the CF-41 still works and I have a PCMCIA modem and joystick adaptor for it somewhere in the big box of antique computer gubbins.
I have an ancient, but still working, Packard Bell laptop with a still functioning Netgear PCMCIA Wifi card. All completely useless now of course!
I seem to recall my Amiga 1200 had a PCMCIA slot on it. No idea if there were any peripherals that used it... I'm guess that must have been one of the earliest devices to sport such a port?
I had an A1200 but never used the PCMCIA slot.
I know there were external hard drives available with cases that matched the profile of the computer. My mate at school had one and it sounded like he had no end of Guru Meditation crashes with it. I stuck to internal IDE drives.
There was also a PCMCIA SCSI adapter branded Squirrel I think.
Rummaging through my drawers (fnarr fnarr) this weekend, I found:
• 2MB PCMCIA Card
• 8MB PCMCIA Card
• Modem PCMCIA Card
• Ethernet PCMCIA Card
• Wifi PCMCIA Card
• Wifi Cardbus Card (Cardbus being the compatible successor to PCMCIA)
• USB 2 and Firewire Cardbus Card
• Titanium Powerbook with Cardbus slot
Oh, and the realisation that I should sell / throw away some of this old rubbish.
On a different note, aren’t many of us already wearing Li-Ion batteries in our smartwatches? Imagine the agony if one of those goes on the fritz? I can take my coat off faster than I can take my watch off (in my case, a Seiko Chronograph - so not very smart, and not very likely to explode - but still, lots of people have smart watches) - and a watch battery is pressed quite close to the skin.
So no, I don’t particularly have a problem with this. I don’t want one - and I certainly wouldn’t advise smart pants (what are pants called in the US? Or does everyone in the US go commando?) - but I don’t imagine that clothing related problems will be all that common.
Until two weeks ago, I could have said that I have very much a similar collection of PCMCIA cards in the pile, including their manuals, packaging, and driver CD's (and in two cases, driver floppys!).
Gotta admit, having the shelf space back feels awfully good.
The primary issue I remember with PCMCIA was that if you used a wireless card in your wife's laptop and she dropped it down a flight of stairs (truly!), not only would the card get bent in an unusual fashion, but it would rip the header apart internally within the laptop. And this would happen despite you getting it all set up not even a week prior.
Not that I'm bitter.
Actually I rather like 'FLIB' - sounds soft and bendy and cuddly, like Flibbertigibbet. Doesn't seem to have any serious contenders for prior art (I think we can ignore the Fachverband Luftdichtheit im Bauwesen (German: Association for Airtightness in Buildings; Kassel, Germany)
And it's pretty language neutral - works well in many languages without any embarassing meanings (remember the Polish 'Fart' bar?)
Wo ist mein flibie?
Ou est mon flib?
Donde es mi flib?
Ble mae fy fflib?
The flib of my uncle is in the fire-bucket of my aunt.
"El Reg linking to itself 18 years ago. I feel old."
They also keep every comment you ever posted, even rejected ones (although only you and presumably the Reg admins can read those.) It can be quite an eye-opener to click a page near the end of the list and read stuff you posted a decade ago and had long since forgotten. Some of it will bring back fond memories of the good old days.
Just also be prepared that at some point you're going to facepalm and groan, "What the hell was I on when I posted that!?!"
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