Best Low Cost AA battery charger: BQ-CC17

I recommend only one inexpensive battery charger among hundreds of possibilities. It is the Panasonic Eneloop BQ-CC17 which can be had for $15 at Amazon in white or black, or as part of several possible bundles that include Eneloop batteries.

Update 3/12/17: A new post on this site compares this charger with two other budget chargers that have faster charging rates. The BQ-CC17 compares favorably. See Best of the Budget Chargers.

I bought a BQ-CC17 bundled with Eneloops two months ago. The rest of this post is my review of the included BQ-CC17 charger, as well as the criteria I use to eliminate other low cost chargers from consideration.

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Four Little Breakthroughs: Bikes, AA Batteries, Daypacks, Transit Cards

Big media loves to celebrate big breakthroughs. The Internet. The electric car. The smartphone. These truly are big breakthroughs (though not without their side effects).

Big media also loves to celebrate future breakthroughs. Revolutionary new battery technology. Private spacecraft. Quantum computing. Nanotechnology. Some day, these amazing technologies will be commonplace. Worth writing about? Absolutely!

But what about all the little breakthroughs—innovations that are here and now, improving people’s everyday lives? Big media can only cover big topics. So that leaves covering little breakthroughs to blogs or forums or niche web sites, like this one.

I like little breakthroughs, so here are a few of my favorites, ones that I use every day:

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Best AA Batteries: 2015 update

This article has been replaced with a 2018 AA Batteries update, due to various product changes and other developments in this category.

Not much changes from month to month or even year to year in the world of AA batteries and chargers. My two articles on the subject continue to be relevant despite their age:

Best AA Batteries That You Never Heard Of

La Crosse Battery Chargers

However, there have been many minor developments in the market over the past few years. Newer generations of low self-discharge batteries have been released. My favorite inexpensive battery chargers were discontinued. I’ve also heard a few questions asked repeatedly, the most important being, “When is it better to use Alkaline batteries instead of NiMH?”

This site has become a significant source of information about low self-discharge batteries and chargers, so it’s time for an update.

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9-year old Baseball Arms Race: Pitcher vs. Hitter

I recently completed my first year as a youth baseball manager while my 9-year old son completed his fifth year of PONY league baseball. It was a fun year, much better than I expected.

The dynamic I found most interesting was the arms race between pitcher and hitter. It started at a very low level with most hitters striking out when pitchers actually managed to throw a few strikes. More often, hitters walked. But the hitters and pitchers kept leapfrogging over each other to get better . . .

Here’s how it went:

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How to Prevent Youth Pitcher Arm Injuries

I researched and collated much information on pitcher arm care into a parent advice guide for my spring PONY team in April 2014. Here I present the same information, expanded and reworked into a more blog-appropriate format, and updated gradually over time as I learn more.

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Great iOS Apps for Taming Information Overload

I’ve spent a bit of effort with this site describing techniques and reviewing software and hardware that helps people reduce distraction, filter information, or otherwise deal with information overload . . . perhaps a bit too much effort at times. In this post I’m going for short and sweet:

Here are some iOS apps I use day in and day out that help me get information I want, and nothing more:

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iPhone 5C Hand Feel and Other First Impressions

After using a Blackberry for nearly 4 years, I switched to using an iPhone 4s. As I wrote about here and here, it was a great leap up for portable computing, but it was a step down in terms of voice performance and hand feel.

On Friday I got an iPhone 5C (32GB white) to replace my 4s. So what do I think of the 5C after 3 full days of use?

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A Great Web Site Design

I am always on the lookout for readable, content-focused WordPress themes. I’m happy to see that a higher percentage of sites of late have been moving in the direction of better readability.

However, I haven’t seen any WordPress designs that better meet my design goals as well as the theme I designed for FilterJoe four years ago.

That is, until today.

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Book Review: Liars and Outliers

The book Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive provides a framework to answer the question, “Why do people trust each other and cooperate?”

I read this book with an eye towards improving my understanding of how people filter information, which is relevant to the focus of this blog and my recent interest in improving the trustworthiness and quality of crowd-sourced product information. I also knew of and respected the author, security expert Bruce Schneier, who is a source for parts of my password management series.

Filtering information effectively requires trusting your information sources as well as the people who recommend these information sources. If it were fully understood why people trust each other and cooperate, that might guide the development of much more effective and automatic systems to make online information sharing more trustworthy and relevant.

So what did I think of Schneier’s book?

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