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Alan Cox's Exploding Laptop
Bowie J. Poag writes to mention a page put up to commemorate the explosion of Alan Cox's laptop. From the article: "Alan was on the other side of the room from the laptop. I was elsewhere. He yelled out, I ambled towards the room in my own good time, and then I heard 'Fire! Real fire! Call the fire brigade, now!' and I speeded up a bit. From Alan subsequently, I gather there was an explosion and flying pieces of laptop, and a fireball, and a couple of fires started where (presumably) boiling battery landed, and one fragment smashed an LCD monitor. And then there was smoke and smell (there is still smell) and smoke alarm wailing and firemen and sirens and paramedics (happily unneeded) and police and a man with a notebook asking questions for the fire report.'"
Alan Cox (born 1968) is a programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991). Whilst employed on the campus of University of Wales, Swansea, he installed a very early version of Linux on one of the machines belonging to the university computer society. This was one of the first Linux installations on a busy network, and revealed many bugs in the networking code. Cox fixed many of these bugs, and went on to rewrite much of the networking subsystem. He then became one of the main developers and maintainers of the whole kernel.
Wincopy
Neither the MacBook or the iBook G4 have two latches on the screen, neither have audio jacks on the front, no apple notebook shipped with a 4 pin FireWire jack (on the front? are they serious??), etc.
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I got curious about how much better Lithium Ion batteries were than Nickel Metal Hydride. So, here are a few numbers I quickly grabbed from the Wikipedia.
_ battery
Li-Ion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery
Energy/weight ~150 Wh/kg
Energy/size ~250 Wh/L
NiMH:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_metal_hydride
Energy/weight 60-?? Wh/kg
Energy/size 100 Wh/L
My laptop gets a couple hours of battery life with Li-Ion. It looks like I'd get about 40% of that with NiMH -- not that appealing. I don't think we'll be turning back any time soon.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
They handle fire- and smoke-damaged equipment all the time.
At the risk of being arrested and taken to a home for the criminally obvious, don't breathe any of the smoke from an exploding battery. Some formulations burn into chemicals that you don't want anywhere near you, such as hydrofluoric acid. It's not that strong an acid but it's remarkably destructive to flesh. If you do get a whiff of smoke go to the emergency room even if you feel OK.
Now where have I read that phrase before? *googles* oh yeah...
Dude, at least site the source of your data (and more complete information at that): wikipedia page for Alan Cox.
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Umm....I think you need to read up on how modern batteries are recharged (and how power managment is done in a laptop). Leaving a laptop plugged in does not mean they are constantly being recharged. Recharging circuitry for modern battery chemistries requires much more sophistication than the old Ni-Cad approach (you can't just throw them on trickle and the circuitry won't be sitting there turning on and off keeping them at peak). I'm too lazy to search for links so I'll just submit AC...
You forgot a very likely possibility:
4) Your computer is full of dust.
Every 6 months or so, I take the computers outside and blow out the "Ghost Turds". I have a fairly dusty house, and when they are full of "Dust Bunnies", I know by the fact that my temp-controlled fans kick up speed at inappropriate times.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Just about every single person living in the UK...
I'm talking about digital camera batteries (in continuation of my previous comment). Those are LiIon batteries which replace the NB-1LH and NB-2LH. The original Canon batteries cost around $40, the off-brand replacements cost $4. If you take a closer look at the cellphone or laptop battery market, you will find the exact same situation. I just happened to know actual prices for digital camera batteries, so I used them as an example of the kind of markup which "reputable dealers" put on brand-name batteries.
Yep. HF is straight up deadly. Eating away your flesh is the least of your worries when 3% covereage with .1M solution is enough to kill you in 48 hours. It's not a pleasant way to go, either.
I used to work with HF in my lab when I was a grad student. Let me tell you, you start to follow lab safety procedures REAL careful like.
RTFA: he bought the battery off eBay. Nuff said, no need to say more, move along.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Is his diary still in Welsh?
That's the silliest thing I ever knew. I used to read it, but now he's effectively cut it off for the non-Welsh speaking world.
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You *could* use a vacuum cleaner, instead of blowing dust all over the place. It may work better - using a high pressure air stream may end up packing dust further into the cooling system. With a vacuum, you can out most of the dust back out the way it went in. I use a vacuum to de-dust my laptops, and it hasn't caused a problem yet.
Actually, if you have proper saftey procedures in place, there should be a tube of Ca-gluconate cream close by so you can apply it after you wash the exposed area. That will supply a nice source of Ca for any remaining HF. Of course that's just the 'band-aid' you use for the trip to the hospital. As previous posters have mentioned....you're not going to know if it was a lethal exposure until it's too late.
IANALY, but you are on an interesting track. Products liability law in many jurisdictions in the US imposes liability if the plaintiff can show, among other things, that there was a reasonable alternative design. That is, a design that would have prevented the injury could have been built at the time that the original product was built and still been reasonable, so far as its utility and cost go.
So, if someone does get injured by an exploding laptop and can show that a harder case would have been a reasonable price to pay for the added safety, he can probably sue and recover for his crotchal injuries.
Ooops! Looks like it still exists: drivers/char/lp.c: printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);. And here I could have sworn it was removed at one point.
I knew for sure that it did exist all this time in USB printer code, though. drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: static const char *usblp_messages[] = { "ok", "out of paper", "off-line", "on fire" };
And actually, now that I'm grepping kernel source, looks like there is a kernel-level yes-i'm-on-fire message of some kind: arch/i386/kernel/cpu/mcheck/p5.c: printk(KERN_EMERG "CPU#%d: Possible thermal failure (CPU on fire ?).\n", smp_processor_id());
Still, I mourn the fact that libc5 had "not a typewriter" and glibc has "inappropriate ioctl for device"... GNU project produces mostly boring and to-the-point software =)