Sony recalls batteries

Still recovering from it's $400 million recall just two years ago, Sony has issued a recall for 100,000 units of lithium-ion batteries for laptops. Users complained of overheating in many cases sometimes even smoking or even flaming. These batteries were made by the same subsidary of Sony as the last batch to be recalled, based in Tochiji, Japan. 

The company most effected by this recall is HP with over 72,000 of the 100,000 existing in their laptops. Sony claims that the effected batteries were produced in 2004 and 2005, before both the reforms of the production technique and even the previous recalled batteries. HP, Dell and Lenovo have offered to replace batteries free of charge. This recall came at one of the worst possible times for Sony who reported very low earnings for September and October and had to lower their projected profit for the year. 

Texting from Gmail

Gmail has just introduced a new feature on their site that allows a person to enter a phone number as a contact. When the contact goes offline if you have their number saved an option comes up allowing you to send an SMS format message to their phone. This technology is not new but what is unique about it is that google automatically issues you a number when you first use this service and sends that number with your message every time unlike other services which send a random code with each message. This may not seem important but it allows the reciever of the messages to then add you to their contacts and send reply messages. Upon testing the service only takes about 3 seconds to put the message through, incredibly fast for computer to phone messaging.

London's new trashcans

With all of the terrorist attacks going on in the last twenty years the leaders in the city of London decided, way back in 1980 that they were going to take trashcans out of crowded streets and subway platforms much to the dismay of travelers. They did this to prevent bombs being thrown in them and who knows how well this worked since there were still bombings in the subways just a few years back.

About five years ago the English government started work on new bomb proof trashcans that can absorb heat, stop shrapnel spread and extinguish fireballs. They have been thuroughly tested and proven to stand up to the job. What is interesting about the trashcans is they have an LCD touchscreen on the side that show travel info, maps, and recent news which will be a nice addition to the subway.