My Acer Aspire One is a couple of years old  now and has been, by a rough calculation, has been used on at least 540 of those days. The humble 3 cell 2200 mAh battery that comes with it has now begun to near the end of its useful life.

Rather than lasting say, 2 to 2.5 hours, its now struggling 1 hour 15 minutes. BatteryBar is showing that 40% of the battery capacity has lost and, when charging, the red light stays on until its completely charged. It’s not good.

So I decided to order a new one. And, let’s be honest, laptop batteries aren’t the cheapest – I found that even similar 2200 mAh batteries are a lot, and bigger capacities aren’t a huge amount more.

I found eBay to be the best source, and most come with decent warranties on them. In the end I decided to go for something ridiculous – a 7800 mAh 9 cell replacement, which I managed to pick up for just £29 (including postage) from a seller named smart_battery.

And… it’s HUGE. Really big (which I should have expected really). Indeed, it has to come with its own rubber feet as the back ones on the AA1 won’t touch the ground again! However, it does tilt the keyboard to a really nice typing angle. And it makes a handy carry handle

I did wonder if a third party battery would fit with regard to the plastics and colours used on the original netbook, but I need not have – they match perfectly.

But – and this is the important bit – take a look at the first image in the gallery below. It shows my battery life. No, that’s not a mistake – 8 hours 33 minutes. And that’s not fully charged – it was showing about 8 hours 45 minutes then. Incredible.

BatteryBar does modify this over time to show “real usage”, so I suspect this will go down. Never-the-less, Windows is showing a life of over 7 hours, so I suspect the end result will still be mightily impressive.

Summary of Acer Aspire One 9 Cell 7800mAh Battery

An impressive third party battery that packs a real punch – over 8 hours use. And its price is modest too! It only looses one mark for the size.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 15th September 2010.

Gallery

I got to see this film at the weekend on DVD. And, it wasn’t too bad – from the reviews I was expecting worse.

It’s directed by Jonathan Mostow, who made a right hash of Terminator, so it wasn’t a promising start. Never-the-less, the plot is interesting, with lots of twists and, in particular, the “world” of the film is particularly well made.

Okay, the idea here is that human looking robots have been made, but unlike the film “I, Robot”, they’re not intelligent. Instead, humans control them – they can see through their eyes and feel what they feel. Over time, people have started using these “Surrogates” in the real world instead of venturing out. It’s safer and crime rates have plummeted as a result.

Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, a cop (hurrah!) – his Surrogate is much younger looking (think of the de-aging process they used in X-Men: The Last Stand) and has hair – see the image to the right. Indeed, Surrogates by and large are young and good looking (and sometimes not even the same sex as the “operator”). He stumbles across a weapon that will not only destroy a Surrogate but kill its operator. That then leads across a number of set pieces, with lots of action thrown in as well.

There’s, sadly, a lot of weird posturing about his relationship with his wife, how he never sees her anymore, etc. It seems to come from nowhere and there appears to be a reference to her being on medicine that isn’t then explored. However, the graphic novel that the film is based on provides the answer to this. However, an action sci-fi film doesn’t seem to be the natural place to add in an almost redundant bit of drama into – it just didn’t sit right.

Anyway, the affects are excellent and the Surrogates are portrayed well – very human but, at the same time, not quite so. I particularly like the way that Greer’s partner had a strange gait when walking (I hope that was intentional!).

Lastly, I’m sure one the actions at the end of the film was inconsistant with something that happens earlier. This contains spoilers, so look away now if you don’t want to know…

Summary of Surrogates

It’s good. Not brilliant, but good. Good effects, good plot, but it felt like Bruce was just playing this “by numbers”. The fact that he refused to return to do some dubbing work on the film I guess shows how much it meant to him.

There was very little in the film that meant it deserved the 12A certificate and I’m sure it could easily have been trimmed back to a PG without losing any of the content – either that or they could have easily kept the certification but made it more “gritty”.

It’s also not very long – 1.5 hours – but, at least, if you don’t like it you haven’t lost too much of your life

Reviewed by David Artiss on 15th September 2010.

There are quite a few sites around that offer money off vouchers and coupons for online retailers. Quidco, however, not only does that but, if you visit the retailer via them, you can earn money back as well. Indeed, it’s this last operation that Quidco was originally set up to provide – vouchers and coupons is only a recent addition.

Simply sign up – it’s incredibly easy to do – and then search for an online retailer. Click on the link and you’re taken to the relevant website. Buy your item and you’ll find Quidco “tracks” a certain amount of cashback – this is listed on the site under your profile details, where you can also see payments (which occur regularly direct to your bank account).  The amount of cashback is dependant on retailer and is listed along with the retailers link.

I regularly use it, for instance, when buying from Play.com. The one notable omission is the lack of Amazon for cashback.

Never-the-less, I’ve recently got £40 back from a £200 home insurance and my wife last night bought a new phone on contract and received an extra (on top of cash back from the retailer) £40. It’s free money, basically.

If you use Firefox, Chrome or IE 7 or 8 you can even add Quidco as a search engine – making the whole process even less hassle.

Quidco WordPress Shortcode

Quidco offer a “refer a friend” service. If you go into the “Referral Earnings” screen, they will provide you with generic Quidco links to add to your site, but also specific links for retailers. I’ve therefore created my own little shortcode that will add this to my site.

Here’s the code, which needs to be added to functions.php…

add_shortcode('quidco','add_quidco');
function add_quidco($paras="",$content="") {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array('alt'=>''),$paras));
    if ($alt!="") {$lookup=$alt;} else {$lookup=$content;}
    $lookup=strtolower(str_replace(".","-",$lookup));
    return '<a href="http://www.quidco.com/user/xxx/yyy/'.str_replace(" ","_",$lookup).'" title="'.$content.'" title="'.$content.'" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">'.$content.'</a>';
}

You’ll need to replace xxx and yyy with the user specific information that’s shown in the “Referral Earnings” screen. Now simply placed [quidco] and [/quidco] around any shop names, and it will an automatic link to the appropriate Quidco referral screen. Hopefully. Dots are replaced by dashes but, obviously, if you write the shop name different to how Quidco refers to them, it may not work. In this case, specify the name as an additional parameter of ALT.

e.g. Two ways to link to play.com, both will work the same – [quidco]play.com[/quidco] or [quidco alt="play-com"]play.com[/quidco]

Note that when using the ALT parameter, you must specify the shop name as Quidco uses it in it’s link (e.g. with the dots converted to hyphens).