Al Shinn wrote:
> Hey, lighten up!!, we are talking about a disposable camera here (see
> the Subject).

No, the part you are objecting to was about sloppy units.  And no, I'm not
going to lighten up about abuse of units since it can be so damaging and
there's so little excuse.  You were off by 12 orders of magnitude!  Anyone
can make a simple mistake, but that wasn't what was going on here.  People
who get sloppy with units, especially on a technical forum, deserve the
modern equivalent of being tarred and feathered, schackled in a stock or
pillary on the courthouse steps, or declared a witch and hung.

> The cap  fits INSIDE the camera, it's the size of my
> pinkie!

I didn't at all get that you meant to use a strobe cap from a camera to
"fix" your NiCd batteries.  It sounded like you were espousing a general
recipe to zap shorted NiCds back to life.

> and no, not milliFarads either - microFarads.

Maybe now you can see why we have standards for units?  Go look up something
called the "SI" units.  One of the key features is prefixes for powers of
1000.  Once again:

  M = mega = 10**6
  K = kilo = 10**3
  m = milli = 10**-3
  u = micro = 10**-6 (actually greek mu, but "u" is common for those
      of us without greek letters on the keyboard)
  n = nano = 10**-9
  p = pico = 10**-12

There are others, but those cover the vast majority of real world
electronics.

> This is a common practice for restoring NiCds.

Zapping them with a charged cap is, charging the cap to 300V isn't, and I
don't think 300V is a very good idea.


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