Does freezing a laptop battery give it a longer life...

So battery on this Dell Mini 9 I got the other day has a terrible battery life, about 2 hours, I decided to do an experiement to see if sticking the battery in the freezer ACTUALLY does something useful

li-ion battery
all testing done with no interaction of the laptop

-- day 1 --
Day one was basically starting from 0% battery to full charge and then letting it run down back to 0% and repeating this several times


Charging from 0% to 100% took 2 hours
Discharging from 100% to 0% was also 2 hours


-- day 2 --
08:30 battery placed in freezer in two bags as per guides on the internet

-- day 3 --
12:00 Battery is removed after 27 hours in the freezer and given two hours to get back to room temperature.

Charging from 0% to 100% takes 2 hours
Discharge from 100% to 0% also takes 2 hours

-- Results --
Freezing the battery has done nothing what so ever to the battery!

-- addendum --
Some people have said that I need to cycle the battery at least 4 times to see an effect, this is currently being done and the results will be posted later on. I dont think it will work...

Dell Mini 9 Linux wifi broadcom drivers (solved)

OK so most of this weekend I have spent fucking about trying to find a lightweight linux OS that worked with the broadcom wifi built in.... here are the results

Crunchbang - doesn't install from USB (using unetbootin)
Ubuntu 12.04 beta - didn't work out the box
Ubuntu 10.04 - worked but way way too heavy
Ubuntu 11.10 - too heavy hate gnome3 and unity
Arch - argghhhh just NO
Xubuntu - lightweight but didn't work out the box
Linux mint debian xfce - didn't work out the box
Linux mint 12 - Live CD worked fine - useable but installed didn't work and needed a wired connection

So what have I gone for? Linux Mint 12, set up with a wired connection to install the bcm-kernal-sources which i am hoping to move over to xfce.

Network Thumbnails in Ubuntu

Just found this out as a cure for a little annoyance of mine, not seeing thumbnails of images/files over network shares.

goto Nautilus > edit > preferences > preview
and change thumbnails to Always rather than Local Only.

Another small problem in life fixed!

3d Rep-rap printer build (phase 2)

Thought I would share the current state of the 3d Rep-rap printer I am building... z-motors installed along with Z-guides, the Y axis wood bed (the Z motor wires are sitting on it) is also installed now and everything is now tightened up and secure - the weight has pretty much trebled too!

ATM card skimmer (real)

Well as I am being all photographic today, I thought I should get some photos up of the ATM I aquired from some friends who found it on an ATM machine in Oxford Street London (they contacted the police but they didnt seem to care - nice!) So after some months I have it and here it is in its full glory.

Now to try to figure out how it works and get into some proper hardware reverse engineering!