There have been a number of recent reports in the UK press about a potentially huge number of unsafe chargers, for all sorts of consumer devices, presently available both online and on the high street. The concern is that these devices are prone to overheating potentially leading to fires or are badly wired leading to a risk of electrocution. Another concern is that they are often sold without standard UK plug fittings which means that they do not fit well in UK wall sockets or require a dodgy set up with some sort of adapter.

Buying safe chargers online

So what are some of the ways that you can mitigate the risk of buying a low quality and potential dangerous charger online?

• Firstly I think that where possible you should only buy a charger that comes with a standard UK 3 pin plug if you are go to plug it into the mains (obviously different if you are buying a car charger). This will at least ensure that they fit properly in the plug socket.
• Secondly buy your charger from a trusted manufacturer or retailer. Either from the original manufacturer of the device you want to use the charger with, or if that is not available a well known specialist manufacturer or retailer. The quality processes of these companies will be better and this will significantly reduce the risk. An example might be the Griffin Tech AC adapter/charger for the iPod.
• Thirdly be prepared to spend a little bit more money. We are only talking about something like a tenner here, you won’t miss it once it is spent and you don’t want to end up regretting making a cheap purchase.
• Lastly it is probably a good idea to also make sure you buy a good quality travel adapter for when traveling overseas.

Following these rules should help but you actually might find it is harder than you think! Anyway if ever find your charger appears to be getting much too hot, or it rattles when you shake it, indicating something is broken. Then throw it away and get another one, it is not worth the risk.

Have you any ideas on how to safely buy chargers online?

We talked a bit in the last post about data storage out in “the cloud” that is the Internet. Well of course “cloud computing” is not restricted to just data storage, as it also includes all the online applications that are available on the Internet.  This includes email applications like Gmail (my personal favourite) and Yahoo mail etc., but also all the online office applications like Google Docs and its various and growing number of online rivals.

I am a great fan of some of these applications, and Gmail has become my de facto home email client and I rarely now use an email  application like Outlook or Thunderbird.  This is not the case at work where the email client is standard, and I have no choice.  With Gmail though I have always had one gripe and that was that although I regarded Gmail as my default mail client my computer didn’t! So when ever I clicked on a mailto:  link on a website my browser would always try and start an email client and not use Gmail.

Well today I found a tip on the Google Mail blog which shows a new feature in Firefox 3 which means I can set up the browser to always use Gmail as the default email application, meaning I will no longer have this problem.  This should will also work for you if you use another email application either on your computer of in the cloud!  Great huh!

Do you use online applications a lot?