hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4243.txt

Episode: 4243
Title: HPR4243: Hand Warmer, long term product review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4243/hpr4243.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:56:27

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4243 for Wednesday the 6th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled Hand Warmer Long Term Product Review.
It is hosted by Mr. X and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Long Term Product Review of my Electric Hand Warmer Inspiration from
Kenfell and during on-camp.
Hello and welcome Hacker Public Radio audience.
My name is Mr. X and welcome to this podcast.
As usual I'd like to start and thank the people HPR for making this service available
to us all.
HPR is a commuter of podcasts provided by the community for the community.
That means you could contribute too.
You've got any ideas for a show, just send it in, they've gone to a lot of effort to
make it very easy and once you've sent your first show in and got over the barrier, you
probably enjoy it.
Every listener sent a show would have more shows than they would know what to do with.
Talking of shortages of shows, I believe we are a bit short of shows at the moment and
I've got a gentle nudge to send in a show, actually, which is why I'm doing this one
just now, and actually I'm going to just plug in my magic box which will tell me how
many shows are in the queue, so I'll wait and it will booting up and I can report that
when it comes up.
This show came about because during Og Camp, I can't remember exactly why I mentioned
it, but I mentioned to Ken because we were at Og Camp and I mentioned to him that I had
an electric hand warmer and he said, oh, you know what it is, is it any good?
I said, oh yeah, it is, I thought you could do a long-term review on that, was I good?
This is the long-term review of my electric hand warmer, so it's a thing to come up yet.
So it hasn't come up yet, it takes me a while for the pie to boot up, anyway, it's
that, oh no, it's coming up now, I'll just tell you how many shows are in the queue waiting
for IP address, oh, red light come up only four days to free HP R slot, are you all
listening out there, sending a show, it's dead easy, I'm using my phone here actually,
I'm not even sending the computer, I've got a headset plugged in, my Mrs X as a headset
that she uses sometimes and just plugged into the bottom of the phone, but I mean, they
could just record it straight into the phone, anyway, this hand warmer, back to the back
to what I was talking about, now I don't know how you pronounce it, it's an Okupa, O-C-O-O-B-A,
it's 10,000 milliamp hour capacity, so batch, it's not used as a battery, and I purchased
it back in December 2020, it was looking back through my Amazon purchases and whatnot,
as you can see, a while ago wasn't it, how much did it cost, well it cost 25 UK pounds, so
there you go, and I must admit that every, you know, obviously during the summer, I don't use it
so much, or very much at all really, and so it can sit for several months and I thought,
I always worry what's going to be like when I start using it again, but anyway, that's,
I can talk about that a bit later, anyway, so the thing is, I do a lot of dog walking,
and I suffer quite badly with cold hands, in fact I've got cold hands right now,
funnily enough, no, maybe I could put my hand warmer on, let's just see, I'll just click,
there you go, yes that's nice, right, I've tried different hand warmers over the years,
I think the first one I got was the one that I'm sure most of you are familiar with,
you get these bags, you boil them in water, and in fact you get them fully, you get them charge
normally, I'm assuming you first buy them, and you click a thing in the bag, and it generates heat,
the trouble with those is that they don't last very long, you know, they're kind of like I have them,
my max, they stay warm for 10 minutes, 10, 15 minutes, something like that, and then they go cold,
you know, well that's not enough for a flamin' whenever a dog walk or whatever it is, or how long you go,
and so that was the first kind of, another one that I did get a good bit later on was a zippo hand warmer,
and that's good, you know, it lasts for many hours, it is a bit of a fath because you've got to
pay poor, this is going to special fluid into it, because I like to fluid, I'm not sure, but then you
get to put this fluid in it, and there's a catalytic, a catalytic wick in the base of it, which
you like, it's a bit of a fath, and it can sometimes go out and you can knock it, but if it's
when it's working properly, I mean, six, seven hours, use something like that, so it really is good,
I guess if you're spending all day out in the cold, that's the thing you want to get a zippo hand warmer,
my wife, Mrs. X, got a, it was, so I'm impressed that she got a zippo hand warmer as well,
and I think by that point, it was clear when you looked at the same unit, it wasn't the same,
and I think it was maybe manufactured, say it was manufactured in China or something like that,
but the quality had definitely gone down, and it didn't, it never worked as well as the,
the one I have, but I guess I've seen at the times, but I would say, oh, I've got this one right now,
I've got lovely heat coming from it, I'd say this electric hand warmer is by far, I mean by far
the best solution I've discovered, and in a fact, it saved me twice during all camp,
because it's funny, I see people top on their phones up, plugging them in in various places,
and I'm like, oh, how can you be so disorganised, not keep your phone charged, it's charged,
and the morning it's dead easy, you know, well, I can't remember what, I can't remember the two,
I mean, one of the types, I hadn't put the switch on or something like that, and in fact,
I needed it for the journey home, I came home by train, and had I not had the hand warmer,
I would have been snuckered, so it was actually very handy, I'd never actually used it for that,
for that before, so I wasn't even sure it was going to work, I just used it for keeping my hands warm,
the thing, I think when I first got the hand warmer was really quite skeptical of the whole idea,
because, you know, it's a far from ideal conditions for a battery, because you're obviously,
you've got the heat, you've got the heat packs, or the heat pads, either side of the battery,
top and bottom heats up, and there's a lot of heat generated, and on one hand, I guess,
as this packs warms up, they might just be even more efficient, but it's also, they get the
perfect attempt of whether it's not doing much good for the battery, and because these batteries
don't like, I'd probably let them polymer battery, I'm guessing, they don't like hot conditions,
and then, of course, as I say, between someone and winter, it's not used for a long time,
so that's another thing, but I tend, if I charge it fully up, I don't leave it fully charged
for too long, even if you just use it for half an hour or 15 minutes, that's enough to just take
off the very, very top charge point, and that probably helps to maintain the battery, and likewise,
don't leave it over a excited period of time, totally flat, or flat really for that matter,
if you're going to not going to use it for a number of months, it's good to leave it at 50%
or something like that. You do these things, and as I say, mine is a from 2020, so it's coming up,
it's coming up four years old now, and I haven't noticed any degradation in its performance at all,
and I think when I first, so back in, I was a wee bit curious, so I've got a USB
device thing, which reads charging, I think it's milliamps and milliamp hours at records,
how many milliamp hours of charge goes into an item, and I flattened it once, about a year into its
use, and I think I live in polymer batch, you can improve over time initially when it's brand new,
and the best she'd ever got was 8,034, I mean that's pretty good, the never meet the capacity
they're supposed to be, so a year later, 10,000 milliamp hours, and it was actually 8,034,
so back in 2021, so I thought that was pretty good,
and it's what I'm going to say about it,
why, because it's eye, yeah it's particularly useful, I don't know what we know here about,
particularly loose useful, because of the weather, it's got the dimension, the weather's
got unstable, it's lemon awful, so the controls, so it's very easy, so analytic pictures of the
the hand room, so you can see it, there's a button at the top, and if you double-click it,
then it gives you an indication of the charge, now, so if I double-click, let's do that now, so
you've got, and I've got two lights, two of the three lights, so it's approximately half,
half way charge on it, and then that last is on for a while, number of seconds and goes out,
but if you hold it, and then let it go for, hold it for a few seconds, then
the, I've got one red light come on, that means it's now on, but it's set on at the low setting,
it adds usually, setting the whole time, so I've got low, and I've got two red lights on that,
it's medium, and I've got a high, I've never used high, but back to low gain, it remembers a
setting, so you don't want to, you know, whatever you set it to, it remembers, this is quite nice,
so anyway, that's it on, so to turn it off, you just hold it again, and then let it go,
why not, I did that, that's how that again, hold,
which is, I thought with the, I don't know, I've got what I could use to here, hold,
that's it, I hold it till the, the red light goes off that's right, that's what you do,
so you hold, I'm confused with that, so hold it, one, two, three, and the red light comes on,
that's it, let it go, and then you hold it, one, two, three, the red light goes off, and let it go,
yes, you hold it until light changes, basically, and there's, so on the end of the hand warmer,
it's got three, three, three sockets, so I use, generally use the middle one,
it's, oh no, I don't use the middle one, what we're talking about, so I use, I've got to take
a picture, so I use, generally use the one on the, um, or the picture I've taken on the left hand side,
the one on the left hand side, that's a USB-C, and that's for charging, I believe, I don't think you can,
I don't know if you can use that for power as well, I don't know, I need to look at instructions,
um, you can use the middle one, which is like a normal USB, I don't know what you call it,
the square USB that you, and you can take a power cable off it and charge a phone with, for example,
and then on the other side you've got a, I think it's one of the older type USBs,
it's not a very good review and I don't actually know the specifications, I'll, I'll send a link
to the unit, um, and, and, and more details in, in, in, in the show notes, um, but yeah, you can
basically charge a phone off it and whatnot, the only thing I've found is, and it wasn't that long
into its shoes, it's got this rubber material, and, and now it's not going to stick
at anything like that, but it's, it's peeled off, it's flaked off, and I think also because it's,
it's in my pocket, um, the, the heat pad, which is underneath a, a silver coating, uh, the
silver coatings got, it must be quite, it doesn't feel thin, it feels quite solid, but it's got,
like, little dents all over it, where I've been, where's my pocket against hard objects, um,
but, um, and I say it's, it's now four years old, and I'm sure it'll, it'll last another year,
five years, and I think you can still buy them, uh, if you suffer from cold hands,
I would say you will find no better solution.
Oh, uh, one thing I forgot to mention was, um, how long the thing actually lasts.
Well, I don't exactly know, um, many hours anyway, many, or at least, many dog walks,
and I say, I haven't noticed any degradation, but they're actually measuring it, I don't know.
Um, I think that's about it, um, if you want to send in a show, you can, also if you want to contact
me, uh, I can be contacted at, Mr X, at hpr at googlemail.com, that's mrx80hpr the at symbol googlemail.com.
So until next time, send in a show. Bye.
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