Episode: 3788
Title: HPR3788: Nitecore Tube torch
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3788/hpr3788.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:19:37

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,788 for Wednesday the 8th of February 2023.
Today's show is entitled Night Accord Toop Torch.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about seven minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I have owned, one of these for many years and find it very useful.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Dave Morris.
I've got a short talk today which I've sort of put together in a bit of a hurry because
we're getting so low on shows, so just as a hint to everybody, if you have any ideas
for shows and you have the capability of making something relatively quickly, then your
contributions will be much, much appreciated.
Anyway, getting on with the subject, I'm talking about a torch or as other parts of
the world call them flashlight and it's subject that came up during the recording of the
Community News in May 2022, I'm not very quick.
I've got an example of this particular device which is called a Night Accord.
Night Accord seems to be a fairly productive brand because there are many different
torches available, but this one is called the Tube and it has had it since 2016 and it's
been fantastic.
I've got lots of reviews all over the place, but I thought I'd just give you a quick
overview and point you at some of the longer reviews if you're interested.
Version I have is the Night Accord Tube version 1 which I don't think is available anymore,
at least it's not on Amazon, there's version 2 which is about the same price and should
be just as good.
There's a photo of the little torch against a ruler on the Imperial side so it's a little
bit over two inches long.
I bought this on Amazon and after seeing Big Clives YouTube channel where he did a video
about it and it was under ten pounds at that point and I haven't tried the version
2 but I will maybe do so at some point in time.
It's a small plastic body torch with fittings for a key ring.
I've not been keen on the idea of putting on a key ring because things on key rings tend
to get bashed by the keys, not that I have a huge lot of keys but they are in a pocket
and tend to get rattled about a lot so I keep this one in my shirt pocket.
There's a little rubber like, some substance that feels like rubber on the top of it when
I say the top, I mean the flat side.
It's actually quite a narrow device, it's got enough width that you can hold it easily
and it's got a button in the middle of one of the flat sides which is just down from
the LED that does the business.
It has a micro USB port on the edge which is also covered by one of these rubbery caps
which you can easily move to one side and plug a USB cable in.
When it's charging, there's a blue LED inside the body of the torch which lets you know
what's happening and turns off when charging is complete, nothing very exciting there.
There's a whole, I'm surprised how many functions are in these things, there shouldn't be
really.
So there'll be a micro controller or something in there which is doing it but a single
press turns the low light level on and off.
It's just enough to see way around in a darkened area, darkened room.
It doesn't carry very far but it's fine if you're not wanting to turn the lights on in
your house at night and you're moving around for whatever reason.
If you do a double press, it turns on the permanent high level mode which is quite a lot
more powerful and it's really quite good that you can see a lot with that in the dark.
If you do a single press and hold for more than one second, you get a temporary high
mode and then if you press and hold when in low mode it increases in brightness in steps
and you press and hold for more than five seconds when it's in high mode and it'll lock
the torch against accidental button pressures and presses the light blinks to show that it's
locked and then just press and hold to return to normal.
I'd played with this but I don't use it because in a shirt pocket it doesn't get a lot
of bumps and bashes so it tends not to suffer from being switched on accidentally.
So I don't use this torch a huge amount, it's not a thing that I'm trolling around
the outside with very much but the fact that it's in my pocket means I have a source of
quite bright light when I need one.
The lower light level as I said before is good for moving around in the dark or in a gloomy
place.
The brighter level I tend to use to read labels on jars, bottles and other containers.
I think it's probably my age and my eyes that are letting me down here because I cannot
deal with labels on things where they're quite small to start with, the writing's very
small and they use weird coloring like a dull orange lettering on a purple background
over it and down here.
Another sort of maroon purple orange on maroon is so similar.
If I illuminate it with this bright thing I can read it, otherwise no chance.
I could hold it under a light I guess but the lighting in my house is not bright enough
to hurt for me to see it.
So the night court is my savior as I say in the notes when dealing with this sort of
thing.
The other thing does pass it to my kids and say can you read that but it's not, I won't
be very popular if I keep doing that.
I don't charge it very often because it's not getting a hell of a lot of use but it's
easy to do with the phone charger.
I have several micro USB cables around and lots of these charging plugs that I used over
the years for phones and MP3 players and whatever so it's well able to cope with that.
So yeah so my conclusion is that this is great little device.
I have other torches for when I need stronger more broadly illuminating the light source but
I wouldn't be carrying these around, they're bulky things, they wouldn't be in my pocket
all the times what I mean.
The night court is small and compact enough like keep it on me at all times and if I lost
this one or it died I'm pretty sure I'd get another similar nature and this brand I find
is good and reliable and quite well made.
So there's a bunch of links in the notes which if you're interested you can go and look
at quite a lot of big clive links and a very detailed review of the device so if it's
of interest you I hope you find them useful.
Ok then that's it, bye bye.
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