Not much outside of work has been going on lately, but I finally have a couple neat things to blog about.

First up, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a new extended-time battery for my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  I found a decently reviewed clone of the Canon BP-827 on Amazon for a great price, and figured I’d give it a shot.  Here’s the battery:

Maxtek 4.5hr rechargeable battery

The most common problem with cloned batteries for stuff like Canon camcorders is the fact the OEM batteries have a chip in them that communicates to the camcorder.  The earlier cloned batteries didn’t have this chip, so you couldn’t get an idea of how much time you really had left to record.  You would also see warnings about a non-compatible battery every time you started the camera.

The newer battery clones have started to incorporate one of these chips, and work with the onboard charger in the camera, as well as the OEM external wall chargers.  I’ve already tried both charging the battery from the camera and the Canon CG-800 wall charger, and had no issues with either charging method.

Now I will have to buy some 32GB SDHC cards so I can actually film as long as the battery can last!  What an exciting prospect.

While on the subject of batteries, I managed to successfully replace the worn out SLA battery in my GE Simon III home security system.  That was kinda interesting, since I had to call the monitoring company and put the system in test mode to prevent any false alarms.

Once that was done, it wasn’t too difficult to get into the guts of the system, and replace the small SLA battery.  After making sure I didn’t have any wires pinched, I had to call the monitoring company, and verify the system was able to communicate with them.  This required tripping the alarm, and letting the thing scream bloody murder for about a minute.

Now I won’t get any more annoying status updates about the “low battery” in the alarm system!  If you have one of these alarm systems, they aren’t too difficult to service yourself.

Yup, that’s about it.  The most exciting thing to happen at home in a couple months was all battery related.