Idle Time

I wrote previously about the Targus Chill Mat. Two Chill Mat generations later, it’s time for an update.

When I wrote the previous post, I had only the first-generation Chill Mat, and Targus had just introduced the second generation. I finally bought one a few months ago.

It does seem more effective at cooling than the first-gen, but the price I paid for that is that it’s loud—so loud that I would intentionally put it aside and go back to the first-gen for my monthly trips to CocoaHeads Lake Forest.

Last week, visiting Walmart for the first time in a long time (they remodeled it! it sucks less now!), I noticed that there is now a third generation. I picked it up for $20, partly out of curiosity regarding just where they stashed the cable, since I couldn’t see it from outside the package.

For those of you not familiar with the Chill Mats, they’re powered by USB. One end looks like the end of a DC power cable (as from a wall-wart), and the other end is a USB A connector.

The first and second generations had a problem where bouncing around inside your laptop bag with the DC connector plugged in would cause the connector to become loose, and eventually stop making reliable contact. The first-generation also had an inline power switch, which was even easier to break; they knocked that off with the second-gen, so let us not speak of it again.

The third-generation adds a nifty feature: Set into the underside of the mat is a hollow cleat, with a clip on each side of it. You wrap the cable around the cleat and hold it in place by snapping it into the clips, and you put the USB connector inside one end of the cleat and the DC connector inside the other end.

This cleat feature should help relieve the fragility issues that plagued the DC connector on previous Chill Mats, because now I have a better place to store the cable than plugged into the jack.

The third-generation is also much better about noise (to the point that I’ll feel comfortable bringing it to CocoaHeads), but the trade-off is that it cools much less effectively than the second-gen. Even so, I think it’s good enough. (In case you’re wondering, it is a little louder than the first-gen.)

All told, this is the best Chill Mat yet, and it will be my Chill Mat for all uses from now on.

UPDATE 2009-05-24: When I went to add links to this post, I noticed the Chill Mat for Mac on their website. I haven’t seen this in any store. If you find or order one, I’m curious to hear how well it works (you can set iStat Menus to show your MBP’s external temperature) and how loud it is.

Here’s something I found interesting.

If you’re on Twitter, you might have noticed a trending tag today, #TMItweets. People have been deliberately posting tweets with Too Much Information, tagged with #TMItweets.

The interesting part is who started it.

If you go all the way back on the Twitter search for the tag, you’ll find that the earliest tweet in the search engine’s short memory is this one from Alex Fayle, 20 days ago. I don’t think he’s who started the current trend.

The next few tweets are. They are, in order:

1. Tai (her tweet)
2. Dora Bianchi (her tweet)
3. Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham (her tweet)
4. Raven Pritchard (her tweet)
5. Pintsize* (his tweet)
6. Penelope Gaines (her first tweet with the tag; her second)
7. Faye Whitaker (her tweet)

If you read Questionable Content, you recognize those names. These are the official QC character accounts, they each have thousands of followers, and they’re all written by Jeph Jacques.

So, basically, this trend started among a closed circle of fictional characters, and migrated into the real world from there within minutes**. I can’t think of a medium where this could have happened before (without including it in the primary medium—in this case, in the comic strip).

Like I said, I found it interesting.

* Not linking directly to Pintsize’s account page because the links he posts are almost all NSFW. Consider yourself warned. ↶

** Pintsize posted his #TMItweets entry at 5:05:46 UTC, and the first subsequent non-QC entry came at 5:07:53 UTC. I used the Twitter API show-status method through curl to obtain these timestamps. ↶