My Ooree 8 inch USB table fan (UF108)

If you need a small table fan at your workplace or study desk, or you tend to work with your laptop at outdoor café and nice to have some cooling breeze, perhaps you can consider this Ooree UF108 8 inch USB table fan.

This USB table fan is good enough to generate breezing wind that you can feel within 1 meter in front of it, yet its size (8 inch diameter end-to-end) and weight (416 gram) are also good enough for it to be portable.

It is powered by USB source, which can be the USB port of your laptop / desktop / monitor, or the USB charging port of your power bank / charging adapter. By powering it with a mobile electricity source such as  power bank, you can use it anytime and anywhere, such as during camping, during electricity blackout, etc. The fan has a low power consumption of around 2.5W only.

Its 1.2 meter USB cable is detachable. It has an on/off switch behind too.

It will have some noise of fan rotating during operation, but overall still considered pretty quiet.

Note that the 8 inch as advertised is the diameter of its metal frame. The diameter of its fan blade is around 5.5 inch only. Its build is pretty solid, despite its packaging box is hollow inside (without any foam or paper support) which does not provide much protection to the fan during delivery.

As you can see, its packaging box deformed during the courier process, which is the main complaint I have with this product. Luckily the fan is not too fragile and still in good condition during unboxing.

Its price is quite reasonable. If you search around carefully, you can find online seller selling it at less than RM20, despite most of the sellers are putting a price tag of RM30-RM40 to it.

There is another model UF110 which is 10 inch and with double speed control, selling at a higher price. If you need stronger wind, you can probably look into the UF110 model.

My Cashido 10 second ozone anti-bacterial water-treatment machine

Ozone has been used over the past 150++ years for water treatment since its discovery by a German-Swiss chemist called Christian Friedrich Schönbein.

A brief history of ozone usage in water treatment is as below:

• 1886: The ability of ozone to disinfect polluted water is recognized in Europe.
• 1891: Test results from Germany show that ozone is effective against bacteria.
• 1893: The Netherlands started to use ozone in large scale as disinfectant in drinking water.
• 1906: France city Nice commissioned first municipal ozone plant for drinking water.
• 1909: Ozone is used as a food preservative for cold storage of meats.
• 1915: Ozone is widely used in Europe with at least 49 major installations throughout the region.
• 1939: Ozone is found to be able to prevent the growth of yeast and mold during the storage of fruits.
• 1965: Scotland employs ozone for colour control in surface water.
• 1970: French exploited the use of ozone in algae control.

Today, Ozone is known to be a very strong oxidizing reagent which able to effectively:

• Kill bacteria and viruses.
• Remove 75% of pesticides.
• Remove bad smell (such as fish-smell, smoke odour, etc.)
• Remove colour formed by organic compound.
• Keep food fresh.
• Settle down heavy metals in water for easier filtration.

Its effectiveness is well supported by academic researches. To name a few of them:

 

 

However, Ozone in gas form, when inhaled into our lung, is harmful to human health. The following bodies have specified the safety level of maximum concentration of ozone permissible in occupied space:

• FDA: 0.05 ppm
• ASHRAE: 0.05 ppm
• EPA: 0.08 ppm
• OSHA: 0.10 ppm

My Cashido 10 second ozone anti-bacterial water-treatment machine is an electronic device that can generate ozone almost instantly and mix it with normal tap water to form ozonized water. Its operation is claimed to release less than 0.01 ppm ozone into the air, which is well controlled below the permissible level.

The ozone gas generated is directly transmitted via a soft silica tube to its ozone mixer installed at the water outlet of faucet. Therefore, very minimal amount of ozone gas is released into the air during its operation.

This machine has additional safety measures to prevent excessive ozone from being released into the air:

• It only start producing ozone when it has detected water flow at the faucet. It will immediately stop working once the water flow stopped, or it detected the water is just dripping instead of flowing.
• It will auto cut-off itself after 10 minutes of continuous operation, even if the water is still flowing.
• It has 2 LEDs. The red LED will turn on when it is connected with electric power, even when it is in standby mode. The blue LED will turn on whenever it is generating ozone to be mixed with the water, and will turn off when no ozone is generated.

With the ozone in the ozonized water made by this machine, we can use the water to:

• Wash our hands, face, legs and other body parts. (The machine can be installed for shower too)
• Rinse our mouth and teeth.
• Bath our pet(s).
• Wash fruits, vegetables and meats (before refrigerator storage and/or before cooking).
• Wash kitchen utensil, cups, bottles, baby products, toys, clothes, etc.
• Clean the floor, table, kitchen, bathroom, toilet, etc.
• Sanitize dentures, contact lens, etc.
• Wash and sanitize pimples, surface wound, insect bites, etc.

This Cashido machine is called 10 second machine because the generated ozonized water only needs as short as 10 seconds to complete its function to oxidize, disinfect, deodourize and decompose pesticides & harmful materials of the target object you are washing or cleaning with it. If the contact is less than 10 seconds, then the washing/cleaning is considered partial, with some left out remains untreated.

Note that the ozone in the water has a short half-life of 20 minutes and will eventually disappear from the water (released as oxygen), leaving no residue in the water.

Therefore, ozonized water cannot be stored as it will soon lost its effect in disinfection of bacteria and viruses, pesticides removal, bad smell removal, etc. due to its short half-life period. It needs to be generated on the spot when use.

With this Cashido 10 second ozone anti-bacterial water-treatment machine, we can expect a more hygiene living environment, healthier & fresher food, and better health (by eliminating as well as preventing bad breath, body odour, Athlete's foot, skin problems, etc.).

High endurance microSD card suitable for use in car dashcam

If you have a car dashcam, you will need to install a microSD card in it to store its video recording and emergency photo taking.

Even though certain dashcams come with some amount of internal memory, the storage capacity of this internal memory just won't be enough, and you probably would not like to give your whole dashcam (instead of the microSD card only) as evidence for investigation in case it really captured some critical event that happened to your car.

Most people found that the microSD card installed in their dashcam is unable to last long and will be unusable within a few months of usage. Most memory card manufacturers also exclude warranty if they found out the memory card is used in dashcam. Why? Because ordinary memory cards are not designed to be used in tough working conditions in your dashcam.

What kind of tough working conditions for the memory card to work in your dashcam, which installed right behind your car windscreen?

• It will need to be able to endure the sunlight heat entering and developed in the car. At noon, when your car is parked in uncovered place, its cabin temperature can easily go above 35 degree Celsius (if you installed good window tint with high TSER value) , and can possibly go beyond 65 degree Celsius if your car is non-tinted and stays for long hours under hot sunlight.
• It will need to have high number of rewrite cycles for its lifespan. As you might aware, the electronic storage cells in the memory card has limited times of data rewrite. That is also the reason whereby disk defragmenting is highly discouraged for SSD hard disk as massive data rewrite will shorten its lifespan. Whenever your dashcam is working, it will keep on recording videos into your microSD card. If you are recording 1080p videos, it just takes a few hours to completely used up a 32 GB microSD card. When the microSD card is used up, older videos will be overwritten by new records, and the rewriting will occur.

Other than the above 2 essential conditions, the memory card used in your dashcam should also meet the following conditions:

• Shock and vibration proof - if it got damaged while writing data during accident shock, you will have difficulty retrieving what it had recorded.
• Water proof - what if the accident caused it to immerse in water?
• Class 10 - this is the minimum read/write speed required to smoothly record 1080p full HD video.

By the way, certain memory card manufacturers also include the following conditions, which I consider as "marketing gimmick" as it should be true for all flash memory cards:

• Magnetic proof - metal detector used for security scanning could induce magnetic field. Don't worry, only magnetic hard disk will be endangered by magnet. Flash memory should immune to magnet by nature. So, nothing to shout about.
• X-ray proof - x-ray is used for security scanning in airports. Flash memory should immune to X-ray as well. Nothing to shout about either.

Therefore, you need high endurance microSD card that can fulfil all of the above conditions to work in your car dashcam, to last for at least 24 months of operations, or a minimum of 5,000 hours of continuous 1080p full HD video recording.

The high endurance microSD card should have an operating temperature range of around -25ºC to 85 ºC and storage temperature range of around -40ºC to 85ºC.

Some of the available high endurance microSD cards in the market include:

• Sandisk high endurance video monitoring card
• Transcend high endurance MLC microSD card
• Silicon Power high endurance MLC microSD card
• Kingston Industrial Temperature microSD UHS-I
• Adata Premier Pro microSD UHS-I

The price of this kind of high endurance microSD card is much higher than ordinary microSD card. Among them, Sandisk high endurance video monitoring card has a relatively lower price, being a mid-range product of its kind. It has a 2 years warranty period which would not void even you use it in your dashcam.