technology

Essential Car Gadgets You Should Own

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cool car gadgets
essential car gadgets
Image via Wikipedia

If you spend so much time in your car that it feels like a second home, then why not buy some gadgets to make your drive that much easier and fun? There are so many great essential car gadgets out on the market today. Here are four essential car gadgets you really should think about getting.

Cell phone charger

Everybody forgets to charge their cell phone sometimes. Hopefully, the juice left in the battery will last you the entire day, but sometimes cell phones go dead at the most inopportune times – like right before you need to make an important business call. With a cell phone charger that you can plug into your car, you will never have to worry about being without your phone again.

Auxiliary cable or cassette adapter for iPods

Have access to your entire music collection while driving without the hassle of bringing along your entire CD collection. There are two ways to hook your iPod up to a car. Newer cars will have a place for you to plug in an auxiliary cable. Plug the other end of the cable into the headphone slot on the iPod and voila, everything is connected. However, if you have an older car that only plays cassette tapes, you will need to buy a cassette adapter to connect your iPod to the car. Make sure to create a great playlist that will play automatically while driving – as a driver, you shouldn’t take your attention off the road to pick new songs and mess around with the iPod.

Satellite radio

Sometimes regular radio channels simply aren’t enough. With satellite radio, you have access to tons of additional channels that offer specialized and unique content without annoying commercials. If you are a sports junkie, then satellite radio is perfect for you, with offerings ranging from football and baseball to NASCAR racing and soccer. There are plenty of talk show channels as well as channels playing any type of music your heart desires.

A GPS navigation device

Many people like consulting maps or using MapQuest to figure out where they are headed, but with a GPS navigation device directions become so much simpler. You don’t even have to look at the device – a voice will announce the directions and tell you when to make turns. The device can also adjust to deviations in a route, so if you take a wrong turn it can tell you how to correct your route.

Author Byline:

This article was written by Ryan Embly from the website CarRentalExpress.com – they offer price comparisons on car and van rentals all across North America and Europe.

How does a telephone work?

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How does a telephone work?

Despite the fact that you can conference call people on the other side of the world on the phone, the telephone actually works along quite simple principles. Interestingly, the technology behind the phone in your home has not really changed over the past century. You could take a phone from the 1930s, plug it into the phone jack in your hall or living room and it would still work. So, How does a telephone work?

Inside the mouthpiece on the handset is a thin metal coating. Between this and an electrode is a thin barrier – these days it is made of plastic. This barrier is connected to a wire that carries the electric current.

How does a telephone work?
How does a telephone work?

When you speak into the mouthpiece, you create acoustic vibrations. This moves the metallic coating a little nearer to the electrode, which in turn creates voltage variations. This converts the acoustic energy into electrical energy.

These electrical pulses are carried along the wire to the speaker on the receiving end. The electric pulses are then turned back into acoustic energy – so you hear the voice on the other end of the phone. In a very simple phone, you would hear your own voice through the speaker, which would be rather annoying to say the least, so most phones feature something called a duplex coil, which stops the sound of your voice from getting back to your own ear!

So why do you need to convert the acoustic energy into electrical pulses? Well, electrical energy travels at the speed of light and as it travels along well-insulated wires, little of the energy is dispersed as it goes along. If you decided to send acoustic pulses along a metal pipe, for instance, the pipe would absorb the acoustic energy before it reached its desired destination.

So along with the speaker and microphone, the simplest phone only has one other core component – a hook switch that connects and disconnects the phone to and from the network. When you lift up the receiver, the hook switch connects you and then disconnects when you put down the receiver.

So how is your phone connected to the wider network? There is a pair of copper wires running from one box in the road to another box at your home. The wires are connected to each of the phone jacks in your house. The box in the road is connected to thick cable that consists of more than 100 pairs of copper wires, which run to another box that acts as a digital concentrate and then on to the phone company’s exchange, where it connects to the wider network.

Depending on where you are calling when you pick up your phone, the phone company either forms a loop between your own phone and the handset of the person you are calling, or, if it a long-distance call, it digitizes your voice (along with the voices of thousands of other callers!) and sends it on a long-distance network – it may go along a fiber-optic line – or even be sent via satellite.