N.B.: “Union de Muchachas” and “Aliança de la Dona Jove” were young women’s associations that, besides working for the uplift and enfranchisement of Spanish women, engaged in antifascist agitation.
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All posts for the month November, 2012

Note the tabs at the top of batteries, which otherwise have the same dimensions and specs. Tabs, flipping the battery over and putting phone’s terminals on the other side of the dock allows mass production of the same battery for different phones.
I’ve never replaced a cellphone battery, and have rarely bought two phones from the same manufacturer. When my HTC Detail’s touchscreen became unresponsive, I reverted to the Hero I’d used before. After digging it up from the attic I found its battery had mysteriously bloated and couldn’t fit in the back of the phone with the case closed. Though the Detail’s and Hero’s batteries are the same size, voltage and amperage, HTC had differentiated them with injection-molded tabs on the sleeve encasing the batteries. They had also flipped the batteries so that the contacts were on opposite sides in each phone, but the polarities were the same.

Note that the polarities, if you flipped one battery over, would be the same. I’m sure contemporary phones have fancier “reuse security”, but it’s worth a look. The Hero is so old that a new battery sells for $14! But you could probably adapt a Hero battery into a newer phone whose “different” battery is sold for more.
Because they became glacially slow after a year with only 4 or 5 apps installed, I hate both of these phones. They’re my first Androids, so maybe it’s the OS, and maybe by 2020 I will have tried every combination of brand and OS and bought an iPhone.
I wouldn’t want to spend more money on something I loathe, but am not eligible for a phone upgrade until March—and who can pay full price for a smartphone? It’s bad enough that most of the “discount” is amortized into the service contract duration. So I felt pretty smug when I Dremeled off the tabs (any knife would have done, but a Dremel took <10 seconds) and put the battery for my Detail in my Hero. It felt even better than the times I replaced my own cracked screen (twice) in my Canon Powershot…because anyone could do it! We only need to examine their design; they assume we have become so shiftless that the most primitive methods will force us to buy more crap.
When the Hero was up and running again, inasmuch as its maimed drag can be equated with a run, I found that it faster than the Detail.
Our power was just turned on after 11 days in the cold & dark after Hurricane Sandy. It’s at times like that, isolated and deracinated compared to our forebears, that you’re jarringly aware of the lack of a popular anything, much less a popular army. In an age of international law that has supposedly obviated war (more like supplanted it), what would a popular army fight for anyway?