The Digital Homesteader (Beta)

While meandering through the endless aisles of our local mega grocery store I happened upon a couple of carts of closeout items. These carts are worth noticing, we picked up a new coffee maker really cheap a couple weeks ago. This week they were selling a lot of emergency supply stuff. I picked up this really neat LED crank flashlight for $10. These retail for $40, so I thought it was worth a shot just from the savings factor alone. It has AM/FM, a fairly bright light (single LED or 9 LED), a flashing strobe with red LEDs added in and siren, a night light mode (which is being tested in a dark bedroom now) and compass. But one of the things that I really liked was that they thought to have a jack and cable so that I can plug in my iPod. During times of crisis it might be rather soothing to have a little Charlie Parker playing softly in the background.  It also has some kind of ability to charge your cellular, but the adapters won’t work with ours.  But hey, for $10 you can hardly go wrong. The best thing about it is that I won’t have to scramble around looking for batteries. The crank is supposed to charge the unit for 45 minutes of operation with just one minute of cranking. Early tests didn’t seem to work out that way at all, but its better than not having lights because I can’t find the batteries that I need when the lights go out!