Wee technology and rice

It’s annoying that as I get older, technology is getting tinier. When Steve Jobs kept making the ipod smaller and smaller, I began to despair, not only for myself, but for kids and parents. The new shuffle! $79! The size of a matchbook! (remember matchbooks?) Dude, I don’t WANT someone to fold up an $80 bill the size of a matchbook and expect me to be able to find it.

The Pink Tornado has a passed-down iPod mini from 2007, and she has problems finding it. I spoke to a dad this weekend who had given his 9 and 8 year olds iPod Touches. O_O I didn’t want to ask how often they lost or dropped them.

I tried to use my Android phone as a music and podcast player but found the UI too clunky. My husband let me use his iPod Nano, which is bigger than a shuffle, but about as thin as a cracker and has a tendency to nestle up to the side of wherever I’m storing it and hide in the shadows like a D&D thief. Every time I think I’ve lost it, I have to roll an Awareness check.

So this Christmas, I bought a Fitbit. It tracks your sleep, steps, stairs climbed, calories burned, etc. It’s small and you can wear it without it bugging you. And you can take off your clothes without noticing it’s attached to you. And it can go into the laundry even after you’ve turned the laundry pile over three times looking for the little bastard.

So after all that bitching about small technology, I want to write about the least championed tool you need during this digital time: rice.

You know when you buy something like shoes or tech and you get a little packet that says “SILICA GEL: DO NOT EAT” – which also makes you wonder who thinks that Reebok sent a snack with their shoes – well that is there to soak up any moisture and avoid mildew. Silica gel is a desiccant, it just draws all moisture to it. Have you seen restaurants in the deep south that have rice mixed in with the salt? That’s so the humidity won’t make the salt clump. Rice is a powerful desiccant.

Which makes me wonder why they don’t package rice with shoes, since you CAN eat rice. But I digress.

The upshot to this is when you run a very expensive, very tiny piece of tech through the washing machine, all is not lost. You discover it, you swear a couple of times, and you get it into a bowl of rice. The brand doesn’t matter- we used brown because it’s what we had. (We had some of that short grain risotto rice but deemed it too expensive.) I put my newly-cleaned fitbit in the rice for 24 hours, and this morning I dug it out, carried it to the dishtowel to wipe the brown rice dust off, and then it cheerfully told me I’d walked six steps. I plugged it in to charge it and now it’s great.

So if you lose a tiny piece of tech in the wash, have some rice on hand, wait 24 hours, and there’s a good chance it will be good.

But if you lose a tiny piece of tech, I can’t help you.