Hawk’s Babble-Log

I do a lot of shopping at [ThinkGeek](http://www.thinkgeek.com/).

Recently, I picked up a Mini Forever Flashlight from ThinkGeek. The idea behind it is that it never needs batteries, and never needs to be serviced. And lemme tell ya, this little sucker works great! It has one super-bright LED, one small capacitor, and a sliding magnet assembly which slides through a copper coil. To charge up the capacitor, just shake it back and forth (parallel to the ground) for about 30 seconds to a minute. It’ll give you pretty good light for a good 10 minutes or so (approximately). After that, you’ll need to turn it off and shake it up some more. If you don’t, it will continue to give light, but not a very useful amount. I left it on for a few days just to see how long it would go and it never did seem to die all the way, but just got very dim.

Now that I had some good experience with the Mini, I decided to buy the regular size Forever Flashlight. It’s just a bigger version of the Mini. You shake it to charge the capacitor, then turn it on. It’s one super-bright LED is brighter than the Mini and I think it lasts a bit longer. But not much.

In my latest order, I got the Forever Flashlight Dynamo. This one blew me away. It works so much better than the other two that I’d recommend getting the Dynamo and not even bothering with the other Forever Flashlights. The Dynamo has a hand crank; no shaking necessary. Just crank it for 30 seconds to a minute and you’ve got super bright light for about an hour! And it’s got three LEDs, with two ON modes. You can run it on just one LED, or all three for even more brightness. Naturally, it doesn’t last as long if you run all three LEDs, but this hardly matters when you can crank it for a bit and then continue getting fantastic bright long-lasting light.

Another advantage of the Dynamo is that it doesn’t contain a hi-power magnet, so it’s perfectly safe around your computers ‘n such. Both the regular Forever Flashlight and the Mini Forever Flashlight contain hi-power magets so strong that they’ll stick to my metal bed frame. In fact, if you turn the Mini just right, the magnet will turn the light switch on. It’s kinda wierd.

Anyway… in summary: I recommend skipping both regular Forever Flashlights and go for the Forever Flashlight Dynamo. It’ll never need batteries and the LEDs will last virtually forever. Just go to [ThinkGeek](http://www.thinkgeek.com/) and search for “forever”.