More on the Macbook Pro Battery Issue

I had given up on the battery in my Macbook Pro being a good one after installing Snow Leopard, and was ready to bite the bullet and and up buying another. You’ll notice in an earlier post, that my battery seemingly went south after the install in Snow Leopard, and there have been many others that have experienced power oddities with the upgrade.

I’m here to say, that my laziness (I hadn’t bought the new battery yet, and have been muddling through on corded power) has paid off! As of yesterday, the batter warnings had gone away, and I’m no longer getting the “Service Battery” messages. I am also getting almost 5500mAh capacity reported in the power section of “about this mac”.

I’m not really sure what I did, or if I did anything that helped. I cycled the battery a couple of times when it first surfaced, but it didn’t seem to make a difference at the time. I’m going to chalk this one up as PFM, and accept the positive outcome. Thanks Apple (kind of)

Your own personal chickenscratch font.

I generaly try to stick with mac tech, but this was to cool to pass up. Found over at lifehacker (and I have to admit I’d played with it prior but lost the link). Fontcapture takes a printout, and you fill in your own handwriting. Then it processes the template into a font you can use on your own machine. Need a signature? here is a way. Need to write a “personal” note and have it look more personal? might be worth taking a look.

Link to your own personal handwriting font

Time machine – NAS – and bad sparseimages

So, I set up time machine to use my NAS volume as found over on Engadget using : defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and have been skating along with no worries, well almost.

About a month into it, I could no longer mount the sparseimage.

I ran disk utility on it, and no luck. I found a solution over at bukisa, and ran hdiutil as they specified, but no luck there either.

Looks like I’ll be spending the cash on DiskWarrior, unless someone who reads this blog has another solution.

Anyone?

A week with 3.0 on an iPhone 3G (no S)

It’s been almost a week since the update, and things seem to be leveling out a bit. The initial day of the update was a little hairy, with several attempts to get the phone updated, and then reset so that things would work the way they were supposed to. Might have just been me, because I wasn’t really able to fond many instances of the same kind of problems I had.

The phone with copy and paste, who’d have thunk it? I remember having an old Palm IV that had copy and paste (and search of all things) that I used until it died. The iPhone should have had this to begin with (I know, that’s a played out complaint) but now that it does, it seems to be more the phone it should have been to begin with.

Having copy and paste (and search) is something we take for granted with desktops (and old palms for that matter). We don’t necessarily realize how much we need it when we’re forced to work around it. Now that it’s there, it make me wonder how I worked without it.

The horizontal touchpad for typing is a welcome addition for those with fat fingers like mine, and I have actually begun to like using the phone to tweet, update blogs, and heck, I have even started to answer email with more than one sentence.

In short, I’d like to thank apple for the update, and look forward to whatever else they have in store for this platform, and maybe something a little bigger sometime soon. Do I hear a mac tablet at some point? the iKindle? Nah…….

In response to the MS ads.

iPhone, iTunes, iPhoto limitations

With iPhone in hand, and the learning curve starting to even out a bit, I’ve decided to put photos on it. Seemed like a good idea, after all this device is made for that sort of thing. Being able to share images with friends, and show them to people seems like a great feature.

There are some drawbacks to this, most likely related to how I use my mac for photo storage. If I were to use iPhoto, or Aperture, I’d be fine. They both allow you to organize your images by collection, and send those collections to you phone. Being able to use collections helps keep everything straight but keeping your photos grouped as you have them grouped in the software.

Like I said, if I used that software I’d be all set. I, however, do not use either. I am a Lightroom user, and have so many images in LR that it just didn’t make sense to switch over, or to keep 2 libraries.

Lightroom doesn’t directly support the iPhone, though you can size and export images to a folder, then import that folder via iTunes. This works nicely, but does not allow for multiple folders, or changing the order that the images are displayed. (They are ordered by filename)

So, though there are some other software packages out there for the PC / Windows side of things, I have been unable to find an equivalent for the OSx world. I have been relegated to exporting them as jpegs, bringing them into iPhoto, and then sending them to the iPhone via iTunes.

If anyone happens to have a better workflow that includes LR, please let me know.

Someone Else is switching, and they have a better photo.

Looks like there’s more than just a couple of folks switching, and this one definately has a better opening photo than I came up with.

For the whole story, head over to Lifehacker and get a look at the full story.

Filemaker, and Bento

So I’ve used filmaker in the past, and though it’s no moster of database power, it has always allowed me to do what I needed to do. I’m certainly no database guru, but have been able to write customer management and item transaction databases that functioned and reported appropriately. I still use it for expense tracking and reporting for my current employer.

This brings be to Bento, It seems like a great way to track projects and contacts, but I’m sure that I haven’t even tapped its potential. I will be playing with it in more detail over the next month or so, and trying to fond out jsut how capable it is. If you’re using it for more than just contact management, please let me know how you’re using it, and for what. I’d love to learn how to integrate it for more than just the address book.

First experience with “The Genius Bar”

So it’s been 4 months since the change to the MacBook Pro, and I had the power supply die on me. Interesting because it would still power the machine, but wouldn’t charge the battery. None of the comforting little lights coming from the magsafe connector.
So, being a little technical, I swapped it out for one from a friends machine and all was good. I tried mine on their machine, and same thing, good power, no charge.

I called The apple store nearest me, and asked them about coming in to get another one. Interestingly, they required me to make an appointment with one of their tech support “Geniuses”. I was a little frustrated at first that I couldn’t just drop in and pick up another power brick, but I made the appointment and headed in.

As usual, the store was packed, and I continued with my feeling of frustration as I checked in for my appointment. The Genius got to me before my appointment time, verified my diagnosis, and handed me another power supply.

Quick, friendly, and far more painless than I thought it might be. My frustrations were dissipated at this point and I headed on my way.

Nice job Apple, far better than the 3 hour phone call I still cringe about when I had to call Hewlett Packard for tech support on a windows box some years ago.

Year end, and what comes next.

Well, I’ve ended the year and mkaed the switch. I am a happy guy, and liking the use of the Mac. OSx is quite the change but overall like slipping on a confortable pair of shoes (that let you run realy fast).

Apple rumors abound. Steve’s health, Macworld, and the potential releases of an iPhone nano, and updates to the mac mini.

I look forward to what Apple has in store for us, and if the mini upgrade is worth a darn, I may move the web adn mail servers I run over to one of those. It would surely be more convenient that having a full tower stashed in the closet.

Warmest wishes and happy macing for the new year.