With all that’s gone on recently about bloggers and the ethics that some display, there seems to be an abundance of articles about transparency. This is a good thing, and those who take product or payment in exchange for payment of some kind can hardly be objective.  I don’t mean to call anyone out, and it is only my opinion, but how can someone possible be completely unbiased in their comments if they are motivated to make those comments by someone providing compensation.

I feel like I should make a statement of my own. I feel like I should let you all know where I come from on this practice, and where I fall in the process.

I have not received any compensation, nor have I received any product for free. I offer my opinions on products that I find cool, or useful. I will generally write about what interests me, or what excites me so you will likely see positive articles as they are the ones I want to share.

I commit to the readers, however many, or however few, to disclose any sponsorship or compensation offered or accepted for any reason.

You will occaisionally see links to products here, and most of them will be direct links to the manufacturer websites. There is no affiliate linking to these items. If you find a link to an item on Amazon, it does include my affiliate link. This will not increase your cost should you choose to purchase via the link. For more information on how the amazon affilitates program works, feel free to head on over to Amazon and take a look.

Thanks

So, after updating to the latest greatest from Apple, the battery issues are back… I guess I spoke to soon, and any hopes of the update fixing things has gone by the wayside.

Every now and again I come accross something that’s just plain cool. These items are often something that I’ve thought about trying to create myself. In this case, I had an idea about one item (the LapTuk), and was thinking about creating something jsut like it, and then POW! I find it on the web.

Pretty cool, and gives you lots more desk space to work with.

While you’re out and about, take a look at Macessity. They have many more items to make your mac life more organized.

A few months back, and before the 3.1.2 update, I came across a hack that allowed me to use my iPhone tethered to provide an internet connection for a laptop. This was a godsend, it allowed me to grab a connection whenever and wherever I was (provided I could get a cell signal).

I found out that this hack wouldn’t work when updating, but being the good little apple user I was, I ran the update anyway and just assumed that functionality was gone. Having MMS had to be cool, and would make it worthwhile.

To be perfectly honest, I have sent a total of one MMS message, and that’s it. It wasn’t quite the useful feature addition I thought it would be, and I miss the tethered capabilities.

Ok, so that being said, the upgrade to 3.1.2 left a config file on my phone, an “Unsigned” config file. As you likely know, with the 3.1.2 update, unsigned profiles don’t do good things. The least of which for em was to break visual voicemail. (Here’s where I admit how little attention I actually pay to things around me). This broke visual voice mail to a point that I no longer got any notices of voicemail, nor did I get a list of voicemail to listen to.

Long story short, it was this way for a little over two months. Ninety-three messages. I found them thanks to a client that was nice enough (and persistent enough) to send me an email after leaving the voice mail, asking me “what’s up”. So I headed back into the voice mail manually and found everything that had been building up for the last two plus months.

The fix for this is a relatively easy one, delete the unsigned profile, and reset the network settings. This is all found in the settings section.

I hope things are leveled out now, and I hope that no one ends up missing voicemail for as long as I have..

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)

The upgrade to Snow Leopard is a good one. The additional features are great, and I love the new little bells and whistles. It also seems that as granddad used to say “there are two sides to every coin”. I now seem to have a dying battery in my beloved macbook pro.

This seems a little odd to me, since I have cycled my battery as recommended, and reset the SMC as recommended. I find it difficult to accept that my battery has lost its life this quickly. When running 10.5.8, I was getting about 3.5 hours, and my battery was showing a full charge capacity of close to 5000mAh. This information has dropped since the install of Snow Leopard, to almost 1/2 the power. It now shows a full charge capacity of 3300mAh some days, and as of the writing of this post, it shows a full charge capacity of 4200mAh.

You can see why I would be a little confused, as it jumps around a bit. I have not had the sudden shut off issues that other users have mentioned, but it still is a bit befuddling to have the capacity of the batter be this “all over te board”, especially after only 40 cycles on this battery.

Apple, please help, and update the SW (or ?) to take care of this issue…. I phoned, and provided system reports to substantiate this, and haven’t heard anything back.. I would genereally say that Apples service is great, as it has been, but in this case, it seems that no one cares to admit that there might be an issue, at least no one that has the capability to fix it.

I’ll be holding out on buying another battery, at least until I can find some more information online about the solution.

A month or so ago I ordered a case for my iPhone. I assumed that I would be hard on it, and should get something to protect it a bit. I did some searching, and came up with a beautiful case made by iFrogz.

It looks great, it has a slightly rubberized coating that keeps it form sliding around, and it’s not nearly as ugly as those rubber slip on cases that are everywhere. I have to say that I absolutely LOVE the looks of this case.

Now for the downside. Where the 2 halves of the case come together, there are small allignment tabs. (I bet you know where this is going) I treated it quite gently, the case was on and that was pretty much it, no messing about with it, and nothing that should have broken these tabs. Even with that, the tabs went away, one day I noticed that one side of the case was not lining up quite right, and sure enough, the tab on that side was gone. Soon after, the tab on the other side was gone. and the case barely stays on at all. What a shame…

So, I have found another case, not nearly as slick looking as the iFrogz case, but far more secure. It’s made by mivizu, and comes in 2 parts. They snap securely around the phone, and have none of the small tabs to break that the iFrogs have.

So, I guess you can have pretty, or you can have good, but you can’t have both.. This case should last quite a bit longer than the iFrogz case, but….

If you’re anything like me, and I’d imagine more than a few other computer users, you end up with multiple versions of the same file. One that you have worked on, another backup, and yet a third that ends up being the most recent and completed version. In the process of this, and moving files back and forth to external hard drives and flash drives, you end up with multiple copies of the same file scattered about. This isn’t really an issue, until you have to go through and find the most recent, accurate file.

Araxis Software makse a piece of software for OSx that really helps with the organization process. Find Duplicate Files, for Mac scans selected folders, and shows all occurrences of files that match based on various criteria. I can go so far as to find matches of files that are filed with different names. It checks against name, size, contents, and checksum. Upon completion, it shows you the results in an easy to read, color coded report, allowing you to act on duplicate files as you see fit.

It’s a free download, and will operate in full mode for 30 days. Upon completion of the trial period, it’s a $15.00 activation. Well worth it.

Like many others, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and was headed all ahead full. Sadly, one of the apps that I couldn’t get installed was the Logitech control center for my MX Revolution mouse. The mouse worked., but mapping of buttons and custom features was not available. USB Overdrive kind of helped, but wasn’t quite as convenient as the native software. (I had to disable it to use the Wacom tablet.) Over at OSxHints, there is a solution, you drill into the install package and install via the Center.pkg file. This one works, and works well. Head on over to the article (here) and happy mousing.