Watts battery maintenance and calibration

So, in my last video, I showed you the test that Mac service techs run to determine whether a battery has failed or not and, sure enough, mine had. It was covered under warranty which was good news and the new battery arrived the next day, so it all was rather painless.

Now that I have a brand spankin’ new battery, I’d like to try to give it a better chance for survival than my previous one, so I’m going to be running Watts to keep me on schedule for regular charging and draining of the battery so that it gets some regular use. Batteries need to be used, not just charged and will deteriorate faster if they are left constantly tethered to an AC adapter.¹

What Watts does is keeps you on a schedule of charges and discharges of you battery to give it a good run once in a while and allow your Mac to see how much charge it actually holds so that it can more efficiently and accurately use and display its capacity.

No Flash?»

Watts sells for just $6.95, which makes it a desktop application at an iPhone app price. You could save that money and just set up some iCal alarms but, who are we kidding, you’re just going to ignore those anyway. Paying a little money is almost like betting yourself $6.95 that this time you’re not going to burn out your battery through improper use.

1. and really, what’s the point of having a Mac portable with wireless internet f you’re just going to keep it tied to a wall like a watchdog on a chain—let it free!! [↩]

Follow Friday—The Blog Edition

Follow Friday is a weekly tradition on Twitter where users recommend other users for people to follow. I’ve kept up with it pretty well but sometimes I wonder if all of my Twitter friends have met each other already and if I’m not just reintroducing the same people to the same people every week. So, just to see what happens, I’m going to introduce my Twitter friends to my blog readers.

My usual method of deciding who to recommend for Follow Friday has been to go over the past week’s mentions and recommend some of the people who have reached out to me ( @rickmacmerc ) in some way and have engaged me in conversation. Conversation wasn’t the original intent of Twitter but that has certainly changed and now it’s a huge part of the experience, so I want to reward those that bring me into their circle and encourage others to do the same.

So, without much further delay, I will bring you my list. Just hover over the links for a little window from which you can get more info on these folks and give them a follow.

@by7the7sea

@etherbrian ( http://etherbrian.org/ )

@psimac ( http://paulsalzman.com/blog/ )

@joeyjoeyjoey ( http://joricel.com/ )

@brightloudnoise

@globalhermit ( http://www.globalhermit.com/ )

@GasStationSushi ( http://vjs829.blogspot.com/ )

@hornsolo ( http://riesenblog.blogspot.com/ )

@RobertB ( http://howesound.wordpress.com/ )

@JanSKay ( http://JanSKay.blogspot.com/ )

@davesalter84

@SwitchingGranny ( http://switchinggranny.com/ )

@mikema ( http://www.mikema.ca/ )

@leebennett ( http://albj.net/ )

@QueenAimee ( http://www.blueoasismassage.blogspot.com/ )

How to respond to the Service Battery warning

Last weekend, while testing some battery conditioning software for a future story, I noticed a distressing alert in my Battery menu in the Menu Bar. It said “Service Battery” accompanied by that nasty triangle with the exclamation point in it.

Not a happy thing. NOT awesomeness.

Fortunately, I’m spending most of the week creating videos at Mac Station in Abbotsford, so I have access to skilled and certified Apple Specialists who are able to check out my battery and see if it’s really finished.

Fortunately for you, this level of service as not reserved just for friends and family of Apple dealers. If your machine is under warranty¹ this service is free and, quite likely, any repair required thereafter.

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

Don’t be afraid of bringing your Apple products in for service—that’s what the warranty is for.

Thanks to Jeremy Wedel ( @az1de ) for running the diagnostic on my battery and talking with me today on camera so that I could share this technological life lesson with you. My battery failed under warranty and before its time, so my replacement will be free of charge.

Awesomeness.

Follow-up video here

1. and I cannot recommend highly enough that you get AppleCare with your Mac purchase [↩]

Photographer skins his iPhone 4 as a Leica M9

San Francisco photographer, Joey Celis ( @joeyjoeyjoey ) has turned his iPhone 4 into a Leica M9 with this ingenious skin. I had to look this up, not being a photography geek, but the M9 is “the world’s most compact full-format digital camera system” according to Leica. So, I would imagine that this skin would be highly sought after by every iPhone-4-using Leica fan.

With this skin, the photographic “business end” of the iPhone 4 is quite convincing as the compact M9 at a passing glance and can actually take pictures…although, not from the Leica’s lens. If you follow along with Celis’ iPhone 4 Leica M9 conversion photo set on Flickr, you’ll see how it looks in the wild as well as its humble beginnings as a Photoshop document.

While, at first, Celis had no plans to produce the skin for sale, response has been so positive that he posted this along with the picture you see above hinting that ordering information would be on the way soon:

Been getting lots of emails on when I’ll be taking orders for the Leica M9 skin and I think I finally settled on how I would like to release this and it will be in the form of donations to NF¹ .

I’ll post information here and here once I skin the other phone.

Stay tuned and thanks for the support!

1. Neurofibromatosis [↩]

Mover Lite …transfer pics and contacts between iPhone, iPad and Mac

Mover Lite is the FREE version of Infinite Labs’ Mover+.¹

The app runs on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and allows you to transfer contacts and photos between your iDevices over wifi. With a 99¢ add-on to the Lite app, you can also transfer those files to your desktop Mac running Mover Connect.

If you want to be able to transfer files between your devices when they’re not connected to wifi, Mover+ allows for connectivity and transfer over Bluetooth for $1.99.

I’ve found that the app runs very well between two devices, but can get a bit confused when you have three devices, like a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone, all connected as I show in the video. It works, but confusion is a possibility.

Mover has come in handy for me many times when I just wanted to transfer a photo and I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of emailing it to myself or some other such procedure.

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

As mentioned in the video, the iPad stand I’m using is the BookArc for iPad from Twelve South. It’s a nice sturdy metal stand that securely holds the iPad in either landscape or portrait² orientations. It sells for around $45.

1. I’m actually using Mover+ in the video, but I’m pushing Mover Lite here since it’s the FREE introductory app [↩]
2. or even diagonal, if that’s how you roll [↩]

NetFlix instant streaming movies to your iPhone …awesomeness?

The Mac web, or more specifically, the iPhone web is buzzing about Netflix for iPhone today. This is huge for NetFlix subscribers who find themselves in need of on-demand entertainment as it allows them to instantly watch movies and TV shows from the service’s vast selection of titles streamed from their servers directly to the iPhone’s screen.

Since I’m in Canada and still awaiting the arrival of the promised NetFlix service, I have to go by second-hand accounts. Mel Martin from TUAW says…

The new iPhone version has excellent image quality, supports fast forwarding and rewinding of the video stream, and like other incarnations of Netflix, allows you to pick up where you left off if you stop a movie and restart it. As Netflix members will appreciate, you can pause a movie you are watching on a Netflix device at home, and start the movie on the iPhone app and it will resume at the same place.

GeekSugar has a very helpful word of warning: make sure you use the app when you’re connected to wifi or expect a huge cell phone bill.

Like I said, I can’t try the app—I wish I could. Just based on the buzz and the strong potential for a service like this in the marketplace, I have to assume this is awesomeness.

Teleport …and a Feat of Geek Strength

If you don’t know about Teleport from Abyssoft, you should. It’s a donationware application that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control many Macs—a virtual KVM switch of sorts. In the video below, I show how I am able to drag a single folder from one iMac across the screens of two other Macs to a fourth Mac situated across the room from the mouse I’m using to control it.

You probably have no use for such a Feat of Geek Strength, but one situation where I’ve used Teleport with great success is when I’m sitting at my desk using my iMac for some serious video rendering while my MacBook Pro sits in front of the iMac’s screen. I use the mouse and its built-in keyboard to control the MacBook Pro and also use them to control the iMac. With Teleport configured to let me move my mouse to the top of the MacBook Pro screen as the portal to the bottom of the iMac screen, the interface is slick and seamless.

I have to admit and caution that, when using Teleport to control another iMac to control a MacBook to control another MacBook as I did in the video, it can become very easy to lose your cursor and become confused as to which Mac is in control at any given time. But, hey, that’s why they call them Feats of Geek Strength

Have you accomplished any Feat of Geek Strength? Let me know in the comments. Better yet—challenge me!!

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

Automated DVD and Blu-Ray backup, encoding and tagging… right to iTunes

First written back in October of 2009, this post on the Handbrake forums is the backbone of my AppleTV home theater setup.

While it takes a bit of fiddling to set up, it allows me to use my old MacBook Pro as a “Media Mac” that backs up my DVD collection while also making that media available via iTunes and shared across my network to my AppleTV.

Using the system is simple: I insert a DVD and the Batch Rip Dispatcher Automator action asks if it’s a DVD of a movie or a TV series¹ , it copies the contents to an appropriate Batch Rip Folder and renames it automatically. Then, in the wee hours of the evening, an iCal action springs into…well…action and summons Handbrake to encode everything for iTunes. An Automator action kicks in to add metadata, cover art, and the correct title for the resulting files and then Hazel moves it all to my backup folders and adds the movies to iTunes. Once in iTunes, the regular update process propagates the media to my AppleTV making them available for viewing.

It all works like a well-oiled machine. Every time I slide in a disc, my mind reared on Looney Tunes cartoons can’t help but start me humming this tune:

1. this can be set to auto-run if you plan to rip a bunch of movies [↩]

EpicWin!

This is new. I don’t mean that in a “it just came out” sort of way…though it basically did. I mean, I have tried a lot of productivity, task management, to do list and GTD¹ applications in my time and this is the first time I’ve tried one that actually hides within the disguise of an RPG.²

EpicWin! is an iPhone app that allows you to assign yourself tasks, schedule repeating chores and set priorities like any other task management app, but it does so by rewarding task completion with XP³ and “loot.” Your tasks are categorized as feats of strength, stamina, intellect, social or spirit and you can set the priority by the amount of “Epicness” the task is worth upon completion.

You start EpicWin by creating your character: choose its race, its name and then you send it out on quests…like “Do the laundry”…”Mow the lawn”…or “Pick up the dry cleaning” As you complete those tasks your character levels up and acquires treasures which your friends on Twitter and Facebook can receive announcements about if you wish.

It’s a really imaginative idea and I hope the folks at SuperMono develop it further. I’d like to see them offer an online database for you to store your tasks and your progress like Remember The Milk and the ability to compete and share progress with other EpicWinners. Maybe they could allow multiple players to share a task together as an EpicWin epic quest!

The app sells for $2.99 US for the iPhone. What do you use to get things done?

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

1. Getting Things Done [↩]
2. Role Playing Game …get to know your acronyms!! [↩]
3. Experience Points [↩]

Inception explained for Mac users

From JonahRay comes this awesomeness:

Well done… well done.

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