tips

Sep 1 2010

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 [↩]

By RickMacMerc • Featured, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, News, tips, troubleshooting • 6 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 25 2010

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!»

By RickMacMerc • Featured, Geek News, hax0r, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, News, osx, productivity, tips • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 29 2010

TotalFinder brings tabs to Snow Leopard

totalfinder screenshot tabs 370x252 TotalFinder brings tabs to Snow Leopard

I wanted to throw out a tip that has made my Mac-using experience much more productive: you are probably familiar with tabs in your web browser. They let you open a bunch of webpages without actually having a bunch of windows cluttering up your screen—they’re all nicely gathered in one window and are each accessible via their own tab. Get ready to have that same tabbed awesomeness in the Finder with TotalFinder from BinaryAge.

Just like in your web browser, you can switch between tabs, drag tabs to and from windows and reorder them within windows. There are tons of other customization options available under the Finder Preferences once the software is installed.

If you worry about installing Finder plugins, and well you should, TotalFinder does not overwrite your Finder.app files. It modifies the running Finder application image in-memory. If you install the software and still feel guilty about it later, BinaryAge supplies an uninstaller to set things right back the way they were—no one has to know. You can even disable TotalFinder without uninstalling it via the Terminal, just check out the FAQs

Version 0.9.6, which came out earlier this week, is available for free. Once version 1.0 arrives, TotalFinder will cost $15. So, I recommend you give Finder productivity a try and see if you’ll be on board when this freeware goes payware. I know I will.

What cool productivity gems are you using to make the most of you Mac experience? Let me know in the comments. If you teach me something new, I’ll link you up when I post about it!

By RickMacMerc • News, productivity, tips • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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