mac station

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 9 2010

The pursuit of Mac Awesomeness

I’ve been thinking of doing quick-and-dirty videos to accompany the stories here at MacMerc for quite a while but the first video is always the toughest. I finally got my inspiration as I was sitting in the local @Starbucks trying to post a story using their free wifi. It was taking me far too long to upload a simple story. Far, far, far too long. This was not going to work.

I looked across the street and noticed my local Mac dealer, Mac Station, and thought, “I bet they have better wifi… I wonder if they’d let me blog from their store.” I assumed they’d want to get something out of the deal—not just let some guy leach wifi and not buy anything. That’s when I came up with the idea to offer to do those nearly-daily videos I wanted to do, but do them from their store. I help get the word out about the awesome store and their fun, knowledgeable staff and in return I get a base to blog from and a gentle nudge to get something compelling done every day.

So here it is, the first video1 . The first video is always the toughest.

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow @RickMacMerc and @MacMerc on Twitter. Me and the staff here at Mac Station have a lot of great ideas we’re going to share with you, but if you know of any Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad awesomeness you want us to feature, post a comment or send me a Submission of Awesomeness and I’ll give it a look.

Thanks for reading this far, as a reward, you get to watch a video of me rescuing a kitten from my car engine»
  1. and, no, this doesn’t take the place of MacMercTV [↩]

This also happened today…

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By RickMacMerc • Featured, macmerc, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, Site News • 3 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,