I had a MacBook Pro battery that was randomly shutting my computer off when draining down. Dismayed, I took it to the Apple Store to see if there was anything that could be done. I knew that AppleCare, Apple’s extended warranty that I highly recommend for laptop computers, generally allowed for one replacement battery. Unfortunately, this battery in question *was* my replacement battery.

The gentleman at the Genius Bar was kind and listened to me. I like it when, if I know what I’m talking about, people treat me like I know what I’m talking about; this man did. Within a few minutes, I had another replacement battery, and I was on my way home.

New Battery Screenshot

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My tweets for the night tell the story:

• I can’t believe everyone missed the biggest feature of iTunes 8.
• Podcast controls have been moved out of iTunes Preferences (cmd+,) and into their own window from the Podcast view.
• In that podcast view, one can see the how often iTunes checks for new episodes and how many to keep.
• The killer feature is that these settings are now able to be applied to podcasts individually, not all-or-nothing. This is amazing.

• Personally, I’ve been asking for this feature for a very long time. It’s handy.
• Moving the prefs out of iTunes Preferences signals that podcasting isn’t a focus of Apple’s anymore, though. It’s separated from novices.

What do you think?

CyberPower is an upstanding company with a great reputation. Their only fault in this situation was a representative with sub-par Macintosh experience. I appreciate their cooperation with working through this situation.

The original post is archived below, for posterity sake.

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I recently purchased an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) from CyberPower Inc. It’s the CP550SL, and it looked pretty good in the store. The box said it was PC and Mac compatible, had a comfortable number of outlets, and had standard shutdown features that worked out-of-the-box with Mac OS X. Great!

For anyone who doesn’t know, a UPS is a glorified power strip, a device that takes one electrical outlet and makes several. In addition, it has a built-in battery to power attached devices in the event of a power failure. Using a usb cable, a UPS connects to a computer so the computer can shut itself down before the UPS runs out of electricity.

I plugged in all of my devices, attached the USB cable from the UPS to my Mac, and plugged the UPS in. After cycling the power on all of my devices, I booted my Mac. Excited to configure the automatic shutdown options (the real reason anyone buys a UPS), I went to the Energy Saver prefpane of System Preferences.

Much to my surprise, all of the UPS options were grayed out. I couldn’t configure anything!

From here, I did the technical thing. I cleared out the user and system caches on my MacBook Pro, rebooted, and tried again. No luck.

At this point, I did the responsible thing – contacted tech support. I sent this email:

I just took the UPS out of the box and installed it with my Mac by plugging the USB cable into my Mac’s USB port. In the System Preferences panel, Energy Saver, I can see the UPS under the drop-down “Settings for:”. When I click that and go to the UPS tab below, I can see the battery level and model, but all of the UPS options (what make the UPS useful, like shutting down the computer after a certain period of time) are grayed out! The UPS is useless unless those options work. I’m an administrative user and the panel is unlocked.

I’m a poweruser, and I’m puzzled as to what the problem could be. Normally these things “just work”. Any help would be appreciated before I have to take this unit back.

This morning, I got this two-sentence response:

The grayed out option is a bug in the latest version of Mac. You can check for an update from Mac.

This response is unacceptable. First and foremost, “the latest version of Mac” doesn’t make sense. The Mac is a computer, the Operating System it runs is Mac OS X, and the company that ships both of those products is Apple Inc. A tech support person would never say,

The grayed out option is a bug in the latest version of Windows. You can check for an update from Windows.

Obviously, he or she would recommend that I check for an update from Microsoft or from Windows Update.

Moving on, there’s no update available from Apple! I’m running the latest version of the Mac OS; the next version, 10.5.5, isn’t expected for some time (more than two weeks). A responsible tech support agent would have told me that CyberPower Inc. is working with Apple to correct the problem and I should expect a fix on a certain date or time-frame. Due to his or her lack of detail, I will likely return this product to the store I purchased it.

The Apple market-share is a small fraction of the computer market. However, we’re a vocal fraction. Until this is resolved, I unequivocally urge Mac users not to purchase any products from CyberPower Inc.

Time is scarce, knowledge isn’t. Today, in an ever-decreasing timeframe, we need to know more about our computers. Although the Macintosh is worlds ahead of the PC, it has its problems. The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab tackles these problems and explores new uses for our macs in an entertaining and informative way.

Its greatest asset? The podcast is divided into chapters so that listeners can quickly scan for questions that they’re interested in. Sick of hearing about networking? Skip it and move onto hard disk problems! A very well-done show, worthy of subscription.

I thought my personal productivity system was air-tight. I’ve been getting my tasks done – or so I’ve thought. But as I listened to Merlin’s talk, one point in particular resinated with me.

At 25:12 in, Merlin asks, “Who gets access now?” That is, who will I let interrupt me as I’m working? I looked around my desktop. Gmail notifier, Twitterrific, and Adium are constantly demanding my attention. I’m changing my use of these applications. I’ve decided to only use Adium when I’m actually open for conversation or have to post where I am, I’m axing Twitterrific in favor of the canonical twitter website, and I’ll check my email twice a day or so.

And then I got to thinking about Quicksilver. I love Quicksilver; it’s an application launcher on steroids. One of the plugins I use for Quicksilver is the Camino Bookmarks plugin. I can evoke Quicksilver using my keyboard shortcut (command + enter), type the first few letters of any website I’ve bookmarked, and press return to load that page. For example:

f – facebook
g – gmail
r – google reader
d – digg
p – pownce

Because those time-suck websites are so easily accessed, I go to them far too often. My new productivity experiment is to disable the Camino bookmarks feature of Quicksilver and see how much of my life I get back. Instead, I’ll check those sites in the morning, at night, and maybe when I have a free moment at school.

It’s amazing to realize that the tool you appreciate the most to save time is what’s actually causing you to habitually waste it.

The iPod Touch is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a wonderful media player and an even better Internet and email device. But, when you’re looking at your iTunes library on its superb screen, you realize just how badly your ID3 tags and album art are.

I spent a large part of this holiday (happy President’s Day!) cleaning up the cruft from years of accumulating music. Luckily, there are some great pieces of software on the Mac and web services to do this.

• iEatBrainz (Freeware) – The Mac OS X client of MusicBrainz analyzes any tracks you feed it and compares its musical ‘fingerprint’ with a known database.
• Album Art Thingy (Shareware) – This inexpensive app looks up your currently playing track on Amazon.com and tries to find artwork. It does lyrics, too.
• Amazon.com (Service) – Whatever Album Art Thingy doesn’t get, you can get yourself by searching the MP3 store.
• Last.fm (Service) – This social network site helps see if you’ve done your ID3 tags right.

It’s really worth it to clean up the cruft from your iTunes library. You’ll not only delete music you don’t like anymore, but you’ll have a greater appreciation for the music you do like. The album art browsing in iTunes, Front Row, and an iPod is really great looking, too.

Good luck, and be sure to share your experience in the comments.

Moving down from a 2.16 Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM is difficult for a few reasons. The first is just plain speed. Running Camino, my Macintosh web browser of choice, was painful on the Cube. There were optimized builds available, which helped somewhat, but browsing was slow and unpleasant. Loading a comment thread on Digg caused the browser to lock up for around ten seconds, playback of Flash videos (like the ones on YouTube) was tricky, and having more than four tabs open turned the browser into a snail.

The second difficulty in jumping to a computer introduced in July of 2000 is its operating system. My MacBook Pro runs Apple’s recently introduced version of Mac OS X, Leopard. As we know, the G4 Cube can run Leopard, but it is largely unstable. Thus, for the last twelve days, I’ve been using Mac OS X Tiger. Although Leopard has bugs that I often twitter about, it is the most impressive operating system I have ever used. The perspective I have from running this antiquated computer for so long lets me see that.

My third difficulty was not being able to do certain tasks. For example, I encountered a major design bug on my site this week thanks to a reader email (thanks, Michael Clark!), but could not fix it. I couldn’t trust the Cube to run the all of software I use to fix up Exposay (Transmit, Coda, Safari, Firefox, Opera) at the same time. I’ll fix the bug as soon as possible.

Doing a key school assignment in the last week was very difficult on this computer. My word processor of choice is Office 2008 for the Mac, which is a very slow and very unstable application on a 450mhz PowerPC G4. To be fair, its requirements clearly state that a PowerPC G4 processor must be clocked at 500MHz or faster for it to run acceptably.

I pushed this machine to its limit this week. I had Camino, Adium, iTunes, Finder, TextEdit, Dictionary, Last.fm, Twitterrific, QuickSilver, and the Gmail Notifier running at almost all times. Although it was most definitely difficult to use, the machine never crashed once, even under long stretches of 100% CPU load.

Really, I’m fortunate to have purchased this extra computer. For what I spent on it, $250, it really came in handy. Besides serving as my Mom’s computer, it never hurts for me to have a backup machine. If it ran Leopard natively, it would have been perfect. I would have just cloned by MacBook Pro’s hard disk to it and carried on as usual. That’s a wonderful aspect of the Mac – true application and data portability from machine to machine. It’s a shame that the Cube could only run Tiger.

Besides downloading optimized versions of some of my applications, running the computer at a lower color depth was helpful in speeding things up. Rather than displaying millions of colors on my screen, I elected to display only thousands of colors.

I hope my experience will provide some insight to others running slow computers and let everyone else appreciate their modern supercomputers. I’m glad to be back.

1. Mac OS X 10.5.2. I’m having a few problems with Leopard right now. It’s great, but Spaces has glitches and USB drives don’t eject as quickly as I’d like them to.
2. A new ultra-portable MacBook. I don’t need a computer right now, but it would be nice to know that the future is shiny.

There are reports of a leaked Steve Jobs keynote flying around. If they’re true, I’m excited.