Oh, hello. You arrived just in time to be my parents’ next computer and to be the last stake in the heart of Microsoft Windows in this household.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Archives for category: Mac
If you use a Magic Mouse or the multi-touch trackpad on a portable Mac, and you’d wished you could do more gestures, I think you’ll like this.
I’ve tried both BetterTouchTools and MagicPrefs, but jitouch 2 stands out a head above with its UI design and built-in gestures.
jitouch 2 is available here for US$6.
Sexy as Macs may be, their accompanying power bricks are simply unwieldy. The “ears” on the MagSafe power adapter for winding the cord may be well-intended, but I’ve lost count of the number of times the wound cord has slipped free of the “ears” and gotten itself tangled up with the rest of the stuff inside my bag. Then there is the problem of the plug end of the power adapter—there’s nowhere to wind it up, is there?
The Quirky PowerCurl solves all that. Both the plug cord and the MagSafe cord wrap around the PowerCurl, allowing for quick and easy unraveling, while the power adapter is elevated for improved air circulation and cooling.
Made for the 45W, 60W, 85W, and older rectangular 85W MagSafe Power Adapter, the Quirky PowerCurl comes in hot pink, lime green, baby blue, bright orange, and charcoal for the 60W and 85W models, and orange for the 45W and rectangular 85W models.
Head on over to Quirky to see all the other great stuff they’ve got.
Whoever wants to piggyback an order for the PowerCurl, drop me a email by Monday.
Say hello to Ceres, my new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
In continuing a tradition of naming the machines I own after planets and constellations (which is, in turn, naming them after figures in Roman or Greek mythology), I christened her a name that compliments those of her fellow stablemates Tethys, the jinxed 15-inch MacBook Pro she replaces, and Cyrene, the Lenovo S10 netbook I’d hackintosh’d.
When I got myself the iPhone 3G, I signed up for a data plan that gives me 30GB every month. Since I did not think I would be using up all that data on just a mobile device, and also that I had been looking for a long-term solution to the problem of not finding wireless access while on a shoot at some remote location, I was on the lookout for a 3G modem for my laptop.
Okay, okay… I wanted mobile broadband really only because all the ‘friendly neighbours’ around my local coffeeshop have wised up and password-protected their wireless networks. So there.
I took one look at the Huawei E220 external USB modem SingTel offers and immediately dismissed it; it’s ridiculous to have that thing dangling off my laptop. Inelegant. Impractical. I decided I wanted an ExpressCard solution.
I am a big fan of ExpressCard and its predecessor PCMCIA/PC Card. Being a slot in a laptop, it lets you keep a peripheral tucked away and have it accompany your laptop all the time. Take, for example, the ubiquitous multi-format memory card reader: it’s something I use daily, so I have one hidden away in the ExpressCard slot.
The data plan I signed up for was crafted for the iPhone, so SingTel didn’t think they needed to throw in the modem; I’d have to fork out more money on top of the monthly subscription. There was no option to purchase the modem separately. Not that I would have, any way, though M1 was more than happy to sell this modem to me for S$398.
S$398! I told them politely to go fly a kite. You can get the Huawei E220 for as low as S$180 if you knew where to look.
Well, I’m happy I didn’t settle for less, because I found the BandLuxe 3.5G C100S HSDPA Adapter.
The BandLuxe 3.5G C100S HSDA Adapter is both an ExpressCard and a USB device. By sheer clever design, a USB adaptor is provided with the modem; should you need to reposition the modem for better cell tower reception, you can simply slot the modem into the adaptor. And, in a very, very nice touch, a small plastic hook is included for you to snap onto the now-external modem so you can hang it off the screen lid of your laptop.
I have never heard of BandLuxe before (some manufacturer from Taiwan), but I sure am impressed with them. Little things like this matters, y’know?
I was up and running in no time. It took next to nothing to get the modem up and running in Mac OS X. The configuration scripts necessary for OS X to recognize the modem are baked into the device, so they are always there should you need them again.
The C100S is listed on plenty of online shopping sites, though the price, averaging S$300 before shipping, is way too much. I got mine for S$250 thru the classifieds forum in Hardwarezone. If you are in the market for a 3G modem, and are able to find the C100S for a reasonable price, I highly recommend it.
Oh, and speaking of which, has any one realized how difficult it is to get a 3G modem off the shelf here in Singapore? It’s next to impossible! Can you say “telco conspiracy”?
Those of you who read me with any regularity would, by now, be used to my occasional disappearance from this blog. My laptop sprung a show-stopper on me for the third time, after this and this. This time, it was no fault of Apple’s; the problem was a graphics card that had conked prematurely. Apple honored the cost of repairs even though it has run out of its warranty. To say that this MacBook Pro of mine is jinxed is an understatement of the highest order.
But it’s all good now. And somehow after updating to OS X Leopard 10.5.6, even the DVD drive is happily burning discs again when it would plain refuse to do so in the past three months or so.
With a new logic board, new screen and fairly new keyboard and trackpad, I am now typing on what is essentially a brand new laptop.
It took, oh, only all of a year and a half, and all of S$838′s worth of stuff I had to buy as stop-gap measures for this sucker to get its act together. There is peace in my computing world now.
Pui.
On the heels of the first-generation iPhone, WordPress released its very own blogging client application for iPhone and iPod touch. I was very intrigued by what WordPress had come up with but was never able to try it until now.
The verdict? The WordPress for iPhone app rocks!
If you are someone who blogs frequently, iPhone or iPod touch + WordPress is a fantastic combination. Having tried just about every blogging client to use on my Sony CLIÉ, and finally giving up because none of them were any good, the WordPress app is like a breath of fresh air. But having said that, there is one thing about the app I hope WordPress will improve on.
If your iPhone or iPod touch is not connected to a network, and you tap on a recent post, a dialog box pops up saying “No connection to host. Editing is not supported now.” What I’d like for the app to do is to store published posts locally, so that I can tap on a recent post and see it the way it was published, in a Viewer mode. Then, if I want to, I can choose to open this published post for editing. This is how my desktop blogging client—ecto 3 for Mac—works, and it’s be nice if the WordPress app did likewise in a true offline mode.
That aside, I think I’ll be using this app quite a lot. Writing a post on a handheld device has never felt this pleasant before…
I dropped my MacBook Pro five months ago on a shoot. The MBP slipped out of a briefcase that was closed but, unknown to me, unzipped. As I lifted the briefcase and turned to walk away, the MBP slipped out and fell onto hard cement flooring, landing on its top lid. The drop whacked the screen hinges out of alignment.
Subsequently, the 15″ LED screen developed three hairline cracks that converged in the middle of the screen, like an upside-down Y-shape. At this convergence point, and also both at the top and bottom of the screen, pixels began to slowly die day after day. A one-inch strip on the left side of the screen also died.
Several months later, the black blob grew so much it became difficult to get any work done on the MBP without resorting to using an external display.
Apple cited S$1,300 to replace the broken display, the reason for the high price being that Apple will replace the entire top lid assembly—everything from the lid hinges on—instead of merely replacing the LED screen. While the top lid of my MBP was pockmarked with dents at all four corners, my priority was getting the screen replaced. A quick search on eBay turned up listings of a brand new replacement LED screen that could be purchased for approximately S$360 before shipping costs.
I had fully intended on purchasing one from eBay and replacing the screen myself (a decision I would be glad I did not make later). Yesterday, at Sim Lim Square, I chanced upon a computer repair shop that had just brought in a new batch of replacement screens for the MacBook Pro. It was quite a stroke of luck; I had gone only to window-shop, and since the LED screens for the MacBook Pro were hard to come by (the same store did not have any when I made an inquiry two months ago), I was not expecting to find one.
The shop owner quoted S$450 for the repair. ‘And we can do it right now for you,’ he added. I said yes immediately.
The repair procedure generally went well. The only time in which the repair person struggled was when it came to separating the screen from the front bezel; these two components were taped together all around with double-sided tape.
Apple’s industrial design for its products, with a seamless and unblemished appearance in mind, generally results in very little assembly points that are accessible for repair work. Take a quick look around the exterior of the top assembly of the MacBook Pro and you will not find a starting point to begin a disassembly except for two screws, hidden from plain sight and obscured from clear access, at the bottom of the front bezel. Observing how the repair person had to pry the two parts away from each other very carefully, I concluded that Apple must have thought it would be easier and quicker to replace the whole top assembly without running the risk of prying and damaging any of the individual components.
So if you need to have your computer repaired (knock on wood), I would recommend a visit to Vital Computer at #04-36, Sim Lim Square (Tel: 6883-1488).
However, I would strongly recommend that you insist on either the store owner (who worked on my Mac) or a senior tech to perform repair work on your computer; the impression I got from casually observing the store as I waited was that the junior techs could be quite novice. While I was waiting, a customer walked in with a MacBook Pro that could not start up any more. Later, I overheard the tech assigned to the job, when asked by the owner why he had not begun work on the MBP, replying rather helplessly that he did not know how to reinitialize a Mac, a procedure which really should be common knowledge to even the end user.
The other observation I made was that the techs thought nothing of using a screwdriver to pry components. Using a stainless steel screwdriver to pry plastic or, worse, soft aluminum that the chassic of a MacBook Pro is made of is definitely not best practice, is a move that gives me the chills, and is something I would not think of doing myself unless I had a plastic prying tool such as these. All techs should use these. Customers do have an emotional bond with their gadgets and would wish to see as little cosmetic blemishes arising from repair work. To be fair, the store owner did tell me that it was very difficult to separate the screen from the bezel and that he reassured me that he was ‘going to be as careful and gentle as possible’.
An hour later, I had a brand new screen. After almost half a year of staring at a black blob, having to arrange application windows around it, and just about going insane, I am so chuffed to be looking at a pristine screen again.
According to the Readme file for The Sims 2 Mac, the player can launch The Sims 2 in windowed mode (as versus fullscreen mode) by holding down the ⌘ (Command/Apple) key while double-clicking the game’s icon.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work if you’re running OS X Leopard 10.5.4. According to user feedback in forums, there is a bug in Leopard that prevents the game from launching in a window. I decided to poke around and see if I could stumble upon one. And I did. Here are the steps to get The Sims 2 running in windowed mode in OS X Leopard 10.5.4.
1. Open up com.aspyr.TheSims2.plist in ~/Library/Preferences. You may have to open it with Apple’s Property List Editor, which is part of Apple’s Xcode download (requires free Apple Developer Connection membership) and also included in the Developer tools package that comes on the OS X Leopard installation DVD; once you install this, you’ll find Property List Editor at the root level of your hard drive in the /Developer/Applications/Utilities folder.
2. Expand ‘Root’, and look at the entry ‘CommandClickIsRightClick‘. By default, its value should read ‘Yes‘. Click on it and change it to ‘No‘.
3. Save the plist. 4. Now hold down the ⌘ (Command/Apple) key as you double-click the icon for The Sims 2 to launch it, and you should get this dialog box.
By default, The Sims 2 will run in an 800×600 window, so if you wish to run it at another resolution, you may want to leave ‘Always display this dialog at startup’ checked.
My guess is that CommandClickIsRightClick is a setting meant for older Macs, those that did not come with a secondary mouse button, when ⌘+click meant a right-click. Since OS X Leopard (and, presumably, the newer machine you are running it on) has the two-finger tap as right-click, the ⌘+double-click shortcut doesn’t work because the application is actually seeing ⌘+double-click as a right-click and not as a modifier key. I am by no means a Mac expert, so that’s my guess…
Let me know if it worked for you.
This is a test post with Kaku, a beautifully-designed blogging client from a 20-year-old Japanese developer known by the online moniker of ‘ppm’.
Don’t let Kaku’s apparent simplicity fool you. As I explored Kaku further, it became clear quickly that Kaku has a lot to offer beneath its polished surface. Comparing Kaku to ecto 2.4.2 (which has been languishing in the shadow of the forthcoming ecto 3), I immediately prefer Kaku’s interface. It looks and feels like an application Apple has thrown in with OS X Leopard. If iLife came with a blogging client, Kaku might be it. It reminds me of Journler, another application worthy of an association with the iLife family of applications. That I can be impressed with Kaku’s design like I am with Journler’s is the highest praise I can give it, for there are too few applications that possess that delicate balance of form and function. MarsEdit is another application that fits into this category.
The beauty of Kaku’s interface is in how it uses mostly only one main window: at the toggle of a button, past entries appear above the editing area. Neat and elegant. One of the grips I have always had with ecto (and also MarsEdit) is that past entries are listed in one window, while editing an entry would bring up another window. I prefere minimal visual clutter in the writing software I use. In Kaku, HTML view, web preview, past entries, current draft, or even pages (yes, Kaku can download WordPress pages!) are all immediately viewable in one window.
While Kaku’s interface is currently only available in Japanese, I am able to poke through its interface and make sense of what features there are despite the fact that my comprehension of written Japanese is next to non-existent. From what I can grasp—and from the information on ppm’s website—Kaku is a blogging client designed only for blogs powered by WordPress 2.2 or Movable Type 4.1. It offers only HTML editing, so you’ll have to know your HTML tags, although you can instantly preview a draft with the click of a button.
On Kaku’s toolbar, there is an icon of a picture that opens what appears to be some sort of a ‘media manager’ for all the images in every entry.
There is also a ‘Link Manager’ that keeps a record of all the URL links in past entries.
But Kaku is far from finished. Some of my WordPress pages do not render correctly, and dragging an image directly into a draft generates some tag code in Japanese instead of HTML. Post tags do not seem to be supported at the moment. And features such as the ‘Media Manager’ will prove its fullest potential, I am sure, once I cross the language hurdle, for the only way to reference an image in an draft post is to upload the image to my blog in order to get its URL link to paste into the draft. Weird.
While I will not recommend Kaku to English users for now, seeing how there is much work yet to be done to make it usable for us, internationalization is on the roadmap of Kaku’s further development. I look forward to the day ppm achieves that. In the meantime, if you are feeling adventurous, do give Kaku a spin and experience the potential of this gorgeous application.
“Macs just work,” so says Apple in its advertising.
Sure. It may be mostly true for OS X on the whole. But don’t count on it when it comes to the MacBook Pro—and the MacBook, I’m sure, if user complaints on forums are any indication. Perhaps every Mac should come with a sticker on it that says, “This Mac may stop working for no fucking reason.”
My MacBook Pro is merely seven months old but already it has given me countless headaches.
Problem #1: Keyboard and trackpad
There is nothing more unsettling than having a computer die while overseas.
February 26, 2008. Two hours into a 10-hour night train ride from Shanghai to Beijing, the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook Pro decided to die on me while I was doing a video edit I had to complete overnight.
The standard recovery steps to perform on a Mac are to reset the Parameter RAM or to reset the SMC, but both require key presses. Without an external keyboard and mouse, I could do neither. As I sat in the near darkness and rebooted the damn thing for the umpteenth time, hoping for a miracle, I noticed how the backlight of the Mac’s keyboard still dutifully lit up at the login screen each time. The irony of such a thoughtful and elegant engineering touch was not lost on me as I sought a way to reconcile an acceptable reason as to why the fuck the hardware on a seven-month-old laptop should be failing.
I could not, and I was livid.
The damage? Four hours of downtime as I waited for stores to open, and exorbitant prices for a set of external keyboard and mouse.
Upon returning to Singapore, I sent my laptop in for servicing. The over-the-desk service I received was nothing short of excellent, and while I’d have preferred a faster turnaround, it took a reasonable four days to get my laptop back. I was told Apple replaced the keyboard and the trackpad along with, strangely, the entire top chassis, which was consistent with user reports on the internet. All was well, or so I thought.
Problem #2: Laptop goes to sleep randomly
The second episode. March 24, 2008. I was typing away on the MacBook Pro when, suddenly, the display blacked out and the system went to sleep. I woke the system with a press of the spacebar and went back to work. Nothing was lost; it was not a crash.
Two minutes later, immediately upon releasing a key on the keyboard, the MacBook Pro went to sleep again. That got my attention. Probing further, I formed an early conclusion that pressing Command and the \ key would somehow send the laptop to sleep. There was absolutely no reason for it. Later into the evening, I realized that other keystrokes—such as the arrow keys or the Option key—would put the system to sleep as well. Pressing any of the Command, Option, or Control key, and only those keys, would trigger the sleeping; alphanumeric keys were fine. It made no sense whatsoever.
I had a shoot coming up and could not afford to send for servicing. In the meanwhile, I removed all the applications I could think of that could be causing the random sleeping, but to no avail. After suffering the random sleep problem for four days, and after the shoot was done, I took the plunge and reinstalled OS X Leopard. Two minutes after booting into the new installation, the MacBook Pro unceremoniously went to sleep. The only logical explanation left was that a hardware problem existed somewhere inside the MacBook Pro.
In the meantime I’ll just have to put up with these random blackouts, even during presentations. In front of my clients. How acceptable is that?
Problem #3: Mac refuses to go to sleep (!)
It happened only today. And, no, it’s not an April’s Fool joke.
You’d think that, with a fresh installation, the last thing you’d expect are further complications to the problem already bugging you. I thought wrong again. After a preproduction meeting earlier today, I closed the lid of my MacBook Pro and was about to slip it into my messenger bag when I heard both the familiar whine the DVD drive would make whenever the laptop woke up and the fans whirring to life. The Mac has somehow awoken itself. I tried closing the lid again. I tried clicking the ‘Sleep’ in the shutdown dialog. I tried choosing ‘Sleep’ in the Apple menu. The damn thing refused to go to sleep no matter what I did.
Great, just fucking great. So now not only does my MacBook Pro sleep at random, it now refuses to sleep when asked to.
I have never had a sleep or hibernate problem with my old VAIO. Closing the lid meant sleeping the system, and pressing the power button meant hibernating the system. Every single time. On the other hand, browse through the Apple user forums and you will find a lot of user reports about sleep issues on the MacBook or MacBook Pro. At the moment, it seems that the three biggest recurring problems users are facing are related to Airport, sleep/wake behaviors, and a recently-acknowledged bug caused by the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0.
Now, the “Pro” in the MacBook Pro moniker stands for ‘Professional.’ It is a laptop marketed at—and long favored by—professionals in the broadcast and print industry. Our livelihoods depend on the equipment we use. But with inexplicable hardware behaviors and obscure failures that seem to evade technical support personnel, I’m not quite sure what exactly is so ‘pro’ about the MacBook Pro other than its S$4,300, ‘for-professionals’ price tag.
The update weighs in at 343 MB and contains a fairly long list of fixes. You can upgrade through Software Update or download the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Combo Update.
Immediately, with 10.5.2, Apple has addressed two of the biggest user complaints; hierarchical menu for folder stacks in the Dock, as it was for folders in the Dock in Tiger, is back, and the translucency for the menu bar can now be turned off.
Active Directory
- Addresses issues which could hinder or prevent binding Mac OS X 10.5.x clients to Active Directory domains.
AirPort
- Improves connection reliability and stability
- Includes 802.1X improvements.
- Resolves certain kernel panics.
Back to my Mac
- Adds support for more third-party routers, as detailed in this article.
Dashboard
- Improves performance of certain Apple Dashboard widgets (such as Dictionary).
- Addresses an issue in which Dashboard widgets may no longer be accessible after switching to or from an account that has Parental Controls enabled.
Dock
- Updates Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view.
Desktop
- Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.
- Adjusts menus to be slightly-less translucent overall.
iCal
- Improves iCal so that it accurately reflects responses to recurring meetings.
- Addresses an issue in which a meeting may remain on the calendar after being cancelled.
- Addresses stability issues related to .Mac syncing of iCal calendars.
- Resolves an intermittent issue in which editing an event with attendees would cause the event to shrink and not register that the event was updated.
iChat
- Addresses an issue with simultaneously-logged in accounts in which iChat sounds generated from one account might be heard in another account.
- Fixes an issue in which iChat idle time is affected by Time Machine backups.
- Improves connectivity when running iChat behind a router that doesn’t preserve ports.
- Enables logged chats from previous versions of iChat to open faster and more reliably.
- Addresses an issue with text chats in which users may be unable to receive messages from the sender.
- Addresses an issue that may prevent rejoining an AIM chat room without reopening iChat.
- Addresses video chat compatibility issues with AIM 6 and third-party routers.
- Fixes an issue with case-sensitivity of AIM handles.
iSync
- Adds support for Samsung D600E and D900i phones.
Finder
- Addresses an issue in which Finder could unexpectedly quit when displaying folder contents in Column view.
- Addresses an issue in which Finder could unexpectedly quit when accessing Users and Groups in a Get Info pane.
- Resolves an issue that prevented setting permissions on a folder alias.
- Resolves an issue in which the Eject command could write to a disc in the optical drive.
- Fixes an issue in which the scroll bar might disappear when deleting a file within a folder that includes files that are out of view.
- Fixes an issue in the Sharing & Permissions section of Get Info windows, in which the gear icon appears to be gray/disabled after authentication.
- Addresses an issue in which the Show Icon Preview preference might not be not saved when turning it off.
- Fixes an issue that could occur when trying to print an image from the Finder.
- Addresses an issue with Message menu’s Mark > As Read choice.
- Fixes an issue in which duplicate On My Mac folders may appear in the sidebar after upgrading to Leopard.
- Improves the accuracy of the Data Detectors feature.
- Resolves an issue with scrolling through a Note that is displayed using the split view in the message window.
- Fixes an issue with deleting messages located in the Drafts folder.
- Fixes an issue in which dragging the icon in the Safari URL field into a Mail message creates an attachment instead of a link.
- Addresses an issue found when opening a item in the Notes folder that is not a Note.
- Fixes an issue that may prevent RSS feeds from being delivered in Mail.
- Resolves an issue in which a selected message could “flash” from blue to gray when in Organize by Thread mode.
- Fixes an issue with scrolling between multiple To Dos in an email message.
- Fixes an issue in which the body of email messages with certain MIME structures may not be displayed.
- Improves performance with America Online (AOL) account-based messages in Mail.
- Addresses issues with some ISPs during automatic set-up in Mail.
- Addresses an issue in which Mail might not send mail on some networks to some SMTP servers.
- Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.
- Adds an option to view large icons in the Mailbox list.
Networking
- Addresses a hanging issue that may occur when connecting to an AFP network volume.
Parental Controls
- Improves stability when opening the Parental Controls System Preferences pane.
- Fixes an issue that may prevent changes to the email address for permission requests.
- Addresses an issue with printer administration for a guest account enabled with Parental Controls.
- Addresses an issue with setting printer administration privileges from another Mac on the local network.
- Fixes an issue that could prevent certain applications from being allowed.
- Addresses accuracy issues with the web content filter.
Preview
- Improves stability when scrolling through a PDF document.
- Fixes an issue that prevents tabbing within a PDF document after clicking on the PDF.
- Improves the Mail Document feature so that email attachments are more reliably created from Print Preview.
Printing
- Addresses an issue in which remote printers may be deleted when the computer is put to sleep.
- Improves printing performance when using some Microsoft Office applications.
- Resolves an issue with some printing options, such as landscape orientation, number of copies, two-sided printing, and so forth that may not have functioned with some printers shared by Microsoft Windows.
- Adds support for certain printers connected to the USB port of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express base station.
- Resolves a stalling issue that could occur when installing certain Canon printing software from a disc.
RAW Image
- Adds RAW image support for several cameras, as detailed in this article; specifically, the following models are new to the list of supported cameras in OS X Leopard:
- Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
- Canon Powershot G9
- Hasselblad CF-22
- Hasselblad CF-39
- Leaf Aptus 75s
- Nikon D3
- Nikon D300
- Sony Alpha DSLR-A700
Safari
- Addresses issues with Safari reliably resolving certain domains.
Login and Setup Assistant
- Addresses an issue in which Setup Assistant could unexpectedly appear each time Mac OS X 10.5 starts up.
- Improves stability and performance during log in.
System
- Improves the accuracy of the grammar checker.
- The computer will now shut down if an automatic disk repair does not succeed during startup.
Time Machine
- Adds a menu bar option for accessing Time Machine features (the menu extra can be enabled in Time Machine preferences).
- Improves backup reliability when computer name contains slash or non-ASCII characters.
- Fixes an issue in which the backup disk displayed in the Finder may be out of sync with the disk chosen for Time Machine.
- Addresses issues in which some external drives are not recognized by Time Machine.
- The status menu now appears by default.
Other
- Improves general stability when running third-party applications.
- Addresses an issue in which the incorrect search results may be displayed for certain Automator Find/Filter actions.
- Addresses an issue with the Latvian and Russian keyboard layouts.
- Addresses an issue in which the backlight could turn off before Energy Saver’s backlight setting.
I’d chanced upon this product sometime ago, but never thought of picking one up until recently.
I use my MacBook Pro 15″ for tethered shooting both outdoors and in the studio. And, let’s admit it; the battery duration on the MacBook Pro isn’t all that great, especially when compared to that of a Sony VAIO T series notebook. Having been spoilt for choice with the latter, I keep a spare battery for my MacBook Pro. Also, having a spare battery relieves charge/discharge fatigue on the main battery and helps prolong its lifespan.
When it comes to shoots, charging batteries is a very time-consuming process; I’d have to wait for one to charge up completely and then swap it for the other. At the end of a long day, the last thing I’d want to do is to mill around a hotel room waiting for batteries to charge up.
This is why I always opt for dual chargers whenever available. While such options are plentiful for both my photography and film/video equipment, there isn’t a dual charger for my laptop batteries I can get off the shelf.
Until the NewerTech Battery Charger/Conditioner came along.
Available for the MacBook Pro, Macbook, PowerBook G4, and iBook G3/G4, the NewerTech Battery Charger/Conditioner sports two bays for you to charge a pair of batteries at one go. The only limitation is that it charges one battery after the other, and not concurrently; most dual chargers behave this way, any way.
What is particularly useful is the conditioning feature. All Lithium-Ion batteries require conditioning/calibration after prolonged usage. You can either follow these tedious steps as recommended by Apple, or you can simply plug it into the NewerTech Battery Charger/Conditioner and, at the press of a button, let it do the work for you.
In a production environment, in which the working hours are long and every minute of turnaround time can impact the production budget, dual chargers are the way to go. The time you will save and the convenience you will gain makes its US$149.95 price tag a real bargain. I highly recommend this product for any one whose livelihood depends on his or her Mac laptop.
About
34, male and very Cancerian. Often irascible, even if he is prescient to his emotions. Lives for the resonance of beautiful passages, cinematic magic and aural bliss. Dabbles in fiction writing, photography, sketching and daydreaming in his free time, even though he is paid to do just those in a professional capacity.
He is, in other words, quite a geek.
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