PureGin.org

I bought a new battery for my 13" Black Macbook yesterday from BattDepot. The Apple replacement part goes for $159, I've seen third party replacements in stores for $129, but BattDepot lists theirs for $47.99 plus shipping and handling. After taxes, it comes to just under $60, almost $100 less than Apple's suggested retail price.

It seems that BattDepot is a reseller for Dr. Battery, so when I selected the "Pick up from warehouse" option ($5) I was given the address of the Richmond warehouse of Dr. Battery. The battery fits nicely, and is a good though not perfect match for color and texture. It is reported by System Profiler as a 5125 mAh battery at 12566 mV, once fully charged.

This has got to be one of the simplest little hardware hacks I've done, but perhaps also one of the most effective.

The problem:

I've owned four generations of Mac notebooks, and several other Apple products besides, all featuring variants of the same basic power adaptor design: the squarish, rounded white brick with flip-out wings for wrapping the low-voltage line for storage. Many of these power adaptors have not stood up well to everyday use - though to be fair, I do mean I use them pretty solidly every day. One of the early adaptors for my iBook developed a short on the 120/240v side. The magsafe adaptor on my latest laptop, a Macbook Pro, had the low-voltage line pull out of the rubber strain relief sleeve attached to the brick, exposing the internal wiring.

After the usual amount of sys admin fiddling, I've moved most of my Drupal sites onto a new server: an Apple 1.66 GHz Core Duo Mac Mini. Over the coming weeks I'll be doing some performance tuning and testing to see how it stacks up against the old server, a Dell SC 1425 dual Xeon box.

I wiped the Mac Mini's drive and installed Ubuntu 9.04 server, which took a bit of fussing, but turned out to be pretty easy once I figured it out (more details on that later; basically I had to install 8.04 and do an online upgrade to the newest version)

The box is sitting beside me - tiny, silent, consuming only 23W or so at idle, 110 at full CPU, compared to almost four hundred watts for the old server. Actually, I suspect that these figures are a bit on the high side. I'm planning to actually measure the power consumption, but that's a project for another day. I suspect that the humble Mac Mini has one of the best performance ratings per Watt consumed of any server anywhere. The new (2009) ones are even leaner. I have to say that I'm in awe of this little box.

It's running 'headless' (needs no monitor or keyboard to boot up) thanks to a bit of hardware hackery that I found here. I took photos and documented the (pretty quick and easy to do) assembly of the dongle in this flickr photoset.

Next steps: install a faster, more robust drive (perhaps an SSD?) and get SELinux working. Also web performance benchmarking.

So, the MacBook is back from repairs, the USB system has mysteriously fixed itself, and I've replaced the stock 80GB 5400 RPM Toshiba drive with a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 160GB drive. I was worried that this drive might draw more power than the one it was replacing but it turns out to draw only 620 mA, compared to the 1A that the original drive draws. Sweet! Bigger capacity, better performance, and better battery life.

The Video glitches I talked about in my previous posting have completely disappeared since I re-installed a fresh copy of Windows XP SP2. This time I have not been tempted to mess with the hardware graphics acceleration settings on the Windows side. I'm hoping that Apple will eventually support acceleration fully in Mac OS X.

I've been using my new 2Ghz 13.3" Black MacBook for about a week now, figured it's time to write a few first impressions.

Case: The case is almost 2 inches wider than my 12" PowerBook G4, only a smidge deeper. It's actually thinner than the 12" PowerBook - more the thickness of the larger PowerBooks. It fits into the sleeves/cases designed for the 14" iBooks, with about a 1" gap because the iBook is deeper (and a bit thicker). It's also a tad heavier. I do miss the ultra-portable form factor of the 12" PowerBook. Somehow the 13.3" form factor strikes me as a compromise.

Yesterday I watched a woman answering her cell phone as she got off the bus. She was carrying a bunch of bags and had to open the flip cover of the phone with her teeth, while clinging to the phone with her one free hand. All of this took place in front of a giant colourful Motorola adverisment, featuring another young woman dancing exuberantly with her new Motorola phone in hand. I actually laughed out loud at the irony.

My 6 year old server has been suffering in recent months from spontaeous 'freezes' - somewhat mysterious, and related to a disk, I think. After trooping off to reboot the beast one too many times, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get a new server. Deciding that my time was worth something, and that Sys Admin was not the most enjoyable activity in which to spend random hours of day and night, I persuaded myself to buy a 'real' server.

Whew! Today, March 14, a courier arrived with my replacement (new, reconditioned or remanufactured) iPod. Yay! I hope that this concludes the iPod Service Saga.

I have to say I'm impressed with the speed with which the new unit was sent out to me... not counting the initial seven weeks of waiting of course :-) Once the machinery was set in motion, things seemed to move with satisfying rapidity. I didn't even have time to go into iPod withdrawal...

My iPod (10GB - the non-click wheel model), after a year of pretty hard use, is starting to show its age. It experiences sporadic freezes, for which the only cure is letting the battery drain completely, and then recharging and restoring the settings. The recording functions no longer work, and battery life is down to about half of what it used to be.

Apple tells us on their iPod webpage that we can expect approximately the equivalent of 400 complete charge/discharge cycles from the Lithium ion battery which powers the iPod, before the battery capacity starts to diminish significantly. This works out to somewhere between a year and two years for most people.

The iPod is not an item which can be serviced by Apple technicians at your friendly local dealer. Instead, you must send yours in for service to Apple. There is a minimum $99 USD charge for