The jZone

On Wednesday this week, for no apparent reason, the battery on my three month old MacBook Pro decided to die. All of a sudden it refused to charge, reported that it had no charge, and threw all of its toys out of the pram.

I searched on the web, and found someone else had experienced the same problem.

So, first thing Thursday morning I gave Apple a call, and they agreed to send out a new battery pronto.

Yesterday, the battery arrived, and everything now seems to be back in order.

Well done Apple for such a prompt response.

My new MacBook arrived last Thursday, but I’ve been away over the weekend, and have only just managed to get online with it, so more on the MacBook later.

However, while I was away, I also took the opportunity to have a little play with iWeb, to see what its like. The results can be found here.

I don’t think I’ll be ditching Drupal just yet.

My Powerbook is having a bad year. In addition to it’s existing woes, I caught the power cord with my foot the other day, and bent the connector as well as stressing the cord a bit. Its been working intermittently if I give it a bit of a wiggle, but on Thursday night it let off a big plume of smoke, there was a lovely acrid smell of molten plastic, and lights off. The Powerbook only has 11 minutes of power left, so I’m typing this on an old aging Sony VAIO.

I’ve ordered a new power adapter until the new Macintel arrives. But I’m not happy. Apple in the UK charge AAL55 for a replacement power adapter. That is absoluely ridiculous. Looking at the prices on the US store, $79, which isn’t much better. But actually, not too bad all things considered. Either way, its too much for an adapter, so I decided to shop around.

I checked with “Cancom”:http://www.cancomuk.com/ and they’ve got a “Macally adapter”:http://www.macally-europe.com/productpage.php?product=400 for AAL41 (including shipping). So, I’ve ordered one, and its due to arrive on Monday. In the rest of Europe this adapter costs Aca

I’ve taken the plunge… rather than repairing my “poorly Powerbook”:http://www.jzone.co.uk/node/136, I’ve decided to keep it limping along until the launch of the new “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/. I’ve pre-ordered one of the new Macintels with 2Gb of memory, and a nice speedy 100Gb 7200rpm drive.

Various reports have sugegsted that the performance claims made about the new Macintels are a little over-hyped. I’m not too worried about the performance under “Rosetta”:http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary_exec_a/chapter_7_section_1.html. Sooner or later the apps I run will all be compiled as Universal Binaries (hopefully sooner rather than later). The most painful wait will be for Photoshop, which it has been suggested wont see the light of day before the end of the ‘06.

In many ways, it is against my better judgement buying a first generation product, and the first generation Macintels are bound not to be without problems of their own. As the new MacBook Pro will be my main pc, I will be somewhat dependent on it, so I really hope that Apple manage to pull the rabit out of the hat on this one. They are obviously going to be concerned over the anti-Intel crowd’s fears being realised by a release marred by problems.

The good news is that so far there has been very little bad news concerning the new Macintel iMacs, which are already in the stores. However, it is still early days, and I’m trawling the news feeds daily for any signs of woe.

The other concern over the MacBook Pro is that the models seen at MacWorld were hastily knocked up prototypes, and that the final product is not yet production ready, and that there may yet be delays in getting the product shipped. Hopefully I can keep the old one running if the dates slip too much.

I hate waiting.

At long last “Google”:http://www.google.com/ has released a version of “Google Earth”:http://earth.google.com/ for Mac OS X.

I’ve been playing with a version of the beta for a while now that I managed to find on a dodgy Spanish blog. It looks virtually indestinguishable from the Windows version.

It makes for beautiful eye candy as well as being a very useful application.

The version posted on the Google site is still beta, but its well worth a test drive. You can snag a copy of it “here”:http://earth.google.com/downloads.html.

Wow. I was already a fan of QuickSilver, and if you’re a Mac user and haven’t tried it, then you should! Now, in the latest beta, there’s a new feature called Constellation Menus, and I love em!



Here’s the obligatory screenie:

For more information, read Garoo’s post about configuring Constellation Menus. And thank you to Mathew Hoy. I spotted his Flickr pic, which led me to Binary Bonsai, and on to the Garoo post.

A while ago my Powerbook screen started acting up… every now and then the bottom third of the screen flickers and vanishes, and the rest of the time when the bottom third is visible, a green line a pixel wide can be seen about a third of the way from the left edge.

Unfortunately, the guarantee has just ran out, and I’ve been told it will cost about 350 pounds to replace the screen. No AppleCare.

Oh, and on top of that, I dropped it. Tonki jumped on it while it was perched on my knee.

Although it didnt have far to fall (about 2 foot max), it landed right on the corner.

It mangled the case a bit, but apart from that, you wouldnt know any different… and it is not related in any way to the screen being faulty. It was already faulty.

The worst thing is, I cant bare the idea of being without it for any amount of time, and is my main machine!!!

/sobs

I’ve just uploaded my first Mac OS X Dashboard widget, “WhoIs Widget”:http://www.jzone.co.uk/software/widgets/whois.

It just acts as a simple wrapper for the native OS X whois commad line utility.

Enjoy.

The WhoIs widget provides a simple Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that calls the native /usr/bin/whois command.


To download the current version of the widget, click here: WhoIs-1.0.1.zip


Currently, the widget only supports the Internic and Nominet whois registries. If you require further registries, then please let me know.



While this widget is freeware. However, if you find it useful, please contribute towards further freeware software development for Mac OS X by making a donation via PayPal.


The WhoIs widget is © 2006 by Lee Walton. All rights reserved.