How much of your Macbook's battery is gone for good?

coconutbattery.png

Rechargeable batteries start deteriorating from the moment they are manufactured. I’ve noticed my Canon 20D’s batteries don’t last quite as long as they did 2 years ago. AA and AAA batteries seem to be even worse. As I’m heading to San Francisco in July I’ll be doing a lot of flying so it’ll be important that my Apple Macbook laptop have a decent battery life.

There’s no quick fix for this as it’s not reversible but if you’re wondering how much life is left, then Coconut Battery is a must have. I installed it last night and it looks like my battery still has 85% of it’s capacity left after 11 months of use. That’s not bad. It’s not enough to get me across the Atlantic but I don’t know if I want to spend €139 on a second battery when I’ll only ever use it once a year.

I think it is possible to slow down the deterioration. Don’t unplug your laptop! The less you use the battery, the longer the battery will last.

The WordCamp 2007 schedule is now online

The schedule is up for your perusal now. It’s a two day event this year on the 21st and 22nd of July with the highlight being the bbq lun.. uh, I mean, it’s all great. I’m looking forward to attending as many talks as I can and meeting people. I’m sure Matt Cutts will have some interesting whitehat SEO tips for us too!

Meanwhile, a group of Irish people who are heading to Silicon Valley on December 2nd to, “try and build some long-term relationships and friendships with people over there which will be good for the Valley and good for the Paddys.” From the About page:

An ad-hoc group of Irish business people have decided to form their own delegation to tour Silicon Valley and create closer bonds with companies and people in the mecca of the computer world. The tour nicknamed “PaddysValley” will head off at the start of November, taking advantage of the new air routes from Aer Lingus.

There’s still plenty to do but if you’re in business in the Valley, and want to build up a relationship with business in Ireland, check out paddysvalley.org. A pity they’re not heading over in July. It’d be nice to have an Irish crowd at WordCamp!

Update! Matt says the registration page is now active. That Paypal IPN stuff is the business!

My flickering Macbook

I thought I had got off lucky with my Macbook. I had dodged the problems with sudden shutdowns that others experienced and I was happy with it. Unfortunately, for the last two days the screen on the laptop has flickered for about 30 seconds after coming out of sleep mode. It looks like someone is adjusting the brightness up and down a few notches really quickly. Here’s what it looks like:

Is there a fix for this? Not yet. There’s speculation that a firmware upgrade might fix it but I have my doubts. My laptop is still under warranty but I presume it has to be sent to Dublin for repair. I better read the warranty card.

I’m not the only one affected by this. Check out these other blogs and discussions:

It’s very disappointing.

In other news, I’m looking for a quiet PC to replace my noisy desktop machine. It’s possible to tell from anywhere in the house when the machine is off. It’s that noisy! My brother has a nice quiet Dell desktop, but I think he got lucky. I’m very seriously thinking of buying another laptop and hooking a proper keyboard, mouse and my LCD monitor to it. I can cope with having a relatively small harddrive in it. All my backups are now done to an external 500GB disk anyway.

The Thieving Duck on The News Of The world

thieving_duck.jpg

Do you read the UK Sunday newspaper, The News Of The World? A comment was left on my photoblog yesterday saying that newspaper used my Thieving Duck image in their magazine and I’m interested in seeing it for myself. If it’s true, they used the image without permission or attribution and that makes me just a little bit angry.

I’m posting this here because this blog has a lot more readers than my photoblog and I already mentioned it there and nobody responded. I emailed the newspaper yesterday but I’m not holding my breath waiting for a reply.

If you have last Sunday’s newspaper, I would really appreciate a photo of the page in question. I can be emailed at donncha @ ocaoimh.ie, thanks!

Update! In case you missed my comment below, I received an email from NotW offering me their standard rate which I’ve accepted. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon.

Dofollowing links in comments and trackbacks

I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be stalked followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.

It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.

There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.

The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.

Health food firms told to "Prove it!"

It’s about time for this to happen. Food companies have been claiming X, Y and Z about their products for long enough. An article in the Sunday Times goes on to say that, “FOOD companies that make false or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of their products will be forced to withdraw them under a new European Union crackdown.”

One of those products listed in a table that accompanies the paper version of the article is the baby food Aptamil. There is very little proof that it helps a baby’s immune system. Looks like Milupa were quick off the mark changing their packaging.

2007-06-13_img_1993-l.jpg

The prominent label, “Supports your baby’s natural immune system” is now missing on the new packaging. Score one for consumers!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Adam needs annother feed. Typing one handed takes ages!

While on the subject of feeding babies, there is an Islamic Fatwa that says adult men can be breast fed. Strange, but read more here

I am legend – last man standing?

This reminds me of a book I read a few years ago. A man off hiking in the country hurt his leg and recovered in a remote log cabin. When he hiked back down everyone was dead. Almost. Eventually he found other survivors of the plague, and the story follows his life and the lives of his children as they descend from civilized community to half naked hunter gatherers stumbling away into a new and threatening world.

I found this trailer for the new Will Smith movie, “I Am Legend” via Anthony’s blog and it could be rather good. As is my want to do these days I checked Youtube for a trailer and found a fan made film and rehearsal clips from the movie. After watching the following movie, check out the comments. Not too many people are happy Will Smith will be playing the lead role! To be honest I though I was watching Independence Day all over again!

Rehearsal clips seem to be shot by local people in New York, not any “behind the scenes” videos by the production staff. Here are a few: video 1, video2 (Will Smith makes a brief appearance in this one), and this one has it’s good moments.

I’m going to look for the book first.

PS. Want to download the trailer? There are probably plugins to do it, but I found that running strings on the .mov loader file displayed the actual movie file. ‘Course I’m only going to watch it once or twice so why bother downloading it? Ho hum! Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to do something, just because we can do it! I will say it looks very impressive full screen.

PPS. Wikipedia page on the book, and the film. Don’t read if you hate spoilers!

I'm not the only one to love the Alfa 147

This evening I watched an old Top Gear where Jeremy Clarkson put an Alfa 147 GTA through it’s paces and compared it to a VW Golf and Ford Focus.

Despite the fact that it will break down, something will fall off, and it’s slower than the other two cars, all three presenters would still buy the Alfa. If you’ve ever owned or driven an Alfa 147 you’ll know exactly what they mean. I read a review of the Alfa 147 in a paper and then months later had the opportunity to test drive one. I fell in love immediately. How could I not buy it? It was a love/hate relationship almost from the start.

The famous Alfa build quality made itself known early on:

  • My Alfa’s dashboard died for absolutely no reason while driving to work one morning. I had to pull over, switch off the engine and start her up again to get things working again.
  • The ABS or Traction Control kicked in going over small potholes. If you know Irish roads you know there are a lot of potholes.
  • Three of the bulbs in the headlights went at exactly the same time and had to be replaced while I was away from Cork.
  • There were other problems with it and I had to bring it back to the garage several times.

I wouldn’t trust it as far as I could throw it but would I buy another Alfa? I’d be awfully tempted..

Here’s what the Top Gear guys think and judge for yourself. Sheer lunacy?

What car have you absolutely adored? What car made your blood boil with passion to drive? What car would make you enjoy a long drive along bumpy roads? Mine’s the Alfa Romeo 147, what’s yours?

Google just killed the ad click tracking industry

It would appear that Google stopped displaying the “Go to ….” message in the status bar when someone clicked on Adsense adverts.

What’s the big deal with this? Unfortunately it means that it’s impossible to track what adverts are being clicked, with the aim of removing low paying or MFA adverts using the competitive ad filter.

eCPM is up today, possibly because Google stopped arbitrage accounts. I hope it’s a sign of better things to come and Google will improve their filter to the extent that it would make the competitive ad filter redundant except for filtering out competitive adverts, like it was supposed to!

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.