Apple killed my battery! October 31, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : eve , add a commentHoly crap!
I installed Apple’s Battery Update 1.3 when it came out (a month ago) and since then I’ve noticed my battery life wasn’t so good.
How bad is it? I’m at 49% capacity. I was able to play games for 3 hours before the update but I can’t do that any more!
It seems I’m not the only one either.
According to Apple this kind of problem should have shown up with the 1.2 update but it didn’t. I’m left with a significant decrease in my battery’s capacity and I’m under 300 charge cycles (299 but that’s still technically under 300).
I’ll call the Apple shop to see if there’s anything they can do. I’m out of warranty which isn’t a good start but then the damn thing was working just fine a month ago.
I’ve seen reports that PRAM/SMC resetting can help so I’ve done those. I’ll try doing a calibration run and I’ll take the machine into work (where it’s cold all day) to make sure it’s not some reaction to summer setting in. The machine doesn’t go above 50 degrees much which is the same as what I saw over winter though that’s a CPU temp and the case was always very cold in winter.
Update 1 November 2007
I took my machine in to work today. I charged it up until it was fully charged then took it off in preparation for discharging. After a while I looked at it and it showed 74% capacity. WTF?
Update 2 November 2007
So my capacity has gone from 74% then it went down to %67 and it’s now up again at %71. I don’t remember my capacity jumping around like this before. The thing is, if I get the local Apple shop to check out the battery and it’s not faulty, it’ll cost me $99. An official Apple battery costs only $199 new and a FastMac battery (that claims a bigger capacity and a longer useful life) is $100 from the US (which probably means about $120 total since the exchange rates are so good right now. I think I’ll just put up with the battery for a while and then get the FastMac battery to replace my current one once it gets too annoying. I didn’t get the machine for its battery life but for its portability and while using a cable is more of a pain it’s still better than dragging around a desktop machine.
… and now it’s up to 82% capacity! If only it would stay this high when charging I wouldn’t have a problem.
Food Preferences October 29, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , add a commentWe had a lamb roast yesterday and finished the leftovers today. I noticed something strange today. Emily and Isaac had eaten a bit and when I looked Isaac had only meat on his plate while Emily had only vegetables. They did eventually eat all of their food but clearly they’ve got different preferences for food.
Comparing Language Development October 27, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , add a commentThis morning, Emily said “I want a drink”, over and over. Isaac said “please drink” so he got a drink. Isaac says please most of the time now and if he forgets a quick prompt will get him to say it. Emily just refuses to use please in a sentence. Even when we say exactly what we want her to say, “Daddy, can I please have a drink”, she leaves out the please.
Isaac can say complicated words like “helicopter”. Mind you, if you didn’t see that he was holding one at the time, you’d probably think he was babbling at you because he doesn’t really have the sounds he needs. He can stream many words together telling you about things. He’s getting up to 3 or 4 words in a sentence too. He was pointing around the room tonight telling us about what he saw.
They’re doing colours at kindy. It must be sinking in because out of the blue Isaac said to us today, “this red shirt”. The particular shirt has always been a “wiggles” shirt and I’m not sure that we’ve ever called it red before.
Emily and Isaac really love nursery rhymes at the moment. Isaac especially loves ones with actions and he’ll try to do them. Emily is starting to sing along but she doesn’t seem able to get all of the words in a sentence.
Hmm…
Now that I think about it, Emily seems to have real trouble repeating more than a few words. Tonight we were reading her Dora book and she couldn’t say “River, Jungle, Farm”. She tried “Jungle, Farm” and then “River, Farm”. It’s as if there’s a big hole somewhere that things fall into. Perhaps some kind of memory problem. That would certainly go a long way to explaining her language problems.
Google pwns my email October 24, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentA while ago now, I changed my email address from whatever it was before (can’t remember now) to an iTools address. iTools is the service that Apple ran for Mac users that was free and “for life”. However, Apple decided they didn’t want to honour their agreement anymore, renamed iTools to .Mac and started charging money for it.
I had a good look around at the time because I didn’t want to go through the pain of migrating email addresses again. I eventually settled on a bigfoot.com address. I’m a cheapskate so I’ve got a free account which forwards emails to my ISPs account. It’s got limitations but I rarely hit them. Of course, since setting up the bigfoot account, I haven’t actually changed ISPs or anything so the benefit of a “permanent” email address has yet to be realized.
So lately I’ve been noticing more and more the performance and SPAM issues that come from having all of my mail forwarded through bigfoot.com. About half of my email is SPAM and my ISP isn’t that great at filtering it out. My mail client catches the rest but it’s still crap that I have to download. Worse, emails sent though bigfoot.com can take several hours to arrive. I know email isn’t supposed to be instantaneous but most services are much quicker than that.
I didn’t bother looking at Google before because I didn’t want the pain of changing email addresses but after reading a hint somewhere I thought of a cunning plan.
1) My bigfoot.com address will remain indefinitely and will forward to my Google account (though less email will go through bigfoot).
2) Online services will send mail direct to my Google account.
3) Google will filter out spam more effectively than my ISP.
4) Mail.app will pick up mail from Google instead of my ISP and I won’t even notice the difference.
The important part here is number 2. I have never used my ISP address anywhere because if I change ISPs in a hurry and forget the password to the web site at the same time I’m screwed. Quite a lot of my email comes from online services rather than from people. Almost all of the time-critical email comes from online services. This is really the same as switching to Google but I’m keeping my old address around.
It’s been a few days since I switched over. So how is it going?
I noticed immediately that downloading from Google is much slower than from my ISP. For regular emails that’s not a big deal but my dad sends me lots of email forwards with big attachments so I’ve filtered them to my ISP account.
Emails that are sent to Google instead of via bigfoot are arriving much more quickly.
I usually do all of my email stuff in Mail.app but sometimes I want to access email from somewhere else. I never had the option to do that before but with Google holding onto my emails this is now a possibility.
Spam blocking is awesome. So far I’ve had no false positives and a 100% detection rate. I have an old Yahoo! account that I used at Uni and it still lets SPAM though.
Using Thunderbird with an uncooperative LDAP server October 23, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , 2commentsI switched from KMail to Thunderbird at work because I had to upgrade to OpenSuSE 10.2 and KMail no longer lets me view my folder heirachy in a sensible way. I don’t care that IMAP generally puts everything as a subfolder of the inbox, previous versions of KMail displayed it correctly, every other mail client I’ve looked at displays it correctly.
I haven’t used Mozilla Mail since it was part of the seamonkey release (years ago, on Windows). I remember being curious about Thunderbird as a Mail.app replacement but then Mail.app got threading and well, none of the Mozilla apps ever felt particularly native on the Mac.
So I got everything setup and it all seemed to be good, except that email auto-completion wasn’t working right. To cut a long story short it turns out the LDAP server is using cn in a way that Thunderbird wasn’t expecting. The field with the information Thunderbird wants is displayName. There are 3 separate prefs you need to change to get Thunderbird to handle this. You’ll need to add these to prefs.js, replacing SERVER with your server’s identifier (you’ll see it in prefs.js). Note that you really shouldn’t put these in “default” because they’re server-specific.
user_pref(“ldap_2.servers.SERVER.attrmap.DisplayName”, “displayName”);
user_pref(“ldap_2.servers.SERVER.autoComplete.nameFormat”, “[displayName]“);
user_pref(“ldap_2.servers.SERVER.autoComplete.filterTemplate”,
“(|(displayName=%v*)(uid=%v*)(mail=%v*)(sn=%v*))”);
What does this do?
The first line changes the Mozilla Address Book DisplayName field to use the displayName field from the LDAP server. The second line changes the display of auto-competed emails to use the displayName field before the address. The last line was the hardest to figure out. I found this page which gave me a suitable value which I tweaked to use displayName.
So now my Thunderbird displays and auto-completes on displayName instead of cn. Yay.
Update 4 March 2009
It seems somewhere between when I wrote these instructions and the current build of Thunderbird (2.0.0.19) something broke. Thunderbird still looks at the default attrmap so if you need this you can set the default attrmap rather than one for the specific LDAP server.
user_pref(“ldap_2.servers.default.attrmap.DisplayName”, “displayName”);
I have raised a bug for this (481338).
Kid Update October 22, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : emily, isaac , add a commentIn some ways, Isaac’s language is ahead of Emily’s. He says please and thank you with minimal prompting and sometimes spontaneously. Emily still just doesn’t seem to get it, refusing to use please in a sentence and telling us what she wants instead of asking for what she’d like.
<rant>
According to the official report we got, Emily’s language is “delayed” but that’s clearly wrong. There’s nothing at all “delayed” about Emily’s language. To delay means to move forward in time. To have delayed language you’d need to have a standard rate of development, starting at a later point than normal. The reason they use “delayed” is because the don’t want to use the (not politically correct) accurate word, “retarded”. To retard is to lengthen and slow. It’s a more accurate description of Emily’s language, which has developed at a slower than average rate. I hate political correctness, especially when people abuse the language in order to avoid using particular words.
</rant>
I caught Emily sneaking broccoli into Isaac’s bowl tonight. It’s the latest move in a string of bad behaviours. I don’t think Emily is trying to be bad. I think she’s a bit confused at the moment. She sees Isaac doing things and tries to mimic them in order to get the same response (which of course doesn’t happen). She tries to play with Isaac but usually ends up telling him what to do and pushing him around. I suspect she’s one of the more dominant kids at kindy because she doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with telling everyone what to do. The language problems she’s having won’t be helping either because she just can’t talk like other kids her age.
Isaac is really in a sweet spot right now. He’s charming, cute and full of giggles. He’s got enough language to talk but not enough to be annoying. He runs around laughing. He smiles for cameras. The only time he’s not nice is when he’s tired or hungry.
Isaac has finally slowed down his eating. For a while now he’s been eating more than Emily. Bree noticed today that he’s shot up quite a bit. He’s now eating about the same as Emily. Both of them are eating less than they were a few months ago. Isaac is still fairly thin. Emily is taller but more solid, she’s getting little boobs now.
Emily and Isaac have quite a bit of overlap now in what they like. Isaac likes cars and other wheeled toys more than Emily while she’s more into her “baby” and other role-playing activities. They’ve both got doll houses. We got hers first, it’s big and wooden but the pieces are small. She’s got a smaller plastic one at my dad’s house to play with and we noticed that Isaac liked it too so we got him one for here. He doesn’t have the fine motor control to handle her doll house so his has bigger, less intricate pieces. Emily likes playing with his house but they’re not always the best at sharing toys.
Isaac's language moves along October 1, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : isaac , add a commentIsaac’s language has moved along another step. He can say a few multi-word sentences (including the charming “more please”). He tries to sing the alphabet song but only gets “A B C D” (though I guess that’s quite an achievement). He surprised Bree by saying “Shrek” when a Movie World ad came on last night. He can say “Isaac” and “Ramsay” but not “Hamish”.
When asked if he wants to go to the toilet he always answers “no”. We’re not even sure if he’s ready yet so we’re not going to push it.