Adam on Apple

MacBook Pro Battery Replacement

The battery in my MacBook Pro had been sucking lately: down to about 1:30 of battery life, and sometimes, after a full charge, as low as 20 minutes. Letting it drain a little bit and then re-charging it would bring it back up to 1:30, but still, for a 10 month old battery, that’s not […]

Safe Sleep Snuffed

I’ve written before about my problems getting Safe Sleep / Deep Sleep to work on my MacBook Pro. More frustrating was I couldn’t seem to disable it fully: I could disable it temporarily, but as soon as my laptop used a different Energy Saver preference [which happened automatically when it was unplugged from the power […]

Getting more info an Apple’s Serial Number

I just found this cool site that can take the serial number of your Apple hardware [computer, iPod, etc] and tell you more about the item — the Apple stock number, which factory it was assembled in, the week it was made, and other little factoids. Handy in a pinch: I was trying to diagnose […]

Perian 1.1 Available

The latest non-beta version of Perian [“The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”]is now available. This easy-to-install preference pane gives Apple Quicktime the ability to play many non-Apple encoded videos: DivX, 3ivx, Flash video, etc. And since QuickTime can play them, that means that apps powered by Quicktime — such as Front Row — can now […]

Improving Apple’s Time Capsule, plus some Sparkle Stuff

It’s kind of rude to speak about improving something before it’s even available, but I’m shopping for a new router now, so Apple’s Time Capsule caught my eye yesterday. I’ve been using Time Machine on my Leopard-powered laptop, but I find that I don’t remember to plug in the USB drive often enough for it […]

NetNewsWire [and more] now free!

NetNewsWire is a great RSS client for OSX. It was acquired by NewsGator in late 2005, and since then has continued to improve and be awesome-r. And now, it’s free, along with NewsGator’s other consumer products, including a RSS client for Windows, an RSS Outlook plugin, and a RSS client for some PDA platforms. NetNewsWire […]

Goodbye, Leopard

I tried installing Leopard a few weeks ago on my main production machine. The machine needed a reinstall anyway, to clear up over a year’s worth of cruft, so I figured I may as well upgrade to Leopard at the same time. The first week or more was fine, and then InDesign CS2 spontaneously developed […]

“Deep Sleep” on MacBook Pros with Leopard

Some months ago I posted about deep/safe sleep does not work on my MacBook Pro under 10.4.10. I finally got around to testing it on Leopard today, and surprise surprise, it “works” in an even lesser way than before; there’s no sign at all that it’s restoring from the saved image, and the only part […]

OmniFocus

I’m dorking around with OmniFocus, a new GTD [Getting Things Done] app. Seems pretty slick so far! I’ve found that GTD has yet to survive the extreme time crunches I get into sometimes, but there’s always room to improve productivity.