zenandjuice.com » Technology

Deformed Macbook Pro Battery

zenandjuice — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:24:04 +0000

A series of Apple Macbook Pro batteries suffer from defects where they can become “visibly deformed”. Apparently, the battery cells start to go bad, and expand. Initially, my laptop started shutting down at 40%. Then I noticed the metal exterior wasn’t flush with the bottom of the laptop, and the plastic casing started cracking. Then it really started to go haywire. I called Apple, and they sent me a replacement battery.

Deformed Battery

Deformed Battery Close-Up

New Battery vs. Deformed Battery

Deformed Battery vs. New Battery

Yahoo Pipes

zenandjuice — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:49:29 +0000

I started playing around with Yahoo Pipes earlier, because I wanted to merge both of my blog feeds into one so that it could be imported into my facebook account (which only allows one external rss feed to be imported into Notes).

So far, it works really well.

I imported the feeds for my two blogs: http://zenandjuice.com and http://zenandjuicephotos.com

into one single rss feed.

Microwave Ovens and Wireless do not mix

zenandjuice — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:21:38 +0000

I discovered yesterday that running the microwave oven interferes with my wireless network bandwidth !

I had never noticed this before.

Spam-Of-The-Day

zenandjuice — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:26:57 +0000

Now that you’ve met a gal that’s hot
You wanna screw her juicy twat.
She looks so sizzling, she’s so nice!
But would your penise size suffice?
Not sure she will ask for more?
You need a thing she would adore!
But how to get it long and thick?
Your only hope is MegaDik!
You’ll get so wanted super-size
And see great pleasure in her eyes!
Your schlong will pound her box so deep,
Tonight you’ll hardly fall asleep!

So try today this wonder-pi’ll
And change your life at your own will!

omg lol

zenandjuice — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:25:38 +0000

this Joy of Tech comic really made me laugh out loud:

been there. done that.

meeting maker to ical

zenandjuice — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:45:16 +0000

The use of Meeting Maker is finally coming to an end at work. We’re moving over to a Microsoft Exchange server.

Personally, I prefer to just have all my calendars (personal, work, and studio) in one application, and on my Mac, so I worked to export the mm entries and import them into iCal.

Which turned out to be a pain in the ass.

MeetingMaker has a “export to icalendar” option, but I found that it didn’t work all the time. It would run, and then die. Apparently, it’s a problem with recurring meetings.

So I exported my entire Meeting Maker calendar as text, and used an automator script that I found to converted Meeting Maker to iCal.

I watched as it nicely imported years of data into iCal, including the recurring items, attendees, and notes.

I found another program that removed any duplicate entries, and ran that (had some duplicates due to Palm mishaps from years ago).

So now, everything is in iCal.

Thought I’d share these tips and scripts with everyone else.

.flv to dvd

zenandjuice — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:32:43 +0000

I needed to find a way to easily put a youtube video on a DVD, and have it work in DVD players.

On my Mac….

Using the unPlug extension for Firefox, I was able to download the youtube video as a .flv file.
I found iSquint, which converts flv to mp4 files (free).
I dropped the resulting mp4 file into Toast, and made a dvd image.

Linksys Hacking

zenandjuice — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:49:11 +0000

So I finally took the time to re-flash my Linksys WRT54G Router so that it can act as a Wireless Bridge.

Why? The house is too big to have a decent wireless signal while I’m sitting in the front living room, or on the patio.

Our wireless router is in the back part of the house, and the signal gets mighty weak when we’re in the other half.

So, using the instructions and third-party firmware available from DD-WRT, I successfully setup a second router to re-broadcast the wireless signal from our primary router.

Now to work on reducing the noise, and maybe build some better antennas.

Time Machine backups via network shares

zenandjuice — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:20:02 +0000

By default, Apple’s Leopard (OS 10.5) only allows Time Machine to backup to connected drives.

“Mindflux” posted a workaround to allow network drives to be used !

Run this from terminal and load up time machine to select your drive! You don’t need to hook the drive up to the Mac first, you dont have to go chowning files and all that nonsense.

Code:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Even easier, someone wrote an automator script that does this for you.

Empty Folder Nuker by Simon Wai

zenandjuice — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:35:07 +0000

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Synctoy for awhile now to do daily backups of my laptop files to my server.

It works great, for the most part. But I’ve noticed that with the “Echo” function (which I use), it does make a mirror of my laptop files, deletes any files from the server that are no longer on my laptop, but it doesn’t remove empty folders.

I just found Empty Folder Nuker by Simon Wai. It’s a great little program, and there’s no installation required !

Features

Finds folders that contain only empty subfolders too

Allows you to choose which empty folders to delete

Uses the Recycle Bin where available

Shell integration: right click on any folder in Windows Explorer and find empty folders within it

No setup.exe: allows simple XCOPY-style deployment

Free!

What a great deal ! Try it out if you’re having the same problem.