The Author – Bart Busschots
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Nov
9
Comet 17/P Holmes Update
Filed Under Science & Astronomy on November 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment
With the Irish weather being what it is it’s been quite a while since I’ve managed to get a good look at the periodic comet Holmes. Since my last post about the comet I managed to observe it just twice, once on the 28th of October, and this evening. I didn’t bother posting on the 28th because conditions were poor and not much had changed since my last post. However, today, I got to observe the comet with good observing conditions.
[tags]Comet, 17/P Holmes[/tags]
Nov
8
Apple Care Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech on November 8, 2007 | 3 Comments
Yesterday I reported that I’d made my first ever call to Apple Care and that they had promised to get a new battery to me within three working days. That was at about 3:15pm. By 11:30am the next day (i.e. today), my new battery arrived along with a return shipping label and instructions for calling UPS to pick up the old one for return. That’s less than 24 hours, you really can’t do much better than that!
[tags]Apple, Apple Care[/tags]
Nov
7
MBP Battery Woes – My First Call to Apple Care
Filed Under Computers & Tech on November 7, 2007 | 3 Comments
About two weeks ago the battery in my MBP started to behave strangely. It would work normally till it got to about 50% and then die instantly. The battery would die so quickly that the machine would not have time to enter sleep mode and just die. This was starting to annoy me and I was thinking of putting in a call to Apple Care anyhow but yesterday evening it became urgent. While packing up my machine after giving a presentation I noticed that the battery had swollen and warped it’s casing. This was obvious because the better no longer sat flush with the base of the laptop and the metal skin on the top had separated from plastic body of the battery (See pictures below).
[tags]Apple, MacBook Pro, Battery, Apple Care[/tags]
Nov
7
When I got my iPod Touch I started by outlining in detail all the little gripes I had with it. I did note that most of these little things could be fixed by future software updates. When I wrote that I envisioned these updates coming in the form of firmware updates to the iPod itself, I hadn’t expected that something as simple as an iTunes update could make any sort of change. Today Apple proved me wrong.
Probably the biggest gripe I had the with the photos feature was that the iPod Touch ignored the new Events feature added by iPhoto 7 (the version of iPhoto in iLife 08). This has now been fixed in a trivially simple way. When iTunes imports your photos it adds each event as an album. This is a very simple hack that is near-perfect. The only minor drawback it has it that it’s not possible to tell which albums are real albums and which are events. But, like I said, that’s a very minor thing. I’m really happy with this update as it makes photos much easier to find on the iPod but if I could really have my way I’d change one more thing. At the moment events are sorted with the oldest events at the top of the list and the newest at the bottom. I’d flip that the other way round.
P.S. This is my first test post with MarsEdit. I’ll be reporting on how I get on with it soon.
[tags]Apple, Mac, iPod Touch, iTunes, iPhoto, iTunes, iLife[/tags]
Nov
1
Trojan in the Wild Exploiting Naive Mac Users
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on November 1, 2007 | 2 Comments
There’s a lot of buzz around the place today because something we all knew would happen eventually, has finally happened. There is malware out there actively going after Mac users. Is this malware exploiting some flaw in the Mac OS? Nope, it’s exploiting the innocence of many Mac users when it comes to security matters. The exploit actually requires the user to not only run an installer, but also to enter their password to give the installer administrative privileges! The only way this could ever work would be if there were a lot of naive Mac users out there so convinced of their security that they’ll happily install any random crap from internet. Uh oh ….
[tags]Trojan, Apple, OS X[/tags]