Thursday, November 20, 2003

PowerBook and iBook: How to Calibrate a Battery for Best Performance

PowerBook and iBook: How to Calibrate a Battery for Best Performance
1. Plug the power adapter in and fully charge your computer's battery until the battery indicator lights turn off and the adapter plug ring goes from amber to green, which indicates that the battery is fully charged.
2. Disconnect the power adapter and use your iBook or PowerBook. When your battery gets low, you will see the low battery warning dialog on the screen. Continue to use your computer until it goes to sleep. At that point the battery has been sufficiently drained for calibration.
3. Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

I think one has to folow a similar procedure with the iPod too. On first use Apple also recommends draining to sleep then charging to full.

When an iBook or iPod really loses its battery calibration, one may need to do a reset (standard reset on iPod, PMU reset on iBook) after plugging in the discharged device.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Burnz Features - CD burner for OS X -- looks very promising

Burnz Features: "-- Including Firewire burners. You can buy a Pioneer DVR-105 for about $150, drop it into a $60 firewire case, and have an external 'Superdrive' for your FireWire capable iMac, iBook, PowerBook or burner-deprived B&W G3 or later minitower. "

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Hyatt on XUL and Mozilla

Surfin' Safari
So what is XUL anyway? It is an XML language whose tags consist of:

(1) layout primitives (tags like hbox, vbox, grid and stack)
(2) widgets (tags like menulist, menubar, toolbar, and button)
(3) commands, keyboard accelerators (tags like command and keyset)
(4) xul templates (for UI binding to back-end data, represented as RDF)

Hyatt's 1-2 page description of Mozilla's XUL implementation is by far the best concise description I've seen anywhere. He understands this material, and he can communicate it. Quite a neat little artifact that he seems to have tossed out fairly quickly.