MacBook: won't startup unless plugged in

My MacBook sounds rather grimly like all of these. I wonder about those MagSafe adapters ...

Here's how it went:

1. Went to use it and it was shutdown! Surprise.
2. Pressed power, it started to boot, I heard the optical disk spin up, then nothing. This is the same behavior one sees when a battery is completely depleted -- the Mac starts on its internal battery, recognizes there's insufficient power to continue, and shuts itself down.
3. Attached adapter, glowed green, booted.

I went through a few of these cycles. Sometimes it would start unplugged if I pushed the power button a few times, sometimes on one push, but, after much back and forth, nothing would start it if unplugged. No response at all. At that point I'd drained the machine's internal battery.

Along the way I reset the PRAM and PMU to no avail and uninstalled Parallels RC 3.

Tonight I mirror the drive and tomorrow it goes to the Apple Store. I'll try leaving the battery out overnight for the heck of it. I assume it's a hardware issue. I certainly don't need this, but then, who does?

Update: Now the apple menu battery icon has a black X through it, and the drop down reads "No batteries available". The 'about this mac' profile showed "no battery".

Sounds like this is a common MacBook battery flaw. Sometimes it's a defective battery, sometimes a defective motherboard. I hope it's the battery of course, but when I push the battery charge button all five indicators light up.

Update 2/27/07: I work about five minutes from an Apple Store, so replacing the battery only took a few minutes. That did the trick. So what happened? Well, the battery might have simply been defective, but I wonder if there's not more to it. These LiOn batteries have internal computers and embedded operating systems that work to keep them on the right side of spontaneous combustion. Maybe that monitoring system detected some 'out of spec' behavior and shut down the battery -- for good. In other words, the noble battery terminated itself to save the mother ship. Mechanical apoptosis, in other words.

Or maybe it just blew a fuse.

Update 4/22/07: Rumor has it there's an association between battery death and running Parallels. Perhaps coincidence, but worth watching.

kw: apple, macbook, battery, adapter, adaptor, power, startup, start-up, bootup, boot-up

Building a PC: a recent quick review

I have built my last few PCs, and I've been happy with how it worked. I may never build another though; all but one of the household machines are Macs now. Still, it's good to get a quick summary of the current state of the art. I'm surprised to learn that the 10K rpm Raptor boot drive made such a big difference, but I'll buy it. For what I do the onboard video, however, is not really an issue. It would be different if PCs, for example, made use of the video card for RAW image rendering (maybe under Vista?).

PS. I like Coding Horror, but he really doesn't know much about OS X or Macs. Contrary to his recurrent postings, for an expert user OS X is a much better computing experience than XP. I think it's a better experience for the novice user too, but both OS X and Vista are lousy options for novices. For the novice OS X wins primarily because of Apple's hardware and the absence of the antiviral software hassle, not because it's enormously better than XP. No comments on Vista, I've not used it.

Update 7/24/07: CH has a cumulative summary and a set of suggested configurations.

A technical guide on designing a privacy friendly web application

footle: Protecting Your Users’ Data with a Privacy Wall

Odd OS X bug: can't share the shared folder

There's a longstanding and mysteriously ignored flaw in OS X File Sharing.

If I connect to one of my Macs using afp, I can browse all the folders belonging to the user I've connected as. I cannot, however, browse the shared folder -- as any user!

I wonder why this only annoys me ...

Update 4/14/07: I thought I knew a fix for this, but I was fooled. If you create an alias to the Shared directory and put it in your home directory, it looks like a remote client can get to it. Wrong, OS X simply redirects to the local shared directory!

I wonder again why I'm the only person who seems to notice this ....

Update 4/15/07: I've been looking at this from a few angles, and this is a real wart. My guess is that the Shared folder is a kind of kludge that was stuck into the OS as a temporizing measure. There's no standard way in OS X (non-server) to create a network share that everyone can access! The one folder available for local shares is not network accessible! (Insert more exclamation marks.) Grrr.

See also: the Parents folder.

Update 9/3/08: This was fixed in 10.5

End of the line for the 35mm full frame sensor?

Canon's latest pro camera uses an APS sized sensor:

High-end Canon SLR counters Nikon | Tech News on ZDNet

As with the 1D Mark II, the sensor is the APS-H size that shrinks the field of view by a factor of 1.3 compared with traditional 35mm film SLRs. That means a 50mm lens on a Mark III has the field of view of a 65mm lens on a traditional film SLR. (The APS-H size is right between the APS-C sensor, which has a 1.6 crop factor and is used in Canon Rebel XTi and 30D SLRs, and the full-frame sensor, which matches 35mm film and is used in the 5D and 1Ds Mark II...

Curious. Why introduce another sensor dimension?

Multiclick iTunes album column to subsort

macosxhints.com - Sort by album and artist or year in iTunes 7

...click on the Album column to sort by album (as you would expect), then click again to sort by 'Album by Artist' and again for 'Album by Year.' ... play whole albums at a time, but ... keep artists together."

Why doesn't Apple ever document stuff like this?

SpyMe: another remote control app for OS X

SpyMe2 is presumably another VNC based remote control app, though the main page doesn't mention VNC. We're still waiting for something like Windows terminal services (RDP).

I might try it. Inexpensive.