Mac Net Journal

My friend Robert Michael Pyle is setting out in a day or two for a year-long adventure across North America, to complete a butterfly big year. The Xerces Society has a Web site about the project, and Bob posted to a butterfly mailing list that I subscribe to a couple of days ago to mention the journey as well as the fact that a couple of sites will blog about the chase. As I just wrote in an e-mail to Bob that he may or may not ever see, since he is cancelling his e-mail account for 2008, what a great way to spend 2008!

The root of my MacBook Pro's mysterious battery issues
Sunday, December 23, 2007, 11:33 AM

The other day I downloaded the freeware battery diagnostic program CoconutBattery and on a whim ran it against the battery in my 18-month-old MacBook Pro, and low and behold it says that the battery only has 27% of its previous charging capacity remaining. This helps explain why I can only run the machine for 30 minutes or so on battery power before it suddenly shuts down. I thought there could be a problem with the power manager on my machine, but the issue persisted even after resetting the PMU.

So, it looks like I am in the market for a new battery and I need to recycle my current battery. The options - Apple's battery or a supposed higher capacity battery that is available through FastMac. I'm pondering...

UPDATE: The battery now shows 23% of its capacity remaining. Methinks the battery is in a rapid failure.

Meanwhile, the price difference between the battery options:

Apple battery = $129 from Apple, $109 from Amazon
True Power battery from FastMac = $99.95

Something to shoot for - Tacoma Marathon on May 10, 2008
Sunday, December 16, 2007, 9:56 PM

I checked the Web site for the Tacoma Marathon today, to see if it will be run again in 2008, and it appears that it is on the schedule to start at 7 a.m. on May 10, 2008 - just a little less than six months from now. I wonder if I can get myself in shape for it without running into the injury issues that stopped my bid to run the first-ever Tacoma Marathon last year? I figure it's worth a try.

Now, how to wring out enough decent time for running 20-30 miles a week in the very new future...

Time management tricks from a NY Times blogger
Sunday, December 16, 2007, 9:20 PM

New York Times blogger Marci Alboher offers some good food for thought in 5 Time-Management Tricks. I just wish I were better at practicing what she is preaching in this piece - especially about tackling e-mail...

Tools of choice for a week of living offline
Sunday, December 9, 2007, 9:27 PM

What is an Internet-addicted Mac user to do when he is about to spend a week living offline? This isn't a trivial question if you are someone who is used to living with an always-on connection to the Net. Your e-mail is inaccessible because you cannot connect to your archive on Gmail or Yahoo mail or whatever online tool you use, and your blog archives and feed reader is likely offline too if you live in Google Reader or another Net-based tool, like I do during the regular week. So, how can you take your Internet with you?

This isn't rocket science, but it is worth revisiting. Over the last week I mainly just lived without the Net, but on a couple of occassions I was able to sip some free WiFi along with a latte at a local coffee shop, and during my short times there I tried to make the most of the connectivity by using more old school Net tools to feed my habit.

Offline e-mail

When it came to e-mail, I used good old PowerMail to suck down my mail and to reply to anything that needed a response right now (OK, to be honest, I didn't reply to diddly. I did reply to a couple of e-mails during the week from my Treo 650 logging into Gmail though).

Offline news reading (RSS)

As for RSS info, I used my limited connectivity as an opportunity to try two tools for offline reading - the offline option in Google Reader and the latest version of NetNewsWire (NNW). Not surprisingly, NNW kicked ass in this case. The only thing missing from the newsreading experience while using NNW as an offline reader was that the images in posts weren't rendered along with the rest of the post, as they normally would be if I were connected to the Net. Otherwise, the beauty of reading offline with NNW is that if I mark a post as read in the reader, or I mark an entire folder as read in the reader, it will be marked as read when I next sync my news feeds when I can get online. Meanwhile, I simply flag any posts that I want to read with full images or that I want to get back to for reference in upcoming blog posts and NNW will keep those around for me to use later.

The offline reading experience is more compromised using Google Reader. Like NNW, Reader doesn't give me offline access to images in my feeds, but worse yet, I cannot do a standard Shift-A to mark all of the posts as read in a Reader folder if I am not online. So the only way that I can see to make sure that Reader marks things as read is to actually open the post in the offline version of Reader and then it will be marked as read when I reconnect later. That's a waste of my time.

As an aside, if you spend much time doing offline RSS reading you will quickly come to appreciate sites that offer full text news feeds. While there is no way to get the full benefit of a well-written post with tons of linked references (other than flagging it and going back later with NNW), nothing is worse than being able to just read three of four sentences of a promising news item and then having to wait to read the whole thing later.

Offline Web reading

The last piece of the offline picture is how to read standard Web articles in a browser while offline. This one is a no brainer. Just load the articles you want to read later in separate tabs in the browser of your choice - Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb or whatever - and then disconnect from the Net and read them when you have the time. The caveat here is that if your machine crashes like mine did at one point during the week, you cannot simply open up your browser and expect to be able to resume reading those "saved" articles in the tabs where you carefully loaded them while you were connected.

Offline blogging

As for blogging and writing tools while offline, there was no adjustment here for me, since I use Tinderbox to do much of my writing and all of my blogging. Tinderbox doesn't care if I am connected to the Net. I just save my files locally, then export them and fire up Transmit to upload them to my Web server when I get connected again.

Of course, a healthy human being would just accept completely disconnecting from the Net for a week and not even think about these issues. Trust me, I spent most of my time offline enjoying real life and doing a lot of reading and writing, but a week is a long time to be offline for a true addict. Don't worry, I am looking for a 12-step program...

What CompUSA closing means for Mac buyers in Tacoma
Sunday, December 9, 2007, 6:09 PM

I am not so sad to read that CompUSA is closing the rest of its stores nationwide, but I am a bit disappointed about what this means for Mac users who want to go somewhere local to get Apple gear in Tacoma. Unless I am willing to battle the traffic to drive to Renton or Seattle to the nearest Apple Store, the only option I can think of that is left in town is Best Buy. Ugh...

Reading page update after finishing The Devil in the White City
Sunday, December 9, 2007, 11:00 AM

I've added notes on a few recent books I have read while on our December vacation trip to Sequim to my reading page. This morning I finished reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, which was an inspiring piece of writing by a Pacific Northwest writer. What a way to weave together a historic tale in a truly riveting manner!

A vacation winding down, while snow falls
Sunday, December 9, 2007, 9:46 AM

Our week-plus vacation in Sequim, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula comes to a close tomorrow, when we will drive the two hours back to Tacoma and slowly slip back into a reguar life full of work and friends and holiday preparations. This last full day in our small rented vacation cabin we are indoors, watching light snow fall and stick to the shorelines of the Strait of Juan de Fuca just outside our windows. About a quarter of an inch of the white stuff fell before the clouds lifted and revealed the long arm of the Dungeness Spit and its lighthouse across the bay to our sight once again.