Mac Net Journal

Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed something annoying with the six-month-old TruePower battery I have in my two-year-old 15-inch MacBook Pro. The battery is no longer flush with the bottom of the laptop, which means there is an edge there that can get caught on things. So today, in the midst of a long weekend, I decided to pop the battery out to see what's going on. Sure enough, the cells in the new battery are bulging and causing the metal piece on the bottom of the battery to protrude along the front edge.

Obviously, this is bad news. I don't want a battery that grows. So I have e-mailed Fastmac to see what they can do to help me with the battery that I bought last December. Meanwhile, I will retrieve my old Apple battery from work tomorrow evening and stop using the TruePower battery for fear that the thing will either explode or catch on fire.

I hadn't heard about this problem with TruePower batteries, but I sure know about it now...

UPDATE: Kudos to the folks at FastMac. I just received a follow up e-mail offering to ship me a replacement battery ASAP. Nothing beats responsive customer service!

Toying with FriendFeed
Monday, June 16, 2008, 11:24 PM

Over the weekend I started playing with FriendFeed, and tonight I am starting to see some payoff as I find new Mac-related stories there that are not popping up for me in my RSS feeds that I track through Google Reader and NetNewsWire.

One example: The number of people pointing to Feedly, a news reading tool for the Firefox browser that uses your own topic preference to create a daily magazine style page with customized news.

The challenge with FriendFeed is that it is just the latest in a long line of social networking tools that are catching on across the Net right now. Over the last couple of weeks I have also dabbled in using LinkedIn in addition to tools I have been using for quite a while like Twitter. And meanwhile, I haven't looked at Facebook in ages...

A free Mac app that could help you be more productive
Monday, June 16, 2008, 10:54 PM

Kevin Richard offers a short review of RapidoWrite, a free Mac OS X application that could help you avoid typing similar phrases over and over throughout the day - RapidoWrite: The Mac app that your fingers will love.