New power supplies sometimes don’t work with old MacBooks

August 11, 2010

Recently I had to buy a new power supply for my 2008 MacBook. Because having three adapters isn’t enough, when you forget to bring any of them with you on a business trip.

So I ran into the Apple store in San Francisco and grabbed a new 60 watt adapter – the one with the “L” style MagSafe connector, versus the older “T” style connectors I’ve got on my other three adapters.

Raced back to the client. Plugged it in – and it didn’t work. Spent 20 minutes cleaning my connector, trying different outlets, etc. No luck.

Headed back to the Apple store, and verified the following:

  • My new adapter works with three different MacBooks on display.
  • None of the 60 watt power adapters with “L” style connectors being used for display Macs worked with my MacBook, but all of the 60 watt adapters with older “T” style connectors did work.
  • The 85 watt power adapter at the Genius Bar did work with my MacBook.
  • The new 85 watt power adapter that Mitch @ the Bar set me up with didn’t work with my MacBook.
  • The older 60 watt power adapter Mitch extracted from the store’s repair supply stock did work.

After all of the above, I got in touch with a friend who works as a Genius at the Manhattan store. Turns out she’d just had to deal with a similar issue, and the root of the problem is that the System Management Controller (SMC) needs to be reset for some older MacBooks to work properly with new power adapters.

Apple has information about how to reset the SMC, and on that page it lists one of the reasons why you need to do this as “The battery does not appear to be charging properly”.

I’m hoping Apple updates the info found on both this page and their Troubleshooting MagSafe adapters page, to make it easier to find in the future for other users. Before Apple Stores run out of these older “T” style power adapters.

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Posted by kkrugler

When optional fields aren’t actually optional

July 5, 2010

I signed up for Virgin Mobile today, as the answer to my “I’m on the road, and I’m tired of trying to find wifi hotspots”.

Previously I’d had a Sierra Wireless AirCard (595U) with Sprint, and it worked great, but I couldn’t justify $60/month for the occasionally trip to the Bay area.

But Virgin Mobile with its pay-as-you-go plan seems perfect. I can spend $10 for a 10-day plan with enough data (100MB) for my email and light web surfing needs. So I bought the modem, and went to sign up. Which brought me to this page on their web site:

This is the error screen you get when you don’t fill in the address fields. Which aren’t marked as being required.

But after using their Broadband2Go app, I can see that having a polished UI experience isn’t high on their priority list. I’m just hoping the Sprint-provided service works as well as with my old WiMax setup.

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Posted by kkrugler

Apple Passive-Aggressive Login

January 25, 2010

I logged into the Apple site recently, to make a Genius Bar appointment.

There seems to be some new information required, where they want the secret question/answer pair that now seems to be part of every company’s registration system. But after my login I got this interesting message:

Looks like a case of the right hand and the left hand not being in sync.

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Posted by kkrugler

Three suggestions for the Mac Finder’s Force Quit command

December 24, 2009

Unfortunately I have to use this several times a week – mostly for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, but occasionally a few other equally troubled apps.

So in the process, I’ve found a few irritations that could easily be fixed:

  1. Display the list of apps in two groups – at the top, the apps that aren’t responding (usually just one). So then I never see the list displayed without the offending app clearly at the top. When you’re running a lot of apps, the list often winds up being displayed such that the hung app isn’t visible.
  2. When I force-quit a non-responding app, don’t ask for confirmation. It’s not responding, that’s why I’m explicitly asking you to make it go away.
  3. And in the same vein, when I’ve force quit a non-responding app, don’t display a scary dialog telling me that an app unexpectedly quit, and whether I want to report the problem to Apple.

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Posted by kkrugler

IndirecTV

January 4, 2009

We decided to upgrade our TV options, while punting on Netflix, as we found ourselves more interested in nature shows and football than movies.

After painfully working through the various packages from Comcast, Dish and DirecTV, I went with DirectTV. Slightly better price and a bit better selection of shows we wanted, plus a $10/mo rebate offer.

What a mistake. We should have stuck with Comcast.

All of these services have problems, but we jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  • The installation was painful. I had to crawl around under the house, and up in the attic, to help the installer figure out how to tap into our existing cable setup and replace several connectors. This had all worked fine with Comcast, but caused problems for DirecTV.
  • For the first month, every 30 minutes or so we’d get a message on the screen about having to download new software. If you weren’t fast enough with the remote, the firmware upgrade would start, and you’d be stuck staring at a status bar instead of seeing the game-winning field goal.
  • Since the beginning we’ve had problems with the screen randomly freezing. Audio would continue, but eventually the entire system would lock up. Only solution is to reset it and wait for the “Acquiring satellites” process to complete. Again, while missing something really interesting that we were paying to not see.
  • And the clincher is that I realized our bill didn’t show the $10 monthly discount. Looking through the paperwork, I found the “apply for your monthly bill credit” slip with instructions. But you had to do this within 60 days of activation, and we were over the limit.

Just for grins, I asked about cancellation. For only $336, we could bail on what my wife calls IndirecTV.

In an attempt to salvage the situation, I’ve requested another visit by the installer to see if they can fix the problem (all of the self-help steps failed), and I’m writing to their corporate office to ask for a more reasonable rebate policy. If you’re in the same situation, their address is:

DirecTV
PO Box 6550
Greenwood Village, CO 80155-6550

— Ken

PS – I thought I’d found a kindred soul in Om Malik, but his “And Now InDirecTV” blog post was about their kludgy video on demand service.

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Posted by kkrugler

Skype warns against bad hair days

October 4, 2008

I was in Japan for a friend’s wedding, and finally was motivated enough to sign up for SkypeOut service. At 2ยข/minute, it made being on hold with Travelocity a bit less painful.

During the sign-up process for SkypeOut, I an unusual icon at the bottom of the page:

So I guess this is the international icon for a “Bad Hair Day” emergency, and you’re not allowed to use SkypeOut to contact a professional stylist.

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Posted by kkrugler

The case of the curious power drain

October 4, 2008

I took my MacBook to the Nevada City 4th of July parade, to save some spots at Wisdom Cafe. This is your classic small-town event, with fire engines, jazzercisers and The German American Friendship Club in full lederhosen.

After about an hour of work, my battery life was down to less than an hour, instead of the 3-4 hours I was expecting. Hmm, maybe my battery is dying. But I can hear a faint humming noise, which means the hard disk is spinning continuously. And I had trouble putting my Mac to sleep before I left for the parade.

I fired up Activity Monitor, and saw that something called “ditto” was using up 95% of my CPU. Firing up the Terminal, I executed “ps auxwww | grep ditto” and got:

kenkrugler 15193  98.2  0.0    75624   1024   ??  Rs   Tue02PM 3942:21.74 /usr/bin/ditto -xk - /Users/kenkrugler/Desktop/.BAHO26HV

Executing “man ditto” in the Terminal tells me it’s used to “copy directory hierarchies, create and extract archives”. What’s odd is that it’s been running for 3942 minutes, or almost 3 days.

Then I remembered that a few days ago, I’d renamed a .jar file to .zip and tried to expand it, to show somebody the structure of a jar file. But the Archive Utility hung, or rather it refused to finish or quit. So I had to force-quit it.

Which apparently left the underlying “ditto” process running, and what looks like a fully expanded version of the .zip file in a hidden “.BAHO26HV” directory on my desktop. I restarted my Mac, deleted the directory, and everything returned to normal (less 3 hours of battery).

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Posted by kkrugler

Mark Twain Commentary on the MacBook Air

April 5, 2008

One of my favorite posts to the Unicode mailing list came during a heated debate about “simplifying” certain character sets. I believe it was Joe Becker who re-posted Mark Twain’s humorous proposal for simplifying English spelling:

Mark Twain

In year 1, that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s;” and likewise, “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” ould be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealth with later. Year 2 might reform the “w” spelling so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant wile year 3 might well abolish “y,” replasing it with “i;” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.

Jeneraly, then the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants; and iears 6-12 or so modifaiiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist kononants. Bai iear 15, it wud be fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c,” “y,” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu replais “ch,” “sh,” and “th,” rispektivli.

Finali, xen, ater sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling iniuse xrewawt xe Ingliy-Spiking werld.

I wonder what Mark Twain would have to say about the MacBook Air…

MacBook Air

A Plan for the Improvement of the PowerBook G4 12″ Laptop

For example, that useless Ethernet port would be dropped to be replaced by wireless only, and likewise the second USB and FireWire would no longer be available. The hard disk will be retained, but only the very slow iPod version or the very expensive flash version, as most people will no longer need to keep files other than system software on their computer.

Continuing our optimization, the DVD/CD-ROM drive is now useless, because there’s no space on the hard disk to install anything. And with the slower processor, the option to expand memory to 4GB is also unneeded as who would now do any heavy processing work with this computer?

Once the device has been tuned for email writing executives, the price can be increased to match their signature authority, thus eliminating problems caused by most other customers buying the product and complaining about limitations.

Finally, then, after extensive optimizations, we would have the perfect computer for our target customer, Steve Jobs.

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Posted by kkrugler

Still a few holes in the system

February 9, 2008

When my daughter was a toddler, my wife & I would joke about starting a “child-proofing” service. We could show up at a house with our daughter, and in 10 minutes Jenna could locate every way that a child could hurt themselves. Exposed electrical sockets, sharp corners, stairs with no gates – you name it, she’d find it.

I kind of feel the same way about the Capitol Corridor commuter train system. I’ve got a long list of issues that I’ve run into over the years, and sometimes it feels like it’s just me, pushing the extreme commuter envelope.

Sacramento Station

On Thursday, for example, it was the Sacramento parking garage. The Sacramento train station lot was full when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, but if you ride the train you get the same rate at the nearby parking structure.

But when you leave the garage, you have to give them something they can keep that proves you rode the train, to some definition of the word “prove”. Normally this would be your train ticket, but I use a multi-ride 10-pass.

Now I’d run into this same situation a few months before. The garage attendant refused to give me the commuter rate unless he got my ticket, but there’s no way I’m giving him my $150 10-pass. In desperation I gave him the stub attached to the ticket, but then the next time I rode the train the conductor gave me grief about the ticket not really being valid unless the stub was still attached.

So this time I was better prepared. I asked the conductor on the train if he could give me some proof of ridership. No go. He suggested I ask at the Sacramento station…they also had no good suggestion, but the guy at my window did give me several stubs from old tickets he had on his desk, so I had something to hand over when leaving the garage.

I asked the attendant a “what if I had a 10-pass” question, and he admitted that it was a hole in the system. His suggestion was to copy the 10-pass and give a copy to them. Unfortunately I don’t carry a portable copying machine around with me, and I’m guessing that’s true of most other people on the train.

So it’s time for my semi-regular email to Gene Skoropowski, managing directory of the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority. He’s a minor deity, by the way – an effective bureacrat who cares. It’s amazing how much good a single person like that can do in the right job.

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Posted by kkrugler

Putting off Potential Riders

December 26, 2007

Most people who know me also know that I try really hard to make public transportation work for me. Since I live here in Nevada City, I rely on a combination of shuttles, trains, and bikes to get to and from my Krugle startup in Menlo Park.

Heck, I’ve even written about “The Perfect Train Ride” on the Krugle.com blog site.

But sometimes public transport makes it hard to be a supporter. This past Friday was a good example.

The Capitol Corridor train 532 was on-time, picking me up in Fremont at 12:49pm and arriving at Sacramento by 3:30pm. Unfortunately that train doesn’t continue to Auburn, so you wind up on the dreaded “motorcoach connection”, aka bus bingo.

Several of the connecting buses arriving in Sacramento were late, so there was some confusing shuffling of passengers between the available buses. The bus I was on, normally a straight shot to Auburn, wound up with passengers for Roseville. And we left the station 15 minutes late. And, of course, freeway traffic on Friday is always a mess.

Which meant we got to Auburn at 5:21pm, or exactly 1 minute after the Gold Country Stage shuttle bus left. The shuttle that’s supposed to wait for us in Auburn and take passengers to Grass Valley. Normal departure time is 5:15pm, so I guess we’d exceeded our grace period.

The Gold Country Stage dispatcher, a very nice woman, said that if they’d known the bus was nearby, they would have held the shuttle. I asked the Amtrak bus driver about this, and he said that they were two different systems, so there was “no way” to coordinate.

Excellent!

So now there are 10 passengers standing in the freezing cold, waiting for the next shuttle. This was scheduled for 6pm, but it’s a local, not express, so the ride to Grass Valley is a painful hour of touring the trailer parks along Highway 49.

However there had been an accident on Highway 49 earlier that day, so the 6pm shuttle was delayed by 40 minutes. And that meant the (now freezing, unhappy, will never take Amtrak again) passengers should have stayed in Sacramento and hopped on train #536, which arrives in Auburn at 6:30pm and connects to an express shuttle bus.

I pulled the rip cord and asked my wife to drive down and pick me up. But everybody else wound up arriving in Grass Valley more than an hour later. For the want of a phone call, a bus connection was missed. For the want of happy customers, passenger traffic targets were missed. And so on – just as all politics are local, so it seems that public transportation lives and dies by the actions of individuals.

So I’ll do my part, and post the Gold Country Stage dispatch number (that’s area code 530, 470-0103) on the steering wheel of every motorcoach connection bus.

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Posted by kkrugler

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