The Curious Incident of the Wrong Power Supply From Apple
Posted: Oct 17, 2007
So yesterday I had an interesting experience with my three year old 15” PowerBook that I’d like to share with y’all. Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink or two…
A couple of weeks ago I had a client meeting, so I took my PowerBook into their office and powered it up like I normally would. When it was almost booted into OS X the laptop locked up to the point where the only way I could shut it down was to remove the power lead and take out the battery.
When the laptop was plugged back in and I’d replaced the battery the laptop booted just fine, only once it was up and running I noticed that the battery display now showed me that there wasn’t a battery present at all—nothing but the big black X in the menu bar where the percentage meter usually is.
Now, my PowerBook is three years old so I’m used to the battery life being shot—I’ve been considering myself lucky if I could get an hour out of it on battery power for the last few months. An hour is one thing, but nothing at all without being plugged into a power outlet? That’s doesn’t make for a very portable portable if you ask me. Despite it’s new desktop-bound status I could still use it just fine, so I figured that I’d wait til the end of the month and buy a new replacement battery and carry on as usual.
The Distinct Lack of Power
Monday night I shut down my laptop when I went to bed, but on Tuesday morning when I tried to boot it I got nothing at all. The green light on my power cord was lit to show that the machine was getting power, but pressing the button to turn it on got me nowhere.
I unplugged it, removed the battery and reseated it, then tried again. Nothing. I had mostly recent backups for everything I was working on but I still didn’t want the hassle of a dead laptop and, lovely as my wife’s new MacBook is, it’s not mine so I couldn’t very well steal it til I bought a replacement machine.
I tried again and again with all the troubleshooting techniques I knew of and no dice, til randomly I got the thing to boot after about six hours of doing the same thing over and over. I used our Apple ProCare to book a chat with a Genius at our local Apple Store so they could take a look at it, then got back on with my day til my appointment time rolled around.
The Genius Tells Me Something Interesting
So we go talk to the Genius (hi Barry!) and he repeats all the same stuff as I’ve spent the day doing, tries booting the laptop with my power adapter and the store power adapter and testing the results.
Turns out that when he uses my power adapter – the one supplied by Apple when I bought my laptop back in London – it booted once out of the four times he tried, but with the store adapter it went four for four.
Hmmm.
He tells us that we might need to replace my power adapter too, as well as the battery, but seeing as we have my wife’s old iBook sitting around we ask him if we can just use the adapter from that for now?
He tells us how some iBook power adapters aren’t powerful enough to drive my PowerBook and charge the battery as they’re rated at 45W – not the 65W that mine is and points it out by showing us the marking on mine where it clearly reads 45W and not 65W like it apparently should have.
Oops.
The power adapter supplied by Apple for my machine was never powerful enough to be used with my machine in the first place!
I’ve been using my laptop pretty much every single day since I bought it with a power supply that, according to the Genius, was dangerous. Awesome. Is the distinct lack of power the reason why my laptop hard-drive died suddenly a few months after I bought it? It is the reason why the battery life has completely sucked for three years?
Right now I’m using the iBook’s 65W power adapter and my new battery and the laptop is behaving better than it has in a long time, but come on! This is the sort of shit you’d expect from Dell or Sony, but Apple?
Steve, I’m disappointed. I’ll glady accept a free iPhone if you want to make it up to me though…
iPhoto 7.1 Launch Crash Tip
Posted: Oct 05, 2007
So after I ran the latest update to iPhoto I had a problem where the program would open but almost immediately crash regardless of whether I tried to use it or just left it alone.
Fixing it turned out to be a depressing game of trawling the iPhoto support forums and a whole lot of trial and error, so I’m writing this to spare someone else the stress of finding a fix for it should they have the same issues.
The Fix
First off, back up your iPhoto database which will be found in the Pictures folder in your home folder. I can’t stress this enough-back up your iPhoto database! The last thing you want to do is risk losing all of your photos.
Right click on your iPhoto library (or press Control and click for the mouseless amongst you) and select the ‘Show Package Contents’ option.
Delete the files named Thumb32Segment.data, Thumb64Segment.data and ThumbJPGSegment.data [1].
Close the Finder window and hold down the Command + Option (Alt) keys and launch iPhoto – it should present you with the ‘Rebuild Photo Library’ screen below:
Check all of the boxes and let it run through each task. If your Mac is anything like mine this will take a while.
Hopefully after doing this you should be able to open iPhoto again without it continually crashing on you. As with any software troubleshooting fix your mileage may vary, but hopefully it’ll help someone else out there.
1. This step shouldn’t be necessary considering you rebuild everything when you run the rebuild command, but for whatever reason I still had the issue until I deleted these files first.
Quick Mint tip: problems after moving your Mint installation
Posted: May 02, 2007
Here’s something I just discovered when moving my Mint installation from its old subdirectory location at http://partiallyblind.com/mint/ to its own subdomain of http://mint.partiallyblind.com.
After copying across all the relevant files, Mint stubbornly refused to acknowledge its new location; regardless of how many times I changed the Mint location field in the preferences or emptied Safari’s cache, it would default back to the new subdomain location but append /mint/ to the end of the url, which naturally wouldn’t work.
The answer was as simple as Mint is clever – Appending ?moved to the end of url forces Mint to reload its configuration after you’ve moved it to another location on your server.
You can see this and the rest of the useful Mint query commands over at haveamint.com.
