Batter Calibration For Apple Computer

The battery calibration for the PowerBook G4 (15-inch Double-Layer SD) and any model of MacBook or MacBook Pro has been updated because of a new battery released with this computer. With these computers, follow these steps to calibrate your battery:

1. Plug in the power adapter and fully charge your MacBook's battery until the light ring or LED on the power adapter plug changes to green and the onscreen meter in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
2. Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for at least two hours. You may use your computer during this time as long as the adapter is plugged in.
3. Disconnect the power adapter while the computer still on and start running the computer off battery power. You may use your computer during this time. When your battery gets low, the low battery warning dialog appears on the screen.
4. At this point, save your work. Continue to use your computer; when the battery gets very low, the computer will automatically go to sleep.
5. Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or more.
6. Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

Tip: When the battery reaches "empty", the computer is forced into sleep mode. The battery actually keeps back a reserve beyond "empty", to maintain the computer in sleep for a period of time. Once the battery is truly exhausted, the computer is forced to shut down. At this point, with the safe sleep function introduced in the PowerBook G4 (15-inch Double-Layer SD) computers, the computer's memory contents have been saved to the hard drive. When power is restored, the computer returns itself to its pre-sleep state using the safe sleep image on the hard drive.

Rechargeable lithium-based technology currently provides the best performance for your Apple notebook computer, iPod, or iPhone. You can also find this standard battery technology in many other devices. Apple batteries share the characteristics common to lithium-based technology in other devices. Like other rechargeable batteries, these batteries may eventually require replacement.

Standard Technology

Lithium-ion polymer batteries pack in a higher power density than nickel-based batteries. This gives you a longer battery life in a lighter package, as lithium is the lightest metal. You can also recharge a lithium-ion polymer battery whenever convenient, without the full charge or discharge cycle necessary to keep nickel-based batteries at peak performance. (Over time, crystals build up in nickel-based batteries and prevent you from charging them completely, necessitating an inconvenient full discharge.)

Standard Charging

Most lithium-ion polymer batteries use a fast charge to charge your device to 80% battery capacity, then switch to trickle charging. That’s about two hours of charge time to power an iPod to 80% capacity, then another two hours to fully charge it, if you are not using the iPod while charging. You can charge all lithium-ion batteries a large but finite number of times, as defined by charge cycle.

Charge Cycle. Using and recharging 100% of battery capacity equals one full charge cycle.

A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle. Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly, but you can put notebook, iPod, and iPhone batteries through many charge cycles before they will only hold 80% of original battery capacity. As with other rechargeable batteries, you may eventually need to replace your battery.

How to Maximize Power Use

The length of time your battery will power your device depends on how you use it. For instance, watching a DVD will use up your notebook battery’s power more quickly than simple word processing. You can follow some easy steps to maximize your notebook, iPod, or iPhone battery life.

Closed lid with open eyes

A MacBook can close it’s lid and then it is going to sleep. On some situations it could be useful your Mac would stay awake instead of using it magic power LED hypnotizing you.

One of those moments could be

• A party and your MacBook is serving some music, but you don’t want anybody to touch it and to see what is on your screen.
• It is bedtime and you want to listen to my podcastor some other music and set your sleep timer, but the display is too bright.
• You have a time intensive task like defragmenting harddrive, backup or downloading and want to prevent dust getting on the keys.
• The screen is no longer used while watching a movie on an external monitor.
• Just you want it!

A tiny freeware tool called InsomniaX puts some matches into the menubar to simply enable or disable the sleep functions.

LihtneS Slide Show

Youtube Video Link Power

When embedding or linking to a Youtube video, you have lots of parameters you can put in the URL. Those are influencing the player’s behavior and view. This is very useful, especially on embedding directly into your website or blog.

Playback with a seek

One of the most unknown and rarely used parameters is the playback with a seek. Let’s say, you want to show a video and the important moment your want to point to is at 1 minute and 28 seconds. Did you know, than you can directly jump into that position? Simply add #t=1m27s behind the video URL like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a92JSlFZHH0#t=1m28s

Video starts playing at 1 min and 28 secs.

This is very cool when sharing videos via twitter or instant messengers and you do not want your participant to watch the whole story.

Other options

There are a lot of other values like setting borders, enable related video recommendations, HD playback and some more which you will find on Googles API page. Have a look at it and I am sure, there is something useful for you.

Stop the iPhone from opening iPhoto

I love iPhoto. I use it for most of my photo editing. The thing I don't like about iPhoto is how it opens each and every time I connect my iPhone to my Mac. What strikes my as plain silly is that, since the introduction of the iPhone two and a half years ago, Apple has not built in an option in the iTunes iPhone status window to disable the automatic iPhoto launch every time you plug in your iPhone.

If you want to take control of this behavior, and you'd prefer to stick with Apple's built-in tools (rather than take advantage of the free and easy Cameras prefpane) there is good news: there's a simple way to disable this 'feature' and it doesn't involve command line stuff. Even better, it isn't an "all or nothing" solution – eg: you can still have iPhoto automatically open when you connect your camera, but not have it open when you connect your iPhone.

It should be noted that this solution only works on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you are running 10.5 or earlier, you'll have to use one of the solutions noted above; we recommend the free Cameras preference pane as a quick fix.

You'll see the image above is of iPhoto's preferences. You may think the option of disabling iPhone auto-open is in there, but it's not. To stop the iPhone from opening iPhoto you actually need to launch the Image Capture application.

Step 1: Launch Image Capture (Applications>Image Capture). If your iPhone isn't plugged in already, plug it in to the USB port on your Mac. It should then show up in the devices source list.

Step 2: Make sure you have the iPhone selected in the source list. When you do, you should see any photos you have on the iPhone appear in the right-hand column of the Image Capture application.

Step 3: At the bottom of the source list, you'll see your iPhone's name then, below that, you'll see the words "Connecting this iPhone opens:" and a drop-down menu. Select "No application". Now close the Image Capture app and you're done. No more iPhone opening up iPhoto, but your other cameras will still auto-launch iPhoto when they are connected!

Chrome Browser for Mac

I love the Safaribrowser. It is fast, reliable, powerful and easy to use. I wish Firefox would use its engine, but there are lot of discussions in the Mozilla forums, that it will remain using the Gecko engine.

From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit.

Alternatives

The only alternative I know what uses Webkit is the Google’s Chrome. Unfortunately, they say, a Mac version is not available, yet. But there is! You can download the developer edition, which is a completely compiled and ready-to-use application. Install it by just dragging the icon to the Application folder like any other program.

After the first start it asks for importing bookmarks. So I did, and it works very well. The passwords are taken from OS X’s Keychain Access and you do not need to enter all your identifications, again.

At the first look, compared to Safari

• it looks a bit more stylish,
• the preferences are easier to use,
• performance feels better on loading pages, working on sites containing Flash objects,
• the developer menu can be found at View, instead of a own menu column,
• no need for an extra search bar, just type into the address field.

Unfortunately I am missing two features, but I can shortly live without:

• Syncing the bookmarks with MobileMe or back to Safari,
• the option to merge all windows together

What Safari does not have is

• the function “New incognito window”.

Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

• opening every tab or window as a own thread
  • if one crashes, not all of the browser activity is lost,
  • if one gets unresponsive, you can work with all the others.
• jumping through search results initiated with CMD+F.

Conclusion

I am using it now for a several time. It works very stable and fast. The workflow is great, everything works fine so far.

 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

I always tried to get the keyboard shortcuts even when I use Windows PC, finally I got some for  MAC Keyboard

MENU COMMANDS

Shift+Apple+Q - Log out

Shift+Option Apple+Q - Log out immediately

Shift+Apple+Delete - Empty Trash

Apple+H - Hide Active Application Doesn't Work With Adobe Applications

Option+Apple+H - Hide All But The Active Application

Control+Eject - Shut Down, Sleep, or Restart Options

Apple+Control+Eject - Quit all applications and Restart

Apple+ . (period) - Stop a process

Apple+ , (comma) - Open Preferences for Active Application

Option+Apple+D - Show/Hide Dock

Control+Up Arrow - Move up one page

Control+Down Arrow - Move down one page

Option+Apple+Esc - Force Quit

FILE MANAGEMENT

Apple+N - New Finder window or New Blank Page in Some Applications

Shift+Apple+N - New Folder Must Be In Finder Window For It to Work

Apple+O - Open Another Existing Document

Apple+S - Save

Shift+Apple+S - Save as

Apple+P - Print

Apple+W - Close Window

Apple+Option+W - Close all Windows

Apple+I - Get Info

Option+Apple+I - Show Attributes Inspector Limited use – varies by application.

Apple+D - Duplicate

Apple+Q - Close Application

Apple+L - Make Alias

Apple+R - Show Original

Apple+T - Add to Favorites Deprecated

Apple+Delete - Move Highlighted Items to Trash

Apple+E - Eject

Apple+F - Find

EDITING

Apple+Z - Undo

Apple+X - Cut

Apple+C - Copy

Apple+V - Paste

Apple+A - Select All

Apple+ { - Align Left Only Works in Some Applications

Apple+ } - Align Right Only Works in Some Applications

Apple+ | (pipe) - Align Center Only Works in Some Applications

Apple+ ; (semicolon) - Check Spelling Only Works in Some Applications

Shift+Apple+C - Show Colors palette in application Only Works in Some Applications

Apple+T - Show Font palette in application Only Works in Some Applications

VIEW MENU

Apple+1 - View as Icons

Apple+2 - View as List

Apple+3 - View as Columns

Option+Apple+T - Hide Toolbar

Apple+J - Show View Options

MOVING AROUND

Apple+ [ - Back Must be in Finder Window

Apple+ ] - Forward Must be in Finder Window

Shift+Apple+A - Applications Must be in Finder Window

Shift+Apple+F - Favorites Must be in Finder Window

Shift+Apple+G - Goto Folder Must be in Finder Window

Apple+K - Connect to Server Must be in Finder Window

Apple+Tab - Switch to next Application Hold Apple key to enter App. switcher mode

CONTROLLING WINDOWS

Apple+N - New Window

Apple+T - New Tab If the Application supports Tabs

Apple+M - Minimize Window

Option+Apple+M - Minimize All Windows

GETTING HELP

Apple+ ? - Open Mac Help

UNIVERSAL ACCESS

Option+Apple+ * (asterisk) - Turn on Zoom

Option+Apple+ = - Zoom in

Option+Apple+ - - Zoom out

Control+Option+Apple+ * - Switch to White on Black

COMBINE KEYBOARD WITH MOUSE

Option+Drag - Copy to new location

Option+Apple+Drag - Make alias in new location

Apple+Drag - Move to new location without copying

SCREEN SHOTS

Apple+Shift+3 - Take a picture of the screen will leave a .png file on desktop

Apple+Shift+4 - Take a picture of the selection will leave a .png file on desktop

Apple+Shift+4, Control - Take a picture of the selection, place in clipboard

Apple+Shift+4, Spacebar - Take a picture of the selected window will leave a .png file on desktop