I got a new TruePower battery for my 2.5 year old 3G iPod last week. It took a grand total of 20 minutes to install, and after charging the battery, my iPod is performing better than it did the day I bought it.
I’ve gone entire work-days (including commute to/from the office) with about a third of the battery life left. It never went that long when the iPod was new. I no longer have to worry about my battery recharge cycle (don’t forget to charge it when you get into the office, or it will be dead when you go home. don’t forget to leave it in the dock all night at home, or it will be dead in the morning. etc… very liberating).
My only regret is that I don’t have to buy a new iPod anymore. My old one runs so well I just can’t justify a new one. I’ll be able to extend the life of this iPod indefinitely, picking up a new battery every few years. That’s just plain cool.
If you have a third generation iPod (the ones with the four buttons that glow), and the battery is starting to suck, run to FastMac and buy one of these batteries. For $30, you get a better-than-new iPod, while retaining the scratches and scuffs that you worked so hard to grind into your iPod…
My battery was comped by the cool folks at FastMac, but if I’d have known about the cheap and fast shipping, I would have totally bought it myself!
I get occasional emails asking me about what plugins I use to run this blog. I don’t mind answering them *cough*Alec*ahem* but having an up-to-date colophon might be helpful, too.
I just copied the table from the WordPress plugin manager, trimmed out the “Action” column, and pasted it into the colophon for this blog. I’ve noticed that some plugins provide incorrect or incomplete URLs to the plugin description/download page. I’ll find/fix the links when I get a chance. And no, I’m not turning the colophon into a wiki 
I gave a presentation/workshop this morning introducing 20 folks to wiki. “Collaborative Publishing with Wiki”. The session went really well, I think, and there have already been edits by some attendees on the U of C wiki (and perhaps on Wikipedia as well).
Here’s an interactive Quicktime version of the presentation. I didn’t record audio – I really need to record the full session. If you view it, imagine me talking about stuff, and making things really interesting and clear. It’s another modified-Lessigian-style presentation, so no bullet points, and some of the slides may not make too much sense without me talking. If a slide looks odd, imagine something interesting or pithy, and click the mouse to go to the next one…
I borrowed an image from Alan (he got a better shot of the Wiki Wiki Shuttle than I did), and pulled a couple images from Flickr. I also took advantage of the Santa Claus Parade this weekend to illustrate solo vs. group efforts
You might need to right-click-save-target-as to download the movie – .mov files are being throttled at the U of C right now, so it’s taking FOR EVER to load in my browser. Save the sucker to your desktop, and when it’s (eventually) done, it’ll be completely viewable.
Patrick just came by to ask me about my experience with GoDaddy, so I was telling him about the great deal – 25 GB of bandwidth per month and 500MB of disk space. Patrick looked at me quizzically and said “No, that’s not right… It’s 250GB and 5GB.”
Wha? So, I check my GoDaddy account, and they’ve increased the hosting account limits! It is now 250GB of bandwidth per month, and 5GB of disk space. For $5CDN/month.
GoDaddy ROCKS! I just hope they can stay in business at these rates. Now, if they hosted Ruby, I’d have a nice testbed for playing with Rails…
I’ve been playing with Google Analytics since I saw Tim Bray mention it last week. It looks like Google bought the Urchin webserver stats cruncher, rolled into their Adsense service, and are offering it for free. Although it seems rather tilted towards optimizing Adsense revenue, it’s also quite useful for non-Adsense usage.
I’ve been letting it chew for a week to see what kind of data it came up with, and am really impressed with the reports it provides. My only real beefs are that the data is delayed (-1/2 star) – by sometimes a day or more – and that it borks in Safari (-1/2 star). And, the interface seems really complicated (-1 star) – I keep forgetting where the various reports live. Are they visible under “Executive” mode? “Webmaster”? “Marketer”? And, some of the terminology used to describe the reports is a bit non-intuitive. Maybe not if you’re an Adsense geek, but for a regular web-head, I keep thinking “uh, what does this report tell me – they do provide nice paragraphs under each report to give the gist of it, though.
The report delay is really noticeable because I’m also using Sitemeter, which provides up-to-the-second reporting. That’s how I saw the traffic spike sent from TUAW this morning. I would have completely missed that (until it was over) if I was relying on the Analytics reports.
The reports are displayed in dynamic form – either “ajax” (blech) or Flash, depending on the report, making drilling down into the data a bit less unpleasant. I personally love the “Map Overlay” view, showing where the last 50/100/500 viewers were from. I wish there was a way to teleport to the other end of a network connection. There are several blog readers in locations I’d love to visit 
The other really cool report matches entry pages with exit pages, so you can see sort of a flow through the data on the blog. Very cool, seeing how people are taking advantage of the alternative navigation links (related entries, calendars, tabs, searches).
It doesn’t have a way to track RSS traffic. If it did, I’d gleefully bump the review up to 5 stars, and ignore the no-Safari display. I can live with a few hours of delay on the reports, too.
Our office space is being renovated/downsized to make room for a new bioinformatics lab. All of the construction/cleanup/setup on our side of the floor was supposed to be done over the weekend, but it wasn’t. And they’ve already started demolition of the area I was in last week. So… Until they finally get around to correctly setting up my area, I’m homeless at work. I’m poaching an ethernet line from a nearby cube today, with the iPod cranked waaay up to drown out the noise of movers and furniture-setter-uppers. If I didn’t have stuff that I promised would be done today, I’d just write off the day as “downtime” and head home. No chance of working from home with Evan home (and awake).
So, in the meantime, my phone is being forwarded to /dev/null, and I’m not sure where I’ll be working. My workshop tomorrow morning should be unaffected, but I need to put together an “Intro to Wiki” presentation for the first part of the workshop…
Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. I’ve got a whole lot more respect for the Apple hardware designers. The metal back of the case isn’t epoxied or glued in place, even though it feels completely solid. There are some locking mechanisms between the edge of the metal and the plastic front of the case, and it just pops off with the special tool (and pops back on with some gentle pressure). Very cool design.
The whole process took 20 minutes. 10 minutes of that were spent gently working the back of the iPod case off. I could have done that in maybe 2 minutes, once I’d figured out the trick to it.
The actual battery replacement was completely trivial. No screws, no pins or anything. Just slide the hard drive out, flip the rubber vibration flap out of the way and unplug the old battery. Slap in the new one, and slide everything back into place. Pop the case on and charge it up. The only “hard” part (after getting the case off) was getting the wires that connect the battery to tuck in out of the way – that took maybe 15 seconds of gentle prodding using the supplied case-removal tool.
I took some photos of the process, to show that the ones found online aren’t too staged.
I haven’t done any battery performance tests yet, but the replacement process was both quick and easy. I was pretty sure I would either bork or scuff my iPod. I was half joking that I’d be ordering a new iPod today – but I’ll have to hold off for awhile now… I’ll write up a review of the battery once I’ve got an idea about how it performs – but it will be performing about 15,000% better than what the stock battery had degraded to
Thanks to FastMac for the battery!
It’s hard. Much harder than I would have guessed. I was upstairs the other night, gathering Evan’s laundry to throw in the wash. The laundry was in the hamper in the home office. The computer was just sitting there, begging me, pleading with me. Just check your email. See if someone’s commented on your blog. Check a couple of blogs. What harm could it do? Who’s gonna know? Come on…. You know you want to….
I think I know how Frodo would have felt, with The One Ring pulling at his neck, begging him to be discovered. … we hates it … tricksy! false! my…. preeeeciousssssssss….
But, I resisted. Somehow. Not sure if it’s going to get easier or harder over time. I know it’s going to be difficult tomorrow – the Learning Commons is being renovated, and our desks are all dismantled, so I’ll be attempting to work from home Friday…
November 17, 2005 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
My new FastMac battery for my 3G iPod (a TruePower battery) arrived here today. It was on campus yesterday afternoon, but just missed the on-campus delivery truck. That’s amazingly fast delivery from California to Calgary, even adding some time for the package to be opened/searched by Customs at the border.
I’ll try upgrading my iPod’s battery tonight, and will take pics of the process to show what it looks like when a total hardware upgrade amateur tackles it (I’ve upgraded RAM and hard drives in Powerbooks, but that’s about it…)
They also threw in a car iPod charger, and a portable charger. I’ll definitely be putting both to good use, and will write up mini-reviews when I get a chance.
