If you have any bluetooth device that constantly wants to talk to your new Macbook Pro (like a headset/keyboard) - it will wake it from sleep constantly and thus drain your battery. Fun eh?

I enjoy gaming. I don’t enjoy having to use a full PC rig to play them. I prefer playing on my Macbook Pro. I recently got myself the new Unibody one and wanted to play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 under Vista x64 (it has 4GB of RAM, x86 makes little sense).

After a painful install, I wanted to get my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work. When I am at home, my MBP sits up on a Griffin stand and I use the Bluetooth keyboard. However, for love nor money, I could not make the thing work under Vista. It would just keep flashing it’s little green light for no apparent reason - until I finally figured it out!

At the step where you have to ‘enter’ the passkey. Enter it, then press ENTER repeatedly. Silly? Yes! The only thing that got it working for me? Yes! It seems that you have to keep persuading the keyboard to actually stop being discoverable and be useful. This appears, to me at least, the only way to achieve it.

The new iTunes 8 came out yesterday! Excellent. Loving the new features - especially the Genius playlist thingie. Apart from… It’s not ACTUALLY that good. Sorry. If you’re listening to a popular artist (Say Coldplay, Michael Jackson or similar), it’s great. If you’re listening to one of the reams of Christian music albums, forget it.

Genius just pops up a message saying “Tough” (see the image for the proper text) when I click the little Genius button while Tim Hughes is playing. Tim Hughes is one of the most popular worship leaders in the UK (and a top guy to boot). I was hoping it would find other inspirational songs when I hit the button. Alas, just the error.

The iTunes store had no trouble finding other Christian tracks for me to buy in the Genius sidebar! Figures. Pandora (although that’s no longer available) and last.fm don’t ever have this trouble. So why does iTunes. I put to you that Genius is truly not Genius.

EDIT: It can’t even handle the Mark Ronson - Version album. That’s far less obscure than some big religion thing!

This morning I updated to 2.0.2 of the iPhone firmware (I have an original iPhone). My phone is unlocked to Vodafone using Pwnage - I won’t provide links to all that stuff here. Problem was, I put the phone into recovery mode, restored my new custom 2.0.2 firmware and iTunes went "Do you want to restore xyz backup?" Yes! This is what I usually do and it works every time.

Anyhow, it restored as normal and rebooted the phone. Only iTunes still saw it as a new phone! That’s not right at all! Anyway a quick Google dug up this thread with details on how to fix it. Appears it’s a common 2.0.2 problem then.

1. Click set up as new iPhone and hit Continue
2. As soon as it starts - CANCEL IT on the iPhone. Then cancel it on iTunes as well
3. Unplug phone
4. Turn off by holding the top button down then ‘Slide to turn off’
5. Turn on the phone by pressing the top button again
6. Once fully booted, plug in phone

And then it all shall work well again.

These days I use VirtualBox almost exclusively as the way I run Windows stuff on my Mac computers. MacWorld have posted a podcast video thingy (probably best to call them *casts) which sort of reviews it but also demos how it’s just as good as VMware Fusion but with a better price tag - it’s free.

Its worth checking out.

So, it appears that during the transportation of my laptop + other bits and bobs to CLUK21, I broke the spacebar on my Apple Aluminum USB Keyboard. It was actually quite an annoying breakage - If I tapped my thumb on the far right of the space bar, it wouldn’t work!

You might be thinking, why is that so bad? Well, try typing ‘cd ..’ in a Terminal as a touch typist and see where your thumb lands. I was constantly writing ‘cd..’ because of this!

Well, long story short I hobbled over to the Apple Store and got myself the little wireless keyboard that they do that is sans numeric keypad.

Not missing it - at all. Having even more desk space back is also nice! Considering it all works over Bluetooth, its very responsive. So I can’t really complain at all. All good.

Appears that calibrating the battery was not enough. Went into the Apple Store, saw an "Apple Genius" and he instantly replaced it. No questions asked. A "new revision" apparently.

Let’s hope this fixes it!

This week I noticed my battery in my laptop went from a ‘health’ of 85% down to 64%! My laptop is a MacBook Pro (bought in December last year).

I noticed it while in Starbucks wondering why the battery had gone from its usual 4 hours of life down to 2. I was quite worried when I Google’d to discover quite a few people with problem batteries. Then… I found the Apple Battery Calibration article.

Success! My battery is back up to 89% ‘health’ and I have a don’t have to spend the £99 that Apple like to charge for batteries.

I’ll be remembering to do this every couple of months from now on.