Mac Book Pro Charger

Apple mac book charger

I hate Murphy. I hate him and his stupid rule. During vacations my Mac Book Pro AC adapter died. Nothing complicated. As far as I could understand, the problem was the cable, near the box. I cut it, and tried to fix it. It worked for a week, and died again. The cable is very thin, and strange. Instead of two copper wires, it is made of just one main wire, with a plastic skin, and then some kind of net, and another plastic skin. It resembles the old TV antenna cables.

Well, I needed to get a new one. I might fix this one using the proper tools, but I need to have a good one.

Unfortunately apple hardware is too expensive. And although people claim that it is good quality, sometimes I doubt it. A new 60W adapter was 79 euros on all Portuguese online stores. Was almost buying one when a friend asked… why do not you try ebay?

I did. I bought one. Paid 10 Eur for shipping. Total paid, 40 Eur. Half the price of a new one in Portugal. And it works. Difference? It is like the one in the picture: it doesn’t have the apple logo, and it doesn’t say Apple.

Zuma – iPod Game

Zuma is the second game I buy for my iPod Classic 5th Generation. The first one was a car simulator. Let me say it is crap. Great it was just 5 Euros.

In that occasion I saw the Zuma screenshot on iTunes Store and noticed it might be a nice game, as the type of game is very adequate to the iPod touch wheel.

After about one year I decided to buy it. The game is pretty nice and playable. I just have two complains. First, the music. It is always the same. I think it repeats every five seconds or so. Yeah, I know I can make my iPod musics to play during the game, but the music could be better anyway.

My second complain is regarding efficiency. The developers of the game know exactly the hardware where the game will run, but the game still have problems running there. Sometimes you notice glitches in the music, and more rarely, on the game itself.

Organizing books with Book Hunter

Jonas Nielsen twitted about Book Hunter, a Mac OS X application to organize your library. It is cool because you add the ISBN or title, ask it to autocomplete, and it fetches all the missing information from the Web. I did this to some of my technical books (not all, yet), and I discovered I have too much technical books…

iPod continues failing after five generations

After years of iPods, generations and more generations (are we in the fifth or in the sixth?), about four kinds of iPod (touch, classic, nano, shuffle), iPods with phones, iPods with cameras, and Apple is not able to deliver a basic and simple functionality: delete a song.

Normally I do not hear music in my laptop. Thus, my iTunes is not highly customized. I have the tracks names, the album cover and nothing more. Just a few songs have ratings, and I do not have playlists. This because I do not use my time in front of the laptop to organize my musics.

Therefore, when I rip some of my CDs to iPod, I add all musics without exception. In some cases I remember the musics that I enjoy, but some other times I do not. And when hearing  on my iPod I need to skip musics that I do not enjoy. And as iPod does not includes paper and a pencil, I do not have time to write down the music that I do not like to remove it later.

Some people use another trick: they rate musics to delete with one star. Then, when syncing with iTunes, they go through those musics and remove them.

While this last solution is not properly bad, I can not understand why iPods does not include a delete command. I can not understand what are the syncing problems that might arise. It is just a matter of defining one solution, and use it. Some options:

• when you delete a music in the iPod it removes the music from the flash disk, and adds the music in a black list (for instance, the MD5 of the file). When syncing no file is removed from iTunes, but no musics are uploaded to iPod that are in the black list;
• when you delete a music in the iPod, the music is removed both from the iPod and from the hosting iTunes when it syncs. Of course this can be accompanied of a message for confirmation;