I've been a very busy little bee over recent weeks. However, a number of my stories have appeared around the place. One was on the subject of CAPTCHA - those boxes of hard-to-read characters that are designed to stop automated web-bots from working.

You can find the full story in the technology section of The Age by clicking here.

The new MacBook Pros, released in June, are the first Macs to ship with a SD slot. Although the slot is ostensibly for making it easy to get photos from your camera to iPhoto, it's also a bootable drive. You can install OS X to an SD card (32GB cards sell for around $130AUD). That makes it part of a viable backup and system recovery strategy.

With a pair of 32GB cards most of us could have a bootable disk with a core set of applications (including SuperDuper for rebuilding a broken system) and a backup of key data (maintained with Time Machine).

Back in May 2007, I wrote a feature for Australian Macworld on batteries and power solution. You can read the entire yarn here [22MB PDF].

In that story I recommended that users should regularly cycle your notebook or mobile phone's battery. That means letting it run all the way down and then fully recharging it.

Today, I came past this story over at ZDNet. It seems that Apple has a nifty diagnostic app running on an iPod that can diagnose whether a failed battery's condition has come from neglect or from a defect.

One of the telling things about this particular visit to the Apple Store was something the tech told me. He said that he would replace the battery with a new one because it has be “used correctly.” When I asked him to elaborate on what that meant, he told me that Apple’s notebook batteries last longest when they’re routinely charged and discharged.

Apple's batteries are more sophisticated than a simple collection of single cells. There are "smarts" built into them that retain information like the number of charging cycles and let you check the remaining charge by pressing a small button either on the battery (for older Macbooks and MacBook Pros) or on the unibody for more recent models.

If you're a mere mortal and don't have a fancy iPod gizmo for testing your battery, you can achieve much the same with iStat Pro - a widget created by iSlayer. In addition to all the useful system information it provides it's able to access that interesting battery data.

As it turns out, battery life is very much a "use it or lose it" proposition. In order to get the most out of your battery, both in terms of longevity and capacity make it a habit to run the battery down regularly.

Over at Hydrapinion I've mused on what I do to avoid my data becoming fragmented while I'm out of the office.

The problem is, when I'm away from the office for more than a few hours, something that happens practically every day, the information I have on my laptop and the information back home are out of sync.

 Data • Mobility

Over at Hydrapinion I ponder the question - Is a hacked iPod touch the best ever non-phone handheld ever made?

Stop by for a read.

 iPhone Jailbreak • iPod touch • Ziphone

So you're planning to travel to the US, UK or Australia. If you carry a laptop it's darn annoying to have to extract the laptop form your bag and have it scanned separately at the security checkpoint. Well, it could be a lot worse.

According to this story from The Guardian you might suffer the following:

• Have you laptop's contents searched.
• The laptop being taken for a more thorough examination for several days

Personally, I find this to be an intolerable violation. If I'm travelling with my laptop (as I do regularly), having it confiscated for even a few hours can make a serious dent into the value of my trip. Losing t for a few days would likely render much of a trip useless.

On the upside, there are some things you can do.

• Sign up for an online data storage service and store important files there. Don't use the laptop as the only source of important data.
• Use you MP3 player as a data storage device to carry a spare copy of important files (you can't so this with an iPod touch but a shuffle will do the job. You could use a memory key but an MP3 player os more discrete.
• Put important files on a DVD and mail them to the place your staying ahead of time.
• Clear your web browser's cache and History. The sites you visit are no-one else's business
• Turn the computer off completely before going through the checkpoint (not just sleep mode). this will ensure that temporary data in the swap file is cleared.
• Create an encrypted drive partition on the hard drive and store important, confidential files there.

Do you have any other tips that might be handy?

 Laptop Security

I've become totally addicted to Twitter recently. My colleague, Simon Sharwood, was using it at a recent conference we both attended and since then I've been using it most days. If you're a Twitter user pop over to my profile and follow me.

If you're using Firefox then there's a neat plug-in that puts Twitter on the side of the screen and pulls regular updates and allows you to post without having to visit the Twitter site. However, as I'm a Safari user this isn't ideal. So, I found TwitGit - a Dashboard widget that provides Twitter updates. The problem is that in order to access the widget I need to press the F12 key. Being a lazy sod, I prefer to have the widget on my screen Fortunately, this can be easily done.

Pop over to Dave Taylor's blog. There, you'll find instructions for placing a widget on your desktop so it's always visible. All you need to do is enter this command into Terminal

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Then log out and log in so that Dashbaord is reinitialised.

The only downside I've found is that the widget is always up front. That means I have to place it to the side and it's always in front of all other windows. The widget is present on all workspaces if you use Spaces.

 Dashboard • OS X • TwitGit • Twitter

I've been running OS X Leopard almost since its release. As usual, I dived in although I did do some analysis before installing it in faith that everything would work. Since the initial release, Apple has released two updates with 10.5.2 fixing many of the criticisms leveled against Leopard when it was first released. Before I launch into this little rant I do want to point out that I'm basically happy. There are just a couple of niggles that I'm finding annoying.

Firstly, on some occasions, after I resume from hibernation, the screen stays off. The computer's still working but the screen won't come back up. I've tried everything I can think of to get it working but only a restart fixes it. Fortunately, I don't have to do a forced power off to do that. Pressing the power button for a moment and then hitting the enter key lets the computer shut down gracefully.

Secondly, after a resume from hibernation (there's a recurring theme) the mouse is sometimes jerky. This happens whether I'm using the trackpad on my Macbook Pro or with my Bluetooth mighty Mouse. It's cured by a restart but that interrupts my work. Windows users are probably used to restarting their computers regularly but, until now, I've only restarted my computer every couple of weeks and that's only because I've decided to do it - not because the computer was unstable.

Finally, closing the lid and going into hibernation mode takes ages. With my old iBook and PowerBook it happened in a second or so. Now it takes up to 30 seconds. That mightn't sound like much but when you're trying to shut the computer down before jumping off a train it's a long time. I guess that's the price of having 4GB of RAM but it'd be nice if that could speed up somehow.

So, who out there is suffering the same hassles? What are your Leopard problems? If you've got solutions to any of the problems I've described I'd love to hear from you.

 Apple • Leopard bugs • OS X

Over at Australian Macworld, I've penned a story on how to navigate through the maze of different mobile ISPs on the Australian market.

Stop by for a read.

My office LAN has been a bit of a mess. I've got a cable broadband connection to the house and that's cabled to my office. In order to save some money I used a cheap hub and my existing Airport Express to share wired and wireless connectivity to the various computers that I have running. In addition, I've had three 300GB external hard disks connected to my Mac Mini.

All of this meant that there was a mass of power adaptors and cables coming from my MacMini. The drive enclosures are the ones from NewerTech so each was a USB hub as well. Ypou can imagine the mess. However, that wasn't the worst of it. Sharing that storage, while easy on a Mac, is still a pain as it needs the host computer to be switched on.

In order to rationalise, I started looking for a cheap Airport Extreme base station on eBay. With the bounty of my recent eBay sales, I picked up a used Airport Extreme. With that, I've been able to remove the Airport Express and network hub. Good news so far.

However, the real bonus comes because the Airport Extreme has a USB port as well as the three Ethernet ports. That port can then be used for connecting a USB hub. I've done just that and connected two hard drives and a printer. Now I can share some storage and a printer without needing to have the Mac Mini switched on. Oh - I now have 802.11n wireless rather than 802.11g.

The net result of this is the removal of a hub, the Airport Express and easy sharing of a printer and 600 GB of storage. I've been looking for a NAS for a little while now but this is a far cheaper option. Plus, it has that Apple touch - all of it was dead easy to set up.

 Airport Express • Airport Extreme • LAN • Wireless