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Swollen Macbook Pro Battery

Aaron — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:21:32 +0000

It’s been said that i’ve replaced or repaired almost every part of my macbook pro, and just to make this notion a bit more valid my laptop battery decided to commit suicide in a hilarious fashion.

The issue started when my macbook pro would just power off after about ten minutes running from battery. I figured the problem was a dead cell in the battery and decided i’d need to buy a replacement in the not too distant future.

A few days later i noticed a slight swelling in the battery which had caused one of the corners of the casing to come unglued. Couple of days after that it had spread to the other side, and was now about 2mm of swelling.

Obviously something had to be done, so i called up Apple. The laptop is well out of warrantee at 2 years old, but this issue just wasn’t right. The telephone support guy explained that they had no policy for the 17″ macbook pro battery (though, apparently if it had been a 15″ they’d have replaced the battery – it got recalled or something). I argued with him a bit. Of course i understand that batteries have finite lifespans, i’m fine with having to replace dying batteries and with MTBF in general – but it’s a different story when the things are inflating dangerously from chemical reactions!

Telephone support guy explained that as far as Apple were concerned the 17″ macbook pro battery was safe, and because of that they wouldn’t replace it. So i got him to agree that if mine DID explode/catch fire apple would be entirely responsible. I felt bad though and didn’t ask for the guys name.

Anyway, i bought a new battery (for £100, sadly) and things were fine. But after about 10 days i noticed that the battery (which was sitting on my desk) was a good bit bigger than it had been when i pulled it out of the laptop!

Threat level

Aaron — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:36:31 +0000

I had an idea a while ago for a bit of fun, and finally got around to making it:

The UK’s current threat level, portrayed by Doomguy.
For those that don’t know, in the classic and mighty first person shooter Doom your health is represented pictorially by an image of the main characters face, as you take damage his face makes it clear. So i wrote some code that scrapes the UK’s current threat level page, takes the current level, and displays the relevant image from one of the following:

Low
An attack is unlikely

Moderate
An attack is possible but not likely

Substantial
An attack is a strong possibility

Severe
An attack is highly likely

Critical
An attack is expected imminently

The Home Office page that displays the threat level is fairly weighty and the scraping code isn’t all that efficient, so it’s fairly slow to load (though does cache the result for 10 mins or so), but considering this is just for fun i doubt i’ll re-write the backend. Sadly considering our current state of affairs it’s fair to say our threat level won’t be changing all that often either.
What i may do, however, is make a nice new frontend for doomguy, in flash, with mouseovers for the other statuses – and animations. I also intend to write one for the American threat level.

Changed my desk again

Aaron — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:44:32 +0000

Re-Jigged my desk again.. I like it more than the last two attempts.
Macbook pro on the left, can’t close the screen at the moment for a reason i’ll explain in a later post. It’s driving the 24-inch dell in the middle.
On the right is a 19-or-20-inch Dell LCD driven by the dual xeon linux workstation under my desk. It’s running ubuntu at a pitiful resolution at the moment because i can’t find a PCI-E 8x graphics card. Stupid diminutive slots.
In the lower left is my new MSI Wind, which i should post a review of at some point. It’s running Windows XP because i know the wifi card is troublesome in both Linux and OSX – i need wifi working when i’m in Berlin, so i’ll tinker with it after i’m back.

Tidying

Aaron — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:53:40 +0000

I’ve spent the last little while trying to sort out my shelves. It’s not going so well.
This is how they looked before i started:

Click the image to view the photo notes in flickr.

Summer holidays

Aaron — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:30:17 +0000

Planning… Something i’m hideously bad at, except in the kitchen. I always find it easier to just buy stuff that’ll help me plan, than to actually DO the planning.

But hopefully these will help!

daikaiju LCD death

Aaron — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:11:28 +0000

Daikaiju is my unhappy 17″ Macbook Pro. Her LCD is dead:

A new LCD is on order and hopefully i can fix her soon.

Oh no.

Aaron — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:41:20 +0000

I’ve been distracted a lot lately, but it doesn’t look like that’ll be happening again for a while..

Yeah, i know. :(

Obsessed

Aaron — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:05:07 +0000

You know you’re obsessed with video game bosses when this happens:

becomes…