A few weekends ago I was using my old PowerBook G4 while over at Lauren’s. While packing up my PowerBook to head home, I noticed that the power adapter was abnormally very hot. Looking closer, I noticed that the DC output wire’s insulation was creating a slight burning smell and looked all bubbly.
I’m lucky it didn’t start a fire and burn down Lauren’s house. And I’m not the only one who has been lucky, as this seems to be a recurring problem with PowerBook and iBook power adapters. There’s even a class action lawsuit.
The problem is that the design of the power adapter’s elegant cable management solution causes a lot of wear and tear on the DC output wire, especially where the wire meets the cable management hook, which is precisely where the big bubble is on the wire in the close-up. Apple is obviously aware of the problem, as with each revision of the power adapter they seem to add more reinforcement to the DC output wire. Unfortunately this is all that Apple has done. They’ll replace a fried power adapter for free, but the replacement of course has the same design flaw.
It’s difficult for me to judge how much this is Apple’s fault; I simply don’t know enough about electricity. Could there be circuit breaker that could stop a short on the DC side of a power adapter? Could the power adapter communicate with the computer on the other end to ensure that the power that is being sent over the wire is within a safe range of the power being received by the computer? I really don’t know.
In any case, it’s important for people who have a PowerBook, iBook, and even MacBook power adapter to handle their cables with care. If you have been rough with your cable — the power management hooks really do invite rough handling — then you should be wary of leaving your power adapter plugged in unattended. You might also consider buying a third party power adapter, like the the one sold by Macally. There is of course no guarantee that theirs is any safer, but it at least doesn’t suffer from the same design flaw as Apple’s.
In today’s Star:
Former Gov. Fife Symington says now that those strange lights that appeared over Phoenix a decade ago were from another world and that he had a close encounter with an alien craft on March 13, 1997.
“I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people,” Symington said Thursday. “I don’t know why people would ridicule it.”
Symington, who was in his second term as governor of Arizona during the Phoenix Lights incident, recently told a UFO investigator making a documentary that he had kept quiet about his personal close encounter because he didn’t want to panic the populace.
Prediction: the UFO community embraces Symington as a hero for coming out against the great big UFO cover-up. Not because he lends any real credibility to the idea that alien spacecraft were behind the Phoenix Lights, but because he’s saying exactly what those in the UFO community want to hear.
Update: Here’s the CNN video.
[youtube]gg6cGCAB2Ck[/youtube]
It’s really quite something that the CNN reporter claims at the end that the Phoenix Lights are “as much a mystery today, as they were a decade ago.” Despite the fact that they have been thoroughly debunked.
Oh, the joys of a brilliant, mercury poisoned mind gone off to Parliament.
Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed.
January 26, 2007 – 7:50 pm
The Boise Weekly has an excellent opinion piece that recaps just how bad our current health care system is.
January 8, 2007 – 6:37 pm
Isn’t it kinda disturbing that a city and parts of a neighboring state could smell something odd, and no one can figure out why?
New York, of course, has had its share of mystery aromas, big and small. In 2005, an odd maple syrup smell overcame parts of Manhattan and New Jersey. Last August, an unidentified odor sent people to the hospital in Staten Island and Queens.
January 4, 2007 – 6:19 pm
As evidence, a thread from Daily Kos.
Brian Nelson’s explanation for how Sen. Barack Obama’s picture got paired with a caption that read “Osama bin Laden” on the front page of Yahoo! News is perfectly reasonable. Yet nearly no one who replies in that thread actually believes him. It’s absurd, and sad.
January 3, 2007 – 8:07 pm
Tomorrow, this country’s first Muslim congressman will be sworn into office, using a Quran. But not just any Quran:
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will use a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson during his ceremonial swearing-in Thursday.
The chief of the Library of Congress’ rare book and special collections division, Mark Dimunation, will walk the Quran across the street to the Capitol and then walk it back after the ceremony.
Some critics have argued that only a Bible should be used for the swearing-in. Last month, Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., warned that unless immigration is tightened, “many more Muslims” will be elected and follow Ellison’s lead. Ellison was born in Detroit and converted to Islam in college.
It’s really unfortunate that so many people believe the falsehood that the US was founded as Christian country. Sure, many of the founding fathers identified themselves as Christians, but others, like Jefferson, would hardly be called such a thing today, after committing blasphemy like this:
The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth as it is formally titled, was an attempt by Thomas Jefferson to glean the teachings of Jesus from the Christian Gospels. Jefferson wished to extract the doctrine of Jesus by removing sections of the New Testament containing supernatural aspects as well as perceived misinterpretations he believed had been added by the Four Evangelists.
But whether or not the Founding Fathers were truly Christians matters very little. What does matter is what our Constitution says about religion: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Really, shouldn’t this be the end of the story?
November 17, 2006 – 9:35 pm
Protect Marriage Arizona has given up any hope that the continued counting of the early ballots would miraculously make Proposition 107 pass. Arizona is now the first state in the nation to defeat a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only a union between one man and one woman. A statement issued by Protect Marriage Arizona implies that the other side distorted the debate:
Make no mistake: the defeat of Proposition 107 had nothing to do with whether Arizonans believe same sex marriage should be legalized or not.
Arizona voters were bombarded with misinformation about Prop 107 by our opposition. We were outspent about 4 to 1.
Our opponents were able to focus the debate on what Proposition 107 was not about: benefits for unmarried individuals. Our opponents were able to scare seniors into believing they would lose their social security benefits if Prop 107 passed. Our coalition simply did not have the funds to respond to opponents’ attacks and distortions about the true intent of Prop 107.
Claiming that Prop 107 wasn’t about denying benefits for unmarried individuals regardless of sexual orientation is absolutely absurd. Why then, does the entire second half of the proposed amendment read “no legal status for unmarried persons shall be created or recognized by this state or its political subdivisions that is similar to that of marriage”? It’s pretty clear who is being intentionally misleading and spreading misinformation about Prop 107: the same people who drafted the amendment!
But, unfortunately, Cathi Herrod is probably right about one thing: the defeat of Prop 107 probably had little to do with wether or not Arizonans think same sex marriage should be legal. So I’m fully expecting that, come 2008, we’ll be voting on another, narrower, marriage amendment that will likely pass. In fact, if I was a Republican who intends to run for President in 2008, I’d be absolutely delighted that Prop 107 failed. It’ll be just one more opportunity to get the anti-gay Republican base out to the polls.
November 4, 2006 – 1:47 pm
I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading the software that runs this blog, b2evolution. Thankfully, the upgrade procedure was not as bothersome as I figured it would be. Converting my skin for use with the new version wasn’t very difficult. One of the reasons for the upgrade was so that I could use TextMate’s Blogging Bundle. This is actually the first post to try it out.
Unfortunately, there are some tricks necessary to get b2evolution 1.8.2 (Serenity) to work with the Blogging Bundle. The first is to understand how to specify your blog ID in the Blogging Bundle configuration file. You need to specify the ID number at the end of the URL, with a #. This is what mine looks like:
# List of Blogs
#
# Enter a blog name followed by the endpoint URL
#
# Blog Name URL
eric's blog http://eric@limulus.net/blog/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php#5
They have an example like this in the documentation, but don’t actually say what the # does.
The next problem with 1.8.2 was a database error. I was able to fix that with help from this forum thread.
Finally, when requesting old posts, b2evolution was stripping out the newlines. Commenting out the few culprit str_replace() calls in xmlrpc.php fixes this problem (search for “kludge”).
November 2, 2006 – 11:15 pm
Dust off your winmodems, it’s time to subvert democracy!
The phone modems are turned on at 7:00pm on election day allowing the precincts to report totals. This phone communication method is fundamentally stupid. It opens the “crown jewels” (the central database of votes) to outside manipulation by anybody who has that phone number, often NOT changed between elections. Diebold’s software protocols allow standard personal computers to make an incoming connection, not just voting machines. Elections officials would never know that this “rogue” slipped in and manipulated the database.
The description of this exploit indicates that this system’s only layer of security is based on the assumption that an attacker does not have the phone number for the central modem bank. If this is true, the designers are relying on very bad security through obscurity.
