How to ‘fix’ a swollen MacBook battery

If having your laptop’s battery swell up to the point where your trackpad and keyboard become unusable was a problem universal to all laptops – then presumably a Google search on the phrase “swollen laptop battery” would bring up all sorts of brand names….

But it doesn’t.

Because swelling laptop batteries is a lovely Easter egg, an unsung Mac “feature”, and searching on the phrase “swollen laptop battery” brings up references only to Apple Macbooks.

Yet, despite the uniqueness of this feature to Macbooks and its $84 billion in cash (almost enough to fill up the UN’s proposed $100-billion-by-2020 Green Climate Fund), Apple is too mean to replace my swollen battery.

The fix: Sorry, I don’t know how to fix Apple. Somewhere there must be a preference setting for self-importance,

Boycott South African Airways

The experience of Cory Kratz, friend of a friend: “South African Airways is without a doubt the most outrageous, heartless and cruel airline in existence. My husband died on 17 September, so I had to cancel a ticket that I had booked to travel about 2 weeks later. They refuse to refund the fare, though I have offered to provide a copy of the death certificate. To make it even worse, their so-called “Customer Service” office and refund offices are set up in such a way that one cannot phone them and get a human being to talk to. They contrast with every other company I have dealt with. Delta and Air France both issued refunds almost immediately, as did some 4-5 hotel companies. South African Airways has no concern or compassion for its passengers and customers. Utterly outrageous and hurtful to have to deal with this at this time.”

Isn’t an inviolate comfort zone the whole point of modern civilisation?

How do you react to discovering, again, that somewhere in your environment, other beings are really suffering?

These are some of the reactions I think we sometimes dismal, sometimes wonderful beings may have or experience on realising, uncomfortably, that something bad’s happening somewhere in our environment, or – if we have the heart to stretch our imagination over time and space – in our world, past, present and future:–

1. There’s something out there?
2. There’s something bad happening out there? Hey, bad stuff happens.
3. What’s happening out there? Do pass the salt.
4. Yes, there’s bad stuff happening out there, and I won’t bore you with the statistics, but in fact it’s an inevitable part of the evolution of late-stage global democratic capitalism, so really, everyone’s actually getting richer, and in 40 years time today’s poor will have joined us in deep appreciation of home entertainment centres, recreational shopping, cluster housing and package holidays (all of which of course are the apogee of human development and will be surpassed only by locating these activities in outer space).
5. There’s something bad happening out there, but have you been out there? I have, and I just can’t help feeling they bring it on themselves.
6. There’s something bad happening out there, I know. Really I should actually be doing something but I’ve so little time.
7. There’s something bad happening out there, and, it has to be said, it’s happening to people who do seem to weep and bleed rather compellingly.
8. There really is something bad happening out there. Hey, I know, I’ll donate some money… and phew, yes, that does feel better.
9. There’s something bad happening, and I’d really like to do something more substantial now. But, but there’s this kind of weird sticky fear holding me back; do I really have to leave my comfort zone? Isn’t an inviolate comfort zone the whole point of modern civilisation?
10. There’s definitely something bad happening out there; and this time, I decided to do a bit more and actually went out of my way to help, but I tell you, they were either so disorganised or so ungrateful, I really don’t know if there was any point.
11. There’s something bad happening out there, so bad, really; and so this time I lurched past my sticky fear-comfort zone thing, and really helped; and actually, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
12. There’s something bad happening out there, sure, but I did my bit last time; someone else’s turn now.
13. There’s something bad happening out there. We’ll do everything we can to help ‘them’, so long as ‘they’ cooperate.
14. There’s something bad happening to someone, to us. Us is everyone. It’s happening right here, right now, and it will change if, only and when we do. Oh shit.

I wrote this in 2008, during the outbreak of violent xenophobia across South Africa. I know so many people who seem never to have laboured through these stages of inner evolution, who seem to have been born with an instinct for the good. May blessings descend on them in abundance for, unseen and small in number, they truly hold the world together. This posted at risk of revealing the meanness of my own conscience.

Keeping your Mac fit, fast and cool

What, you say, the geniuses of Cupertino don’t do all the speeding up and fine-tuning of OS X automatically for me?

No, they don’t.

This is not a tech blog (much more interesting stuff here) and I am not a techie, but in the interests of keeping fellow suffering computer users sane, I make these suggestions.

This post was sparked by a friend sending me Pete Vardill’s excellent but three-year-old article from Imafish which I certainly can’t beat for detailed recommendations. It’s particularly worth noting the suggestion to keep one’s desktop as clear as possible.

I have a few points to add. Firstly, Pete recommends clearing out unused preference panes, applications and dashboard apps, and I recommend Trashme as an excellent app for quickly and cleanly deleting all three. (For deleting old or orphaned preferences,

“The revenge of Palmer pigweed”: GM crops spawn new super-weeds

I’m biased against genetically modified crops. I believe my biases have solid foundations:

– GM crops are for the most part designed and marketed to make money for agribusiness, not to support healthier food and environments
– GM crops are mostly part of the Green Revolution model of fuel and fertiliser intensive agriculture, which is not sustainable in a world threatened by climate change, widespread land and soil degradation and declining supplies of fossil fuels
– The IAASTD, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, a process that involved contributions from 400 scientists, concluded that GM crops had little or no role to play in creating land and food security for developing country farmers, which has not stopped GM companies from trying to force that technology onto said farmers, with frequently tragic results
– GM crops and derivative foodstuffs have in many instances been forced on farmers and consumers alike

All that said, I hope I keep an open mind and do justice to the facts as I discover them. A recent discovery, thanks to an article from the Centre for Research on Globalization, was reading of a new generation of herbicide resistant crops that have been spawned by the widespread use of Roundup Ready (glyphosate) crops in the southern US. Roundup is a herbicide, and Roundup Ready crops are engineered to resist large applications of Roundup that kill any competing weeds, and that would also kill conventional non-GM crops.

What’s really interesting is reading not what anti-GM activists write on the subject, but what the agribusiness websites themselves have to say about this problem – and they make it clear that it’s a huge problem. And so I bring you a collection of excerpts from a site you will no doubt in future consider required reading, the Delta Farm Press, which is absolutely carpeted in articles discussing the problem:

Herbicide-resistant weeds have emerged as a major problem in Southern agriculture and, so far, Palmer pigweed is the main villain.

Scott noted that 2010 “will be remembered as the year of the pigweed harvest. It didn’t take long to go from one or two survivors to a full-on infestation of Palmer pigweed.”

Guess what the Chinese are up to now?

Those evil, wicked, polluting Chinese … you’ll never guess what they’re doing now.

Under their five-year plans, state-owned industry has strict pollution quotas.

So what happens when they hit their pollution target before the end of five years?

They shut the factory down.

Can you imagine that happening anywhere in the West? Who in the UK, US, Canada – or South Africa – takes climate change that seriously?

Americans rate climate change as something like the 20th in their list of policy priorities.

65% of Chinese think climate change is the greatest threat to the world.

And it’s not just factories that get turned off when they hit pollution quotas. Even traffic lights get shut off!

This post is based on informal info gathered today – I will dig more while here in Mexico.

Why geo-engineering is silly

Geo-engineering is the term given to proposed attempts by human beings to change our global climate. Of course, we’re already causing the breakdown of a stable, human-friendly global climate through our carbon emissions, so proponents suggest geo-engineering as a way of reversing global warming. The problem is that the global climate system is immensely complicated, and while scientists have learned to predict certain large-scale trends with a high level of certainty, it’s impossible to foresee all the consequences of attempts at geo-engineering.

One solution favoured by geo-engineering enthusiasts is attempting to mimic the cooling effects of sulphur produced by volcanic eruptions, by injecting sunlight-reflecting sulphur dioxide gas into the higher levels of the atmosphere.

One massive problem with every almost every proposed geo-engineering plan is that they don’t deal with one of the other gigantic side-effects of our increased carbon dioxide emissions – ocean acidification caused by the oceans soaking up increased amounts of carbon dioxide.

This obvious problem hasn’t stopped self-appointed planetary saviours like Bill Gates, and rather sadly, Richard Branson, from investing in these schemes, in complete defiance of any notion of global democracy, as the Guardian recently described: “The powerful coalition that wants to engineer the world’s climate: Businessmen, scientists and right-wing thinktanks are joining forces to promote ‘geo-engineering’ ideas to cool the planet’s climate.“

But ignoring ocean acidification and global democracy are not the only problems with geo-engineering schemes. The basic logic of geo-engineering is badly flawed, in a way best described by climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Realclimate.org, quoted in an article in Rolling Stone magazine a few years ago:

That, of course, is the fundamental problem with geoengineering — it doesn’t even attempt to address the root source of global warming. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offers a simple analogy to illustrate the point. “Think of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean,” Schmidt wrote recently. “Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and, indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn’t be able to guarantee absolute stability, and indeed, since the system is untested, it might make things worse.

“So,” Schmidt concluded, “is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?”

Fortunately, the UN has taken a strong stand against geo-engineering, recently banning many geo-engineering proposals under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. But it seems the wording of the agreement is weak, and the US, as usual, opts out of the agreement by virtue of never having signed the convention in the first place.

It seems to me that most of the proponents of geo-engineering are people who are most familiar with the logic of closed, linear systems. But those who understand that the Earth is an open, complex, chaotic system have little patience with the notion.

“South Africa unveils plans for world’s biggest solar power plant”

Big plans – bear in mind that this step establishes the infrastructure to support a large amount of solar generation – but doesn’t necessarily populate the ‘park’ with actual panels and solar plants. Government continues instead to promise far more money into nuclear energy – which comes with far greater cost and logistical risk.

South Africa is to unveil plans this week for what it claims will be the world’s biggest solar power plant – a radical step in a coal-dependent country where one in six people still lacks electricity.

The project, expected to cost up to 200bn rand (£18.42bn), would aim by the end of its first decade to achieve an annual output of five gigawatts (GW) of electricity – currently one-tenth of South Africa’s energy needs.

Giant mirrors and solar panels would be spread across the Northern Cape province, which the government says is among the sunniest 3% of regions in the world with minimal cloud or rain.

South Africa unveils plans for worlds biggest solar power plant – guardian.co.uk.