Check The Battery Health On Your MacBook

Hey,

If you have a  MacBook Air or MacBook Pro  it will come with a battery. Battery life degrades over the life time of the battery. Although there isn’t much you can really do about it, other than trying not to cycle the battery too many times, you can keep an eye on it’s health. This allows you to buy a new one, or get it replaced at an Apple shop before there is so little charge left that always needs to be tethered to the wall. This post is going to show you a couple of methods to ensure you know how healthy your MacBook is running at.

Finding The Health

To find the health of your battery open up System Information in Applications > Utilities. Within the sidebar select Power from the Hardware section. This page will list all of the related bits of information  regarding the power supply to your MacBook.

There are two pieces of information that are of use, the charge remaining and the condition. If you have a fully charged battery the charge remaining in milli ampere-hour should be similar to the full charged capacity from fresh which is about 6000 mAh. If your laptop battery is starting to degrade this value will slowly never reach the fully charged battery value.

The second piece of information worth looking at is the condition parameter. There are three settings, Normal, Replace Soon and Replace Now. If the latter two options are appearing it may be time to replace the battery in your laptop. Apple has a guide on how to replace the battery in your laptop.

Finding out the battery power of your MacBook. Finding out the battery power of your MacBook.

Apps

There are other ways of getting the battery power of your Mac. One of the apps I recommend if iStat Menus. These have some of the most well designed menus which allows you to see a multitude of information. One of these is the battery life.

You can use iStat Menus to get your battery life.You can use iStat Menus to get your battery life.

If you want a free app, a popular app is Battery Health, this gives you the health of your battery in an easy to read format, plus it is free which is always good.

Conclusion

Battery life is important to your Mac. Keeping an eye on it isn’t that complicated, with a couple of free apps and a little bit of know how you can keep an eye on your battery life.

via Mac Tricks And Tips

Instagram Asking For Your Government Issued Photo IDs Now, Too

Instagram Asking For Your Government Issued Photo IDs Now, Too  —  Over the past week, a number of users of the popular photo sharing app Instagram and parent company Facebook have been locked out of their accounts and prompted by both services to upload images of their government issued photo IDs …

via Techmeme

America Has Hit “Peak Jobs”

unemployment

“The middle class is being hollowed out,” says James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a […] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” reports the New York Times.

Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market,” according to an AP report on how technology is killing middle-class jobs.

When I was growing up in Canada, I was taught that income distribution should and did look like a bell curve, with the middle class being the bulge in the middle. Oh, how naïve my teachers were. This is how income distribution looks in America today:

 

That big bulge up above? It’s moving up and to the left. America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.

But it won’t be 19th century capitalism redux, there’ll be no place for neo-Marxism. That underclass won’t control the means of production. They’ll simply be irrelevant.

Why? Technology. Especially robots. The Atlantic is already wringing its hands over “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.” These days robots are in factories everywhere–but soon enough they’ll be doing plenty of service jobs too. Meanwhile, software is eating white-collar jobs.

Well, at least the newly unemployed can still go flip burgers…oh, wait, robots are doing that, too. (And other machines can print the meat. No, really.) No wonder people with jobs increasingly feel they have to work harder and longer.

Of course the robot manufacturers dispute this characterization. “While automation may transform the workforce and eliminate certain jobs, it also creates new kinds of jobs that are generally better paying and that require higher-skilled workers,” says the NYT.

That’s true, and the usual retort to this kind of Luddism. But what if, as I’ve been saying for more than a year, technology is now destroying jobs faster than it’s creating them? What if America has hit peak jobs?

Here’s your answer: that’s a good thing…in the long run. Job loss isn’t actually a problem in and of itself. Instead it’s a symptom of something much larger.

Step back a minute. Way back. What precisely is the purpose of technological innovation? Why do we want to make things faster, smarter, better, healthier, new? To get rich? OK: to generate wealth, and ultimately, eliminate scarcity. The endgame, where we’re going as a species if we don’t screw up badly and destroy ourselves or burn out all our resources before we get there, is some kind of post-scarcity society.

Will people have jobs in a post-scarcity society? No. That’s what post-scarcity means. They’ll have things to do, authorities, responsibilities, ambitions, callings, etc., but not jobs as we understand them. So if the endgame is a world without jobs, how will we get there? All at once? No: by a slow and inexorable decline of the total number of jobs. Today’s America is just at the edge, the very beginning, of that decline.

Trouble is, America, more than any other nation, is built around the notion that all able-bodied adults should have jobs. That’s going to be a big problem.

Paul Kedrosky recently wrote a terrific essay about what I call cultural technical debt, i.e. “organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.” Well, the notion that ‘jobs are how the rewards of our society are distributed, and every decent human being should have a job’ is becoming cultural technical debt.

If it’s not solved, then in the coming decades you can expect a self-perpetuating privileged elite to accrue more and more of the wealth generated by software and robots, telling themselves that they’re carrying the entire world on their backs, Ayn Rand heroes come to life, while all the lazy jobless “takers” live off the fruits of their labor. Meanwhile, as the unemployed masses grow ever more frustrated and resentful, the Occupy protests will be a mere candle flame next to the conflagrations to come. It’s hard to see how that turns into a post-scarcity society. Something big will need to change.

via TechCrunch

Create A Personal Google Maps Pin Map With Your Foursquare Check-Ins

To utilize Foursquare to create pin map, just follow these instructions:Login to your Foursquare profile from an internet browserNow that you’re logged in, go to your feeds page. To find your feeds from your profile, you can click on “History”, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the RSS icon to access your feeds.Copy the .kml feed the second one and paste it into the Google Maps search bar. Before you start the search, add “?count=5000″ to the end of the feed url minus the quotes. You can edit this number to your liking; it just specifies the number of check-ins that will be displayed.Now your pin map should be displayed. If you just wanted to view it for yourself, you’re done. If you want to display it, you can click “Link” in the upper-right corner and grab the HTML embed code. Then you can put it on a website, like I’ve done below.That’s it! You now have a digitized pin map. Since Google Maps is pulling data from your check-in feed, a new pin will be automatically added to the map every time you check in. If you’re only interested in tracking your travels by city, you can simply check-in once at each place you visit. However, you might find yourself sucked in to Foursquare’s other features and start checking in everywhere. If you do, make sure you check your privacy settings to make sure you’re comfortable with them.

via To utilize Foursquare to create pin map, just follow these instructions:

Login to your Foursquare profile from an internet browser
Now that you’re logged in, go to your feeds page. To find your feeds from your profile, you can click on “History”, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the RSS icon to access your feeds.
Copy the .kml feed (the second one) and paste it into the Google Maps search bar. Before you start the search, add “?count=5000″ to the end of the feed url (minus the quotes). You can edit this number to your liking; it just specifies the number of check-ins that will be displayed.
Now your pin map should be displayed. If you just wanted to view it for yourself, you’re done. If you want to display it, you can click “Link” in the upper-right corner and grab the HTML embed code. Then you can put it on a website, like I’ve done below.
That’s it! You now have a digitized pin map. Since Google Maps is pulling data from your check-in feed, a new pin will be automatically added to the map every time you check in. If you’re only interested in tracking your travels by city, you can simply check-in once at each place you visit. However, you might find yourself sucked in to Foursquare’s other features and start checking in everywhere. If you do, make sure you check your privacy settings to make sure you’re comfortable with them..

Exxon has surpassed Apple as world’s most valuable company after iPad maker’s stock falls

Exxon has surpassed Apple as world’s most valuable company after iPad maker’s stock falls  —   Exxon has once again surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company after the iPhone and iPad maker saw its stock price falter.  —  Apple Inc.’s stock has been on the decline since …

via Techmeme

Chrome beta for Android exposes WebGL, brings more 3D to the mobile web

Chrome beta for Android makes WebGL an easy toggle for mobile speed freaks

Did you hop on the new Chrome beta track for Android? There’s a treat waiting under the hood. Google’s Brandon Jones has confirmed that the latest build enables the flags page, letting us toggle hidden elements — including the rather big deal of WebGL support. Anyone with reasonably quick graphics can now experiment with full 3D on their phone without having to hack or use a plugin, whether it’s wild music videos or lovefests. Just remember that the experience won’t be as seamless as it is on the desktop. You’ll likely have to force the desktop version of a page just to see the graphics code, and few if any WebGL developers are optimizing for the performance and screen size of a phone. If you’d still like to get a peek at what could be the future of the mobile web, hit the source to join the beta flock.

 

via Engadget

Samsung now ships more smartphones than Apple and Nokia combined

It seems that Santa delivered a lot Samsung (005930) phones over the holiday quarter. According to the latest numbers from Strategy Analytics, Samsung shipped a whopping 63 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012, a 73% increase from the 36.5 million smartphones it shipped in the fourth quarter of 2011. Samsung’s smartphone shipment market share also rose to 29% on the quarter, larger than the combined market shares of Apple’s (AAPL) 22% and Nokia’s (NOK) 3%. Just one year earlier, Samsung’s market share stood at 23.2%, which at the time trailed Apple’s 23.6% share. Samsung reported yet another record-breaking quarter with a $6.6 billion profit on Friday, so it’s not surprising to see its share of the overall smartphone

via Tech News Headlines

Verizon Shared Data Plans – Analysis: Costs down, customers pay more

Verizon (VZ) posted a pretty impressive holiday quarter (one-time charges aside) with a good outlook on Tuesday, and the company’s share price rose as a result. There were also plenty of interesting takeaways from the carrier’s earnings call, but The New York Times’ Brian X. Chen zeroed in on one item of particular interest. Verizon launched new “Share Everything” plans last summer that make smartphone data more expensive for many users. The best thing about these plans for investors — and, not coincidentally, the worst thing about the plans for subscribers — is that Verizon is now making more money off of smartphone data as costs associated with transmitted that data are falling. As Chen noted, Verizon’s average monthly revenue per wireless account grew 6.6% to $146.80 in the holiday quarter.

The main reason for the growth is simple: 23% of Verizon’s wireless accounts are now subscribed to Share Everything plans. The beauty of Verizon’s new plans, as the report points out, is that data is getting cheaper for Verizon to transmit even though the carrier is charging more for it. “The company says the 4G LTE network is five times more efficient than its predecessor, 3G,” Chen wrote. ”That means the more people who buy devices that connect to the newer network, like the iPhone 5, the more money the company will eventually gain.” As an added bonus, Chen noted that Verizon’s faster data networks also cause users to eat through their data allowances more quickly. This eventually prompts them to buy more expensive plans with higher data caps, which of course net Verizon even more cash.

from BGR

Beyond Google Fiber: Google looks to create its own experimental wireless network

Look out, wireless carriers: Google (GOOG) may have its eye on shaking up your business as well. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google “is trying to create an experimental wireless network covering its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters” that “could portend the creation of dense and superfast Google wireless networks in other locations that would allow people to connect to the Web using their mobile devices.” But before anyone gets too excited about “Google Wireless” coming to their neighborhoods, the Journal notes that documents Google filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the network will “use frequencies that wouldn’t be compatible with nearly any of the consumer mobile devices that exist today, such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPad or iPhone

http://news.yahoo.com/beyond-google-fiber-google-looks-create-own-experimental-000721627.html

A Reminder to Follow-up your Starred E-mails in Gmail

If an important email arrives in your Gmail mailbox and you are unable to respond right away, you “Star” that message. These Stars (or Flags in Outlook) help us in remembering messages that need to be acted upon later else they are likely to get lost in the sea of incoming emails.

The problem is, unless you are regularly pruning the list, your Starred folder in Gmail may become just another dumping ground for emails that require follow-up.

Setting a Reminder for Pending E-mails
What I have done is created an email newsletter that arrives every morning and contains a list of 10 messages, picked randomly from the entire pool of messages that are marked with a star in Gmail.

This daily email works like a gentle nudge to act and also alerts me of messages that have been pending for too long. Here’s how you can set up one for your own Gmail account.

Copy this Google Sheet to your Google Drive.
Open the sheet and a new Gmail option will appear in the menu bar. Choose Initialize and grant access.
Now choose Gmail -> Install to activate the script that will send you a daily newsletter. Close the Google sheet.
If you wish to stop receiving the email reminder anytime, open the same Google Sheet and choose Uninstall from the Gmail menu.

Related reading: Create Email Reminders Quickly

Also, the Google Script will send you a summary of 10 messages from your Starred folder. You can however change the values of cell D5 and D7 in the sheet to monitor another label or change the count of messages that should be included in your daily digest.

via A Reminder to Follow-up your Starred E-mails in Gmail.

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