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Ask TUAW: Firewall settings, Snow Leopard faxing, MacBook battery life, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about firewall settings, SSDs, MacBook battery life, faxing in Snow Leopard, and much more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
Mac 101: Keep your battery happy and healthy
There's a good tip at CreativeBits today on prolonging your battery's life. Specifically, it's about letting it run through "cycles."When your battery is fully charged, be it in your laptop, iPhone or iPod, and you let it run until the device dies, you've used up one cycle. Over time, it will lose its ability to retain a full charge. However, there are simple steps you can take to prolong its life (or draw out its death. However you choose to look at it). The folks at CreativeBits recommend at least one cycle every two weeks.You can also use tools like CoconutBattery and iStatPro to see how many cycles your laptop battery has completed and to monitor its health.For a more thorough look at your laptop's battery check out our article on battery calibration.
Battery calibration recommended by Apple, why no utility?
Like virtually all mobile computer manufacturers, Apple recommends that users calibrate their laptop batteries every few months, as Scott pointed out a couple of years ago. Unlike many manufacturers, however, Apple does not include a utility to automatically perform a calibration. Given Apple's uncanny ability to make things user-friendly, this seems like a bit of a glaring oversight. What are the benefits of calibration? Primarily the goal is to ensure that the microprocessor in your battery provides an accurate estimate of how much time you have left on the battery. Over time it can lose track of just how much juice your battery has in it, and calibration gives it a very accurate reading on the battery's health. Older battery technologies also benefited from a process called conditioning, which was typically performed the same way as a current battery's calibration process. In a nutshell, you fully charge the battery, fully discharge it, then fully charge it again. It's unclear whether modern lithium batteries gain anything in an actual capacity perspective from this process, or if it is simply a calibration of the microprocessor for the purpose of providing accurate time estimates.
MiniBatteryLogger
With all the negative stories in the news as of late regarding the dangers of laptop batteries, its easy to forget a hazard that has plagued batteries of all types since the dawn of the portable computing age; premature discharge. Its an uncomfortable subject, but it affects all batteries regardless of original capacity or manufacturer. Snake-oil salesmen will convince some that weekly conditioning regimens can slow or even reverse this horrible syndrome, the only thing that has been proven efficient is close monitoring and eventually battery replacement. While MiniBatteryLogger won't do anything to prevent your battery's eventual degradation, it will let you watch your portable power-source slowly spiral into ineffectiveness. The app displays a multi variable line-graph which lets you see change in charge as well as amperage. Additionally, the dock icon changes color according to the level of charge. While the program might not be as useful as coconut battery, which logs total battery capacity over time, it is awfully pretty. MiniBatteryLogger is available as a free download from Emeraldion Lodge (say that 10 times fast) Software.
