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Smartphone Battery Management During Hurricane Sandy

One good thing about Hurricane Sandy is that we had plenty of notice she was coming.  That meant we could stock up on munchables and charge all our battery powered devices.  We plugged in two 3G iPhone 4S devices and two 4G LTE iPads and crossed our fingers it would all work out if we hit the dark as we maxed out each device to 100% capacity.

We also filled up the bathtub with water in case we would not be able to flush our toilets manually.  If you live in a building with more than five floors and you lose power, you will not have water to flush your toilet because the electric water pump for the building will be inoperable.  You’ll have to “scoop and dump” water a gallon at a time from the bathtub to the toilet bowl to flush.

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Reviewing Awareness! for the iPhone

Awareness! is a new App for the iPhone that listens for danger for you while you lose yourself in your music.  The App only runs on iOS4, and when it is active, you get a bright, red, throbbing bar across the top of your iPhone screen at all times reminding you the App is active.  The only way to rid yourself of that annoying redness is to kill the App with a double click on the home button and then choose to close it as a live application.

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Rotten AppleCare and a Bulging MacBook Pro 17-inch Battery

We all have our unnecessary demons. For the past three days I have relentlessly been dealing the “pros” at AppleCare technical repair over getting a bulging battery replaced on my MacBook Pro 17-inch machine. The reputation of AppleCare is that, for around $300 USD, you are supposed to get the most incredible and kind service. I did not have that experience.

I found the experience rather rotten as I felt AppleCare were giving me the runaround on the bulging battery. It’s as if they hadn’t ever heard of the problem before, but doing a simple search on the problem reveals scads of complaints and images like this one:

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