Battery Fault MacBook Pro

Summary

I have one of the faulty MBP batteries

Symptoms

My MBP was working fine; 3h - 4h battery life. Now I get 20 mins, then darkness.

Suddenly, after 20 minutes from fully charged, MBP dies —no warning, no shutdown, just STOP! Battery still has 4 lights, try restart; dies again within seconds of starting. Battery now only 1 light flashing.

I can operate on AC and battery appears to charge, but running on battery reproduces the symptoms above.

Tried resetting the PRAM, tried restting the PMU; no change

Others have the same problem.

Working on AC — planning trip to Apple dealer.

Update Scotsys are great!

First we verified that the battery was the problem — we swapped the batteries of their demo machine and my MBP (both registring "charged"; took the machines off AC, set them both to work (iTunes visualizer, no volume, no sleep); waited for their machine (with my battery) to die, which it did after 10 minutes or so.

They didn't have a stock of batteries. You don't plan to stock replacement batteries in the first years of a product line.

So they loaned me the battery from the demo model while the dud was returned to Apple for replacement.

The demo model is running on AC, without the battery.

Update

The first replacement Scotsys got was damaged in transit, so I kept their battery until a replacement for that arrived. All went well for a few weeks, then a new disaster!

texmf.local for Fink-installed latex

This note assumes you have a working Fink installation of tetex on your Mac.

To install the local latex classes, such as infletr, which produces letters on informatics letterheads (School, Institutes, Graduate School, ITO, etc.):

In a terminal window on your mac, do (don't type the % that is supposed to represent the shell prompt)
% cd /sw/etc/texmf.local/tex/
then the following
% sudo scp -r user@host.inf.ed.ac.uk:/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex .
Here user is your UUN, host is any dice machine you have access to. You will get asked for your mac password (for the sudo) and then, unless you have a valid Kerberos ticket, your dice password (for the scp access to your dice machine).
Then let the latex installation cache information about the classes you've installed.
% sudo texhash

Fink doesn't interfere with texmf.local, so you can use Fink to update your latex installation without destroying your copy of the informatics classes — but you should use rsync from time-to time to keep your copy up-to-date.

% sudo rsync -az --delete user@host.inf.ed.ac.uk:/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex /sw/etc/texmf.local/tex/latex
% sudo texhash

LATEX iT

\pi^2 =&6\sum_{i=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{i^2}\\
\pi^4 =&90\sum_{j=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{j^4}\\
\pi^6 =&960\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k^6}

This small app from Pierre Chatelier allows you to create JPG and PDF images for inclusion in your web pages, easily from L^AT_EX math. Here you see a jpg — click the image to see the pdf.

When you generate a pdf file, L^AT_EX iT embeds the L^AT_EX source in the pdf, so that,later, you can paste the pdf back into this application, and edit the source. Brilliant!