After pointing Kyle to yesterday's entry which mentioned X-Charge he told me he's using a widget and probably won't be interested in a Dock-based battery monitor app. I recently saw a Macworld review 4-star recommendation for a widget that provides an alert when the power cable is unplugged, which seemed kinda cool... so I went shoping for wigets....

I landed on MiniBatteryStatus and am really happy with it. Low overhead and a nice Growl notification interface which should help a lot with one of the problems I'm experiencing.

My main battery is badly calibrated. Look at the silly picture if you want, it's almost magic how long the thing runs with 0% charge. X-Charge's log tells the sad story that made me think it's time to do something:

2006-08-23 21:39:15: --- System going to sleep... (battery charge = 100%)
2006-08-23 22:18:02: Charger unplugged
2006-08-23 22:18:03: --- System waking up... (battery charge = 99%)
2006-08-23 23:05:30: --- System going to sleep... (battery charge = 51%)
2006-08-24 00:04:17: --- System waking up... (battery charge = 50%)
2006-08-24 00:13:26: --- System going to sleep... (battery charge = 0%)

That was a few nights ago, working with Dr. Bart... first I was surfing around as we chatted from 22:18 to nearly an hour later at 23:05, some 50% of the charge used. Fine. Then we got into something at 00:04 and in less than 10 minutes the other half of the battery was used up? Made no sense, irritating and embarrassing...

...so this morning I tried to recalibrate but it didn't work out as planned. I'll have to come back to this eventually but for now must move on. Too many projects and now this, grr!

Saturday, Aug 26 at 10:40 AM