A few weeks ago, I noticed the battery on my MacBook Pro was acting up. It was holding a charge for only an hour or so, and, worse, powering the machine off without any warning, not only losing work, but potentially corrupting data on the hard disk. (Another weird thing: sometimes, when the power cable was plugged in, the orange/green LED on the MagSafe connector wouldn't be lit.)

And the other night, when I clicked on the battery icon in the menubar, I saw a note telling me I should service the battery:

(I'd never seen that alert before; it's new to Snow Leopard, the chaps at Farpoint tell me.) There's just one problem: my laptop was just – just! – over a year old. Never mind; I bought AppleCare, so I thought I could just pop into my local AASP and get it replaced.

Not so fast. Batteries – classed as a consumable – aren't covered, so they couldn't help. On their suggestion, I called Apple, who exercised a little flexibility and authorised the replacement.

I popped back to Farpoint, who took my battery and, using Apple's authorisation code, ordered me a new one. (I'm petrified that the MagSafe connector will work against me at the moment, popping out and powering off my battery-less MacBook!)

The moral of the story: keep an eye on your battery's health – apps such as coconutBattery can help here, though for me, the sudden poor performance of my battery should have been clue enough – and if it starts playing up, seek a replacement immediately.

And be sure to read up on Apple's official battery advice.

Over on my personal blog, I've written a little tutorial on getting Canon's superb Pixma MP640 – and probably other recent Wi-Fi Canon MFDs – to work with Snow Leopard; the installer doesn't like Mac OS X 10.6, but there's an easy, elegant solution. If you've been struggling with one of these printers, or are looking at buying a terrific-value printer/scanner/copier that you can use over Wi-Fi and need it to work with 10.6, head on over:

Use a Canon Pixma MP640 over Wi-Fi with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Go on have a look at your keyboard right now. It’s actually pretty scuzzy, isn’t it? There are all sorts of  cleaning products you can use to remove the grime from your keys, but today I opted for whatever I could scavenge from the dumping ground that is my desk, together with a baby wipe loaned from Mr Christopher Phin, MacFormat’s Deputy Editor (why he has a pack of baby wipes in his office drawer, when he has no babies - either in his drawer or elsewhere - remains a mystery, but let’s not go there right now).

The things I’ve learned today are:

1) The new style Apple keyboard is a lot easier to clean than the old style. See the picture above. As you can see, while I have two lovely glossy screen aluminium iMacs to play with I’ve got both an old style Apple keyboard, full of crevices and inaccessible areas, which is a veritable magnet for dust, and the other a new style Apple keyboard, which has an easy to clean surface from which you can just wipe over.

2) The only way to properly clean an old style Apple keyboard (short of putting it in the dish washer) is complete disassembly. However, for the time poor and effort shy, a cotton bud can get between the keys quite nicely.

3) I really need to tidy my desk.

Let's just stop for a sec, and wonder at how cheap, robust and convenient storage has become in just a few short years.

Today, you can buy an 8GB microSDHC card at Amazon for less than a tenner. At 11×15mm, it's the size of a fingernail, and because it's solid state, your data is pretty safe.

Think back to the days of 3½″ floppy disks. A back-of-a-fag-packet calculation suggests that, to store the same amount of data, you'd have to buy almost six thousand floppies, which would, when stacked, reach almost 60 feet high.

We can't, practically, show that here – it's just too tall – so we've had to spilt the floppies into eight little piles. Still: that's a hell of a lot of floppy disks, huh? The real kicker, though, is the price; you could easily spend £17,000 on that many floppy disks, whereas that 8GB microSDHC card was, remember, less than a tenner.

Now, we've had to fudge the figures a little. We've assumed that a floppy disk holds 1.4MB of data (and an 8GB card holds 8GB of data), whereas in reality, a little of that capacity will be lost to directories and the like. It's a small amount, but tiny differences multiply when we're talking about thousands of floppies. For scale, we've assumed that the figure is 5′ 10″. Hard science, this ain't, but it should give you an idea of the astonishing speed with which storage capacities have shot up at the same time that cost and form factor have shrunk rapidly.

How to catch an iPhone thief

An old article, but a good one. What I don't get though is why the police weren't interested? His iPhone had been stolen and he knew who had stolen it.