Battery Notification For Macbook
Having a laptop battery that drains quickly is one of the most annoying things I can think of
. I bought a laptop over a desktop so I could use my computer anywhere and expect the battery to last enough time to get a decent amount of work done. Whenever I find something that can increase my battery life, I get excited. I recently stumbled across a firmware patch for MacBooks that does just that.
There are many applications which are tiny yet very useful, UnPlugged is one of them. It is a small application for Mac which notifies if power cord of your mac is plugged in or unplugged. It works alikebattery menu item. It shows notifications via Growl, but if it is not installed, then alerts are displayed via the default Alert window.It is built in Cocoa language and consumes very less ram & CPU resources. Once installed it prompts to be added in system preferences panel. If you want to be notified for each specific percentage of battery loss, select it from the UnPlugged system preferences. Lets say if you select 2 percent from the slider given on preferences panel, it will notify you after each 2 percent battery loss. It doesn't use CPU resources as long as there is no change. You can customize different messages which will be displayed when power cord will be plugged or unplugged.
The patch was released in March 2009, but I did not find it until just now. According to Apple: "This update improves the ability of MacBook batteries to maintain a charge when the system is shut down and not used for an extended period of time.
Apple insists that the best way to extend the life of the batteries in a MacBook Proat least for my generation MacBook Prois to regularly run it off batteries. This would "keep the juices flowing" within the cells and ensure they last longer. This seemed a little self-serving because they use the cycle count (recharge cycles) to determine how old a battery was. If I did as my Apple Genius recommended and cycled my battery constantly I'd have 350+ cycles in less than a year pretty easily. The old Apple page for my MacBook Pro suggested that after 300 cycles my battery should still have 80% of it's charging capacity. The new unibody models are apparently much more efficient and are designed to get to 1000 cycles before dropping to 80% capacity.
So here I was with a battery a little over a year old, it had a grand total of 54 cycles on it and was down to 79% health. I tried the Apple recommended reset procedure but it had no impact. Rather than going back to Apple I decided to try a different route.
After about 15 minutes of moderate use I looked at the status bar and noticed that my battery was already down to 79% available. This was not good. 30 minutes in, I was down to 50%. iStat menu was trying to predict how much longer
DELL Vostro 3750 battery I had and the number of minutes of power left were dropping like some kind of warped time traveling machine.
I went from Carpe Diem to Carpe Power Cordus. Total buzz kill.
I've now had my MacBook Pro for nearly three years. This particular MacBook Pro is the last generation before the unibody models debuted and as such has a replaceable battery. A little over a year ago my battery started acting up something fierce and Apple was kind enough to replace it, though technically it was out of warranty.
The latest laptop devices have some microchips that are adjust the energy consumption and verify if the battery should be charged or not. These devices are specially designed in order to protect the users from the possible overheat or damages of the batteries. But the same device, that is a very good feature for the laptop's integrity can be used by the hackers in order to destroy completely the battery or to infect for good an operational system.
Charlie Miller wanted to examine better the microchips included in MacBooks and he said that a very good hacker can use it to make bad damages both to the laptop and the users. Every microprocessor has an installed software that controls the battery and verify is it is charged or not and this software can be accessed by the Apple engineers using a password. Charlie Miller succeeded to break the
DELL Latitude D830 battery encrypted code that Apple uses and found out the password of the software.
This discovery is worse because Apple is using this password on every device. Charlie Miller said that from 2009 until this moment Apple used the same password for every microprocessor software of that controls the MacBook batteries and a hacker that has access to this password can destroy the batteries for millions of MacBooks.
The easiest way to destroy a battery is from overheating if the hackers have access on the software. In his tests, Miller actually destroyed seven MacBooks' batteries by overheating. If a battery is completely blocked by that microprocessor, the MacBook will not recognize it and it will shut down immediately when the hacker will install the command.
More, it appears that by the microprocessor an operational system can be permanently infected because the malware will not install through the microprocessor directly in the operational system, no matter how many times it is installed.
The good news in this experiment is that the
DELL Studio PP33L battery password for the microprocessor is not enough to affect the MacBook because is very necessary that the interface between the operational system and microprocessor to be broken, but Charlie Miller said that any experimented hacker can do this thing very easily.
by: chanelchouchou
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