Charging laptop batteries

It is 3:45am. I am sitting here in my hotel room at the Radisson SAS Kuwait (which, incidentally has the best breakfast buffet I have ever had at a hotel... it is really something) looking at my laptop and three depleted batteries. After the 4 1/2 hour flight from San Diego to DC, and the 12 hour flight from DC to Kuwait, I have emptied all three batteries I brought with me.

One of my first orders of business is to recharge all my batteries. I travel with one of the new unibody aluminum MacBooks because it is a lot smaller than my 17" MacBook Pro and it is small enough that I can actually use it comfortably in the airplane... even if the person in front of me reclines their seat all the way.

So now I am at the hotel for an overnight stay and have to try to get some sleep and recharge all my batteries. Recharging this many batteries is always a hassle when you are trying to do it overnight, because you end up having to wake up every few hours to switch batteries.

I really dislike doing this, especially here, because Kuwait is 11 hours ahead of California time. That means that when my alarm goes off and wakes me up at 1am to switch batteries, to me, it feels like 2pm (I got here about 10 hours ago) and I just can't get back to sleep (I have that groggy I just woke up from a nap feel). So now I get to sit here watching my battery charge on the laptop... groggy but not going back to sleep.

With the unibody MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro, there is a battery cover that comes off under the machine to replace the battery. Initially I thought this was a pretty good idea. It saves weight on the batteries and on previous laptop models, I always seemed to end up with one Apple battery that didn't match the tone of my laptop. It was a few shades too light or dark. Not that this matters, since few other people peer at the underside of my laptop... but I knew... and it always bothered me.

Oh yeah... back to the MacBook battery cover... after a few times of sitting on the plane, with the laptop upside down on my lap and juggling the old dead battery and trying to avoid knocking my cranapple juice off the tray in front of me while trying to line up the little slots to get the batter cover to close back up, it makes me miss the simplicity of the older-style battery. All you did was use a coin to turn the switch under the laptop, the battery pops out, click the new one in, and you are back in business. It was a one handed process. There is no way to get the battery cover seated correctly on the laptop without two hands.

Hmmm. My mind wanders a bit when I am sleepy....

Something cool that I found at MacWorld this year was the U-Charge by FastMac. It allows you to charge your spare laptop batteries without the laptop. You plug in their brick (about the same size as a MacBook charging brick) and then attach the cable right to the battery terminals themselves.

Currently it will charge the older style MacBooks and MacBook Pros as well as Powerbooks and iBooks. FastMac said that their charging cable for the newest MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro is in production and will be available very soon. The cable is going to be about $20 if you already have a U-Charge unit and will be priced about the same as the existing unit if you wait and buy it when the cable is available.

It won't solve my battery door issue (minor as it may be) but at least I can be charging multiple batteries at one time... and hopefully getting more sleep when traveling.

Packing to go out of town.

I am out of town for the next week on an overseas shoot. I am hoping to post during my time that I am gone... but that all depends upon how crazy the schedule gets.

One of the things that I am always trying to try to perfect is how to pack for long out of town shoots. By nature, I like to bring everything that I might possibly need with me... and then some. The problem is that ends up being waaaay more than I could every sneak past the flight attendants as carry-on.

Each shoot is also different, so each time I have to weigh what to bring, and what to leave home.
But I am always trying to thin down my load, and bring only what I will need, but at the same time not leaving anything behind that I will end up really needing... and many of my shoots are in places where there is nowhere to pick up an extra battery charger, memory cards, or rent lights or lenses if I end up needing them (or needing more that I packed.)

It is also tough because I refuse to check camera or computer gear. I want to carry it on the plane, and carry it off the plane so I know that it arrives in one piece.

I have had a few memorable experiences where my luggage did not arrive when I did. The most extreme was covering Hurricane Rita when I worked for five or six days with only what I carried on the plane... my cameras and my laptop. No clothes, no mosquito repellent (which I sorely needed... I looked like I had chicken pox by the time I was done), no toothbrush, or anything else that I had packed. It was a drag. Even worse, since it was a fairly serious storm, there were no stores open so there was nowhere to buy clothes or anything else... I was ripe by the end of that assignment.

I was on a shoot once that was in a more remote area of the U.S. and we were going to be lighting everything... so I carefully packed my lights in a Pelican case and my light stands, gels, grids etc, in a separate case. The lights showed up... the second case with everything else didn't. The nearest place to rent lighting gear was about 4 hours away and we had to start shooting in a couple of hours. The airline was reeeeeeeeealy sorry... but still they didn't make it and we had to make do. The client understood, and it turned out OK, but it was still not the most ideal situation.

So I don't even want to think about what it would be like to arrive somewhere and not have my camera gear and/or laptop. I can make due without most things, but as a photographer I need the cameras to do my thing.

I have accepted the fact that there is no way for me to carry-on lights along with cameras and my laptop (unless I am just using 580's, or have brought an assistant with me so I can use them to carry on the lights) most of the time when I have to bring lights, I just have to check them and pray that they make it.

The one thing that has totally made traveling a little more fun it is the ThinkTank Photo Airport International II rolling bag . It holds:

5d MkII's x2
50D
16-35 mm f2.8
24-70mm f2.8
70-200 mm f2.8 IS
24mm f1.4 II
50mm f1.2 L
135mm f2
580 EX II flashes x 2
small bounce cards, off camera cables, etc.
lots of camera batteries
chargers for the 5D MkII's and 50D
memory cards
flashlight and lots of other odds and ends.

It is a great bag. It has survived multiple trips to Iraq and Afghanistan along with lots of other places both in and out of the U.S.. It is one of the things that has made travel easier. It is also international sized, so I have never had a problem bringing it as a carry on... even on overseas flights. It also fits in the overhead on the smaller jets.

Along with the Airport International II, I also carry the Shapeshifter. for the laptop. Thinktank has really cornered the market in good travel gear for the photographer.

But I am off for another adventure. I have all my gear packed (hopefully) and I will be posting more soon.

Some of my favorite things.

Here is a short list of some of the things I am using that I really like.

1. Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one printer

I recently replaced my office all-in-one printer. I got the Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one and absolutely love it. It has a much smaller footprint than the printer I had previously, the print quality is amazing, it is quiet, and it has built in duplex printing, copying and scanning.

Yes, all three processes are duplexed. I had a hard time believing this when I read the specs on the printer.

It is the best office printer I have ever used. Another thing I really appreciate about it is that the software that comes with it actually works. With certain other popular brands of all-in-one printers, you buy it, get it home, and then discover that when the box says it works with OS X, that means it PRINTS with OS X, but scanning and faxing aren't supported "yet." All the features are supported on the Canon.

I paid about $350 for it.

2. Skype

I started using Skype on the advice of a pastor friend of mine before we took a trip to Fiji last August. Since I seem to be doing a lot more international work lately, it was always a hassle to make phone calls from other countries. You could find decent internet just about anywhere (including Iraq and Afghanistan) but you were still stuck paying $2.50 a minute on the cell phone or having to use a calling card.

With Skype, you can use your internet connection to make phone calls. You install the software and with a US account, you can call other Skype users for free. For a few bucks a month you can get a phone number on Skype that will let you call US phone numbers for no additional cost, too (so if you have a Skype account with a phone number, you can call other phones for free, too, with no limit on the number or duration of calls.)

Skype also has texting (like IM) and video conferencing which seems much more robust than iChat or AOL's video chat and seems to work at much lower bandwidth. You can also send files, photos, or other docs over Skype, too.

3. ThinkTank's Shape Shifter laptop backpack

As I rapidly rack up airmiles, I have been continuing to hone what I carry and how I carry it.

I have a closet full of laptop bags that almost do what I need them to do, but not quite. Either they are great for a light load, but won't fit everything I need for a road trip, or they will hold lots of stuff, but not be padded well enough for the bumping around that happens on the road, or they are padded well and hold lots of stuff but won't fit under the airplane seat and have no means to lock the compartments.

Thinktank Photo has created the near perfect bag with the Shapeshifter.

It holds everything computer related. It will also hold either one of my laptops (17" MBP or 13" aluminum MacBook) and all the chargers, converters, card readers, backup hard drives, and all the little bits and pieces. You can also unzip an inner area of the bag to expand its size so it can also accommodate a couple full sized DSLR bodies and lenses. If you don't need to carry that much, you can zip the inner area closed and you have a very thin, streamlined laptop solution.

It is also padded in an intelligent way. It is not puffy like the Michelin Man, but has the right amount of protection in the right places.

The outside pockets don't have a lot of padding, but I am putting the more rugged things in those pockets, pens, biz cards, headphones, card readers, cables, etc.. The laptop area is well protected, including on the bottom, (which many laptop makers seem to forget that we do set the bag down once in a while).

The pockets where you would put camera gear are very well protected with a denser foam that is quite thin, the advantage of this is that it protects what is inside (and keeps what is inside from beating up anything around it) but is thin enough that when you close that pocket, it is not a big puffy blob in the middle of the bag.

The key pockets also have reinforced zippers with the locking holes on them so you can secure them and the bag. It won't prevent a determined thief from getting to what is inside, but it will probably deter the causal crook that is looking for an easy unsecured target of opportunity. It comes in black, black, or uh, black and is about $250.

4. Drive Genius 2

There are lots of solutions for Mac Drive/Data recovery. Techtool, Disk Warrior are the two biggest. I have used both, and found both to be lacking. Techtool often finds problems that aren't really there and other times has created new problems. It also seems like it is always a step behind on compatibility. It takes them a long time to release updates when there is an OS update or a new Mac released.

Keeping up with these is important because a big part of their pitch is the ability to use a boot disk or other device to boot your Mac when it is having trouble. I got suckered in a few years back when they came out with a version of TechTool that you could install on a firewire flash drive and it never worked as advertised. It never was able to boot up my Macs and when you talked to tech support they would try to talk you into their annual subscription to get all the updates... huh? Pay for the software and then pay for updates? I tried it... the firewire solution still didn't work and so I swore off Techtool.

Drive Genius I really like. It is simple and works well, but they too are way behind the curve on keeping up with current Mac hardware. As of the writing of this, they still don't support the aluminum MacBook (which was released more than three months ago!) So if I have a problem with my MacBook, I can't boot up with their disk. What is the point?

I found Drive Genius 2 about a year ago. It works as advertised. It works will all my Macs, they seem to update it fairly frequently, or at least when there is a need for an update, and everyone else I have turned onto it loves it also. It has a simple interface, keeps things working the way they are supposed to, and doesn't offer a lot of garbage that you are most likely not going to use.

It can be found for $99

Until next time...

(The photo at the top is from a project I shot in Fiji in Aug 08. It is just a photo that I like... it has nothing to do really with photo or Mac stuff. The fellows in the image are Fijian sugar cane farmers. )

Drobo and Time Machine.. a match made on the Mac.

Time Machine... I love it. It backs everything up, keeps it organized by hour, day, week, month. It's great. The best thing is that I don't have to do anything to keep Time Machine working... uh, except for keeping a hard drive plugged into the computer that has enough room on it for all those backups.

This probably isn't an issue for many Mac users, unless they compulsively save every Youtube video they find online or take part in some other hard drive filling hobbies. For me, it is photos... which is what pays the bills. So at any given time, my basic MacPro backup is anywhere from 100-125gb depending (this is apps, music, and everything but photos) and then my photo drive is another 200-300gb depending (these are transmits and raw takes that have not been edited and moved into my archiving system yet.)

So that first Time Machine backup is about 400gb. Figure I'm using a 750gb drive and right there, I have filled 1/2 of the drive (roughly... I know that math is not one of my strengths). And from there I am able to fill the Time Machine drive up with amazing speed.

Each time I come back from a week long overseas shoot with 50-60gb of raw files... slurp... there goes another chunk of the drive... and you do that three or four times, along with the normal day to day backups and you have managed to fill up a 750gb drive in less than two months.

So then you go buy another hard drive (because I want to have a lasting backup system so that if I need to go back more than two months if I need to) and you start the process over again. First, it creates the giant backup that takes up a large chunk of the drive and then you watch the remaining space get smaller and smaller until it is time to repeat the process again.

Eventually you end up with a whole lot of drives and a bit of a headache from a backup/redundancy standpoint because in the unfortunate circumstance you need to go back to a backup to find something (and it happens... believe me) you then have to remember which disk (which two month chunk of time) the file or files are stored on.

This is when I decided to take the plunge and try the Drobo. I had always thought the Drobo systems were pretty cool. If you don't know what a Drobo is, it is a RAID array that runs its self. You just have to put in up to four SATA drives (any size you want, they don't have to match) and plug it in to the firewire or usb port on your computer and it will do its thing from there.

It seemed like a perfect solution (you put a few 750gb drives in there and it'll last a long time since you won't have to keep re-doing that initial backup). Initially I was a bit concerned and kept going back to look at the backups and make sure that it was working and there weren't errors or problems... and there weren't. The Drobo was rock solid. The Mac would hang and I had to force it to restart, it would restart and Drobo was right there ready to work... unfazed by the shutdown.

One of the complaints that has floated around about the Drobo is that it is slow... when it was USB only, that might have been true, (I never tried the first version that was only USB) but the firewire 800 version is plenty fast. If I was editing video or doing something else that required lots and lots of extreme bandwidth, maybe I wouldn't be as happy. For Time Machine and the drive works great and is plenty fast.

The other thing that made Drobo attractive is that it is redundant backup. If one of the drives craps out in the array, you replace the drive and the Drobo will get you right back up to speed... with no data loss. Nothing nicer than having backups of your backups. Remember... redundancy. Drobo uses part of each drive to backup the other drives in the array automatically. It does all of this by its self. You don't have to do anything other that put data on it.

Here is another reason why redundancy is good. Before trying the Drobo, I tried using one of the Maxtor 2 terabyte drives (follow the link only so you know what NEVER to buy... there is a reason they are always on sale) and found out the hard way that when one of those drives fail (and it is two 1TB drives in an enclosure with a very cheap built in hardware raid solution) you have to send the whole thing back to Seagate and they send you a brand new drive and your data is gone. In my case, the drive shut down all of a sudden with about 500gb of data and would not mount again no matter what I did.

And when your data is gone, you might ask ... gone where? Good question. One they were not able to answer. They promised that they erase everything that comes back as a return, but were unable to answer the question of how many times they write over the data, etc. Plus, if you were counting on that backup... its gone. All of it. They ship you a new drive in a box and will not make any attempt to recover your data.

So with the Drobo it is fast, redundant, quiet and as simple to use as a regular external hard drive. It is the perfect Time Machine (or other backup progam) solution, in my opinion. If a drive fails, you replace the drive. It does not require sending anything back to Drobo unless the actual device fails, but from what I have seen, they are very reliable.

And then I started to compare the Drobo to my existing RAID system...

Secure portable hard drives

I love cool new technology that solves problems. Here has been my problem:

As a guy who is really into redundancy and really into backups, I never leave the office without without a working backup copy of my laptop hard drive. This is a good thing and has saved me a number of times, but also poses a really big security problem.

Where my laptop is password protected and has the hardware firmware enabled, so it is relatively secure if it ever gets snatched, that portable hard drive I carry as a backup is not. It is wide open and easy prey if it ever gets lost or stolen. Where you can use Filevault or other security methods to encrypt the contents of the drive, it prevents it from being bootable, which is one of the things I need in case my main drive in the laptop goes belly-up.

There is a new solution out there that solves this problem. It is currently marketed by Lenovo (yeah, the ThinkPad folks.) It is called the USB Secure Hard Drive. It comes in 160 gb and 320 gb flavors and is not altogether unreasonably priced.

I know, I know, it is only USB2 and not firewire, but I have to let you in on a little secret. I bought one of the new MacBooks and love it and I am actually doing pretty well sans firewire. Buy if you are running 10.5 you can boot up from a USB drive anyways, firewire or not. And now you can do it securely so what could be better than that?

How it works:

You plug it in to your computer, a little red light turns on next to the keypad on the drive. You enter your password and hit the unlock button and the light turns green the drive mounts and you are good to go. Without the password, you can't mount the drive. Since it is a hardware solution, you can pull the drive out of the case and put it in another case and it still won't work. Without the password the data on the drive can't be accessed.

HA! Take that bad guy who steals my drive!


Ohhhhh I love cool new stuff that solves problems.

Sorry

Wow. There is not much to say other than sorry.

It has been nearly a year since I have posted anything... ANYTHING AT ALL here. Hmmm... Life has been crazy, one-year-old twins, a five year old, more international work than I have ever had before in a one-year span (this is a good thing!), and just life in general has made the blog sort of fall to the back of a long list of things I have been working on.

It is sort of like the friend you really like talking to and hanging out with, that you keep meaning to call, but life and responsibilities keep getting in the way until you run into that person somewhere and realize that you never called them and feel really bad about it, but how do you articulate that desire and intent to have called (or in my case, post up here once in a while) but communicate it in a way that they don't feel like you are giving them the brush off or trying to make it sound like a feeble excuse because you never meant to call in the first place. Is there a way to sincerely share that feeling so that they don't feel like they are getting the brush off?

I hope I am being successful at this. I will post more frequently. For those that have continued to check in a lot, I am sorry I have not posted. Life has gotten in the way... that is evidence of my not following through, not proof that I don't intend to post here or don't care. So please stick with me a little bit longer... I will be posting more info and more frequently. My technological life has undergone quite a few changes since last March when I last posted.

Talk to you soon, and again, sorry.