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.

ExpressCard Adapter... Make Your MacBook Happy

One of the things that has always bugged me about Apple laptops is the fact that Apple always left the PCMCIA slot off their smallest laptop (12" Powerbook) and now leaves the ExpressCard slot off of their MacBook Air (along with firewire, ethernet, ahh... don't get me started!)

Even the 13" MacBook is missing the ExpressCard slot (just like the earlier siblings the 12" and 14" iBooks were missing the older-style PCMCIA slots.) Why this bothers me is because both the ExpressCard and PCMCIA were a very flexible interface and therefore used for many different uses. I have and ExpressCard EVDO modem, an ExpressCard compact flash card reader, a SATA ExpressCard... and the list goes on. But without the slot, these cards are unusable on MacBooks, or iBooks and certainly on the MacBook Air.

If you find yourself in this predicament, take a look at Synchrotech. They make a wide range of adapters that will allow you to use ExpressCards and PCMCIA cards on laptops (or desktop Macs, for that matter) through your USB port or through an existing slot, for example, you can use a PCMCIA card with their ExpressCard to PCMCIA adapter or like I have done above in the photo above, I am using their USB2 to ExpressCard adapter for my EVDO modem that I share between my MacBook and my MacBook Pro.

I know that it is not a very safe looking connection in the photo, with that thing hanging way out to the side, but it made for a decent photo, eh? What I normally do is use a USB2 extension cable to put the modem closer to the nearest window to boost my signal and to avoid having it hang off the side of the laptop like that. It doesn't impact the speed at all when you use a USB cable, either.

Ultimately, Synchrotech has created some cool solutions that makes me glad to use a Mac and allows me to exist without the ExpressCard slot on every machine.

Oh, and the adapters I've used all seem to be compatible with 10.4 or 10.5

Mac Backup on the Road

One of the most vulnerable times for a photographer to suffer computer issues or data loss is on the road. This is also where photographers are rarely backed up.

We are creatures of habit. Get on location, setup, shoot, drop images into the laptop, edit, get the selects to the client, break everything down, job well done.

But once in a while the unexpected happens. Just like we plan for hardware failure with backup cameras, and extra flash and more than one memory card and camera battery, your laptop has the ability to fail, too. The most likely part of your laptop to fail unexpectedly is the hard drive. So backing it up is important... and if you are a Mac user, relatively simple.

The first thing to look at is how much junk you have on your laptop. I am a firm believer in keeping a laptop slim with only the things you need to get the job done. I don’t save a lot of photos, games, or a library of every QuickTime movie I’ve ever downloaded on the laptop... I waste the hard drive space on my desktop computer for things like that!

As soon as I get back to my office from a shoot, I move the photos off my laptop and onto my desktop system which then gets it started in my archiving system so I know it is backed up and protected.

By limiting what I keep on the laptop, it also makes it easier to back it up. My backup solution is simple. I have an external portable firewire hard drive... portable drives are the ones that run off the firewire cable and require no A/C Power. The MacBook and MacBook Pro will also boot off of a USB2 drive... but running a machine off of a USB drive is a slow and frustrating experience... stick with firewire.

It is also true that portable hard drives are more expensive and offer less storage than the desktop variety hard drive, but remember, you are buying this to use with a laptop. Portable drives are powered off the firewire connection to the computer and they are much smaller, meaning you don't need to fire somewhere to plug it in and it will fit in your laptop bag. You can be thrifty and buy a full sized hard drive, but you are not going to enjoy dragging it around in your bag and always be searching for a plug when you need to use it.

I normally use SuperDuper to make the backup of the hard drive. SuperDuper creates a perfect bootable clone of my hard drive and also allows you to do synchronized backups after the first full backup. (This means that instead of it backing up the entire drive every time you back up, you have the option to only update the things that have changed since the last backup... saving boatloads of time.)

*Note - SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible.

If you are using an Intel based Mac, there are ways you can back up your Windows partition, too... but that's a topic for another time.

Regardless of which software you use to create your backup, make sure that you select the option to make a bootable backup. That way, if you need to boot from the external drive, you power down your Mac, plug it in, hold down the “Option” button while booting up, select the external drive, and you are back in business.

The other reason having a bootable backup is to repair your main hard drive if it starts acting weird when you are on the road. You can boot up from the external and run the disk utility or other fixit programs on the main drive and hopefully be able to repair it. If you can't, no big deal, just clone your backup back over to your main drive and you are back with a working OS again.

Assuming that you keep your laptop slimmed down without a bunch of extra unnecessary stuff, you should only need to update the backup every month or so to account for software upgrades.

Another thing that I would suggest is create two partitions on the external drive so you can use the extra partition as an alternate storage location for images. If you use a program like PhotoMechanic, you can set it to import the images to a folder on your main hard drive and to copy them to the second partition on the external drive at the same time. That way you have an immediate backup of the files.

If I am shooting out of town, I usually store my external drive separately from my laptop after I've loaded my shoot in it so that if my laptop bag gets stolen, at least I have all my images backed up safely somewhere else (like in my camera bag.) If you keep the external drive with your laptop and it disappears or gets run over by a bus or something... you are hosed.

So remember to backup your laptop and have fun if you make it to MacWorld... I'm home hanging out with the twins.