I'm writing this on my old Palm Vx, which I dug up the last time I went home. In nearly pristine condition, it's a relic from my web designer days, when I needed to keep track of an awful lot of meetings and was given this by my boss to do so. As soon as I left that job, I found I didn't really need it, so it was put away for half a decade to emerge only now.



It's funny how stylish it still looks - actually, it looks nicer than Kevin's Tungsten T5, and if you can't see the screen, it could pass for something new. I used to be quite good at the Graffiti alphabet used to input text, and am quickly getting my chops back. Certainly it's quicker than trying to type on the Nokia E61's tiny keyboard. Battery life is fab, and the flash memory means no faffing around with stupidly long menu trees to save stuff.



The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to sync it any more. I have a serial to USB adaptor, and the Palm Desktop in both Mac and PC flavours, but the Mac refuses to recognise that there is anything there to sync with, whilst the PC sees the device but can't figure out how to talk to it. I've spent a fair amount of time fiddling, but nothing seems to help. Palm Vx and computer just don't like each other any more. Perhaps the laptops feel the ol' Palm is just too passé.

But hoorah! All is not lost. It turns out that I can beam documents from the Vx to my E61 using infrared, then I can Bluetooth them from the E61 to my Macbook. In theory, this works the other way round too, as the E61 can beam files to the Palm but in practice the Palm can't recognise the file contents, so displays them as truncated gobbledegook.

What this means is that I can't add any new Palm apps to the Vx, so I can't add AvantGo (which it used to have), so I can't cram it full of stuff to read. It is, effectively, a write-only device. There is not much else it can do that's of any use. Yes, the other apps all work, but I don't do much calculating on a daily basis, and an address book on an un-networked device is a bit useless. So really all I can do is write... No disturbances. No multitasking. No interruption. (Although also, no spell checker either.)

I've started to carry it with me wherever I go, and scribbling down scraps of blog posts whilst on the tube or, as today, on the plane. (Let's just say that going to Berlin and back in one day is not necessarily a habit I would encourage anyone to get into.) The amount of stuff I've got going on never seems to diminish, and time for blogging seems to be getting harder and harder to come by. But maybe by using the little lost moments on the tube I can get more written.

The unexpected benefit of resurrecting this old thing is the retro geek joy it engenders. At Future of Web Apps, everyone I showed it too cooed as if it were something new and exciting, like an iPod Touch. I think people have fond memories of Palms from this era - they were certainly nicer than many of their contemporary competitors - but these days Palm devices feel old and unloved. If only Palm would do a serious update of both their OS and their desktop. Syncing and conduits and stuff are just all so boring - we want it to just work, not to be a right royal pain the backside. (Although frankly, all syncing is a right royal pain in the backside, if you ask me.)

Anyway, I am not going to promise anything, but it is possible that I will get more blogging done now.

Maybe.

After 12 days in the Apple repair shop, I finally have my Macbook back. I have to say that the staff were really lovely, and they took very good care of both me and my Macbook.

The problem was that my screen flickered, but of course when I took it to the Genius Bar, it refused to replicate the problem, probably because the first guy to 'look' at it didn't, instead carrying out a somethingorother reset which temporarily fixed it so that it then wouldn't replicate.

The guy who took over from him did a really thorough exam of my machine and added a few extra things to the list of repairs, which ended up including:

• new inverter board and cable
• new top case housing, keyboard and trackpad (old one was discoloured)
• new display bezel (also discoloured)
• new power adaptor (old one had shorted out)

I have to say, my Macbook looks like new, and has totally stopped flickering, so I am a happy bunny.

The one thing that does still bug me is that the battery life is so dreadful. When fully charged, I get just 2.5 hours out of it, if I'm lucky. It seems to take forever to charge, so that the length of time left until fully charged sometimes actually increases - even though I am plugged in - if I am also working on it. But it is still a lovely machine to use, and I wouldn't swap it for anything. Well, apart from a new LED-lit one!

What more fun could one have on a hot*, sunny, Sebastopol day than making giant space invaders to be photographed by the Google photographers as they fly over the campus? Not much, I'd say.

Last year I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp and, whilst we were there, word had it that Google were going to be taking photos of the campus for their maps. So Tom Coates, Cal Henderson, Simon Willison, Paul Hammond, Chris Heathcote, Matt Biddulph and I put together a set of Space Invaders, oriented to the north (we hope) so that when it is displayed in Google Maps it'll look like the Space Invaders are actually playing in your browser.

I spent weeks last year, after I got back from FooCamp, randomly checking Google Maps to see if they had uploaded the images from their flyby, but no, nothing. Eventually, I gave up, assuming they'd been unable to capture a good enough image. But lo! News from Tom is that they have indeed got some cool images, and that they will be going live on Google Maps, Google Earth, etc., some time during February! How cool is that?




See those blobs? One of those blobs is me! It's hard to tell which one, exactly, but I'm definitely there.

And if you look at the the full-sized image, and zoom in on the O'Reilly lawn, you'll see the volleyball net as a thin line top to bottom. At the top right of that line you'll see a grey two-man** tent, with a beige one to its right and a blue one below that. That's my tent! Well, strictly speaking, it's Kev's tent, but hell, it's still exciting to think that the place where I froze my ass off on the first night (and was saved from freezing my ass of on the second night by the kindness of Stewart Butterfield who lent me a spare sleeping bag) should end up on Google Maps.

I'm so excited!


* Hot, when the sun was out and you weren't in the shade, anyways.
** If they are very slender and very friendly men.

Last month I was struggling with trying to import all my old posts from Blogware into a local Wordpress install. Well, I finally managed to get it sorted, sort of.

The Blogware import script, written by Shayne Sweeney, that I had found via Chris Pirillo didn't seem to work. Every time I tried to use it, it just... did nothing. Kevin Marks had a look at it and my Blogware XML file, and suggested that I try importing it in smaller chunks. The Blogware XML indicates individual blog posts with <item></item> tags, so as long as you don't split the file inside an <item> tag you're ok. I ended up splitting my archive into nine smaller files and the importer worked fine.

Unfortunately, Blogware's export script makes no differentiation between a line break and a paragraph break, so posts are run together without paragraph breaks. Every one will have to be edited by hand to add the paragraph breaks in.

I have no idea why Blogware have done this. In fact, it's an ongoing bugbear of mine that developers the world over seem to have some weird bias against the paragraph break, even though it's important. And no, a paragraph break is not simply two line breaks one after the other - it is a different beast and it should be respected. It's in situations like this where you see why - by not respecting my paragraph breaks you turn my blog posts into one great big ugly blob of text. Cheers.

The next challenge was importing stuff from Blog-City. Kevin Marks took Shayne's original Blogware import script and tweaked it a bit, giving us this Blog-City import script. There are no categories in Blog-City posts, so they all get dumped in a 'Blogcity' category, which is fine for my purposes.

The first problem was that Blog-City had created two archives of photograph upload data, so I had to delete 150 pointless 'posts'. We then discovered that Blog-City had two dates in its XML archive:

<dateopened>2004-04-04T00:00+00:00</dateopened>
<dateupdated>2004-04-04T15:30+00:00</dateupdated>
Kevin assumed that the 'date updated' date was the date to take for determining when a post was posted, as it has a time stamp, but unfortunately it has absolutely no relevance to anything. I suspect it may have been the date stamp for when the post was exported. The date opened date, however, is the one you want. But it has no time stamp. It seems that I pubished all my blog posts spot on midnight. Wow. How OC is that?

This means that on days when I posted more than once, I have no way of telling which post came first (and I can't go back and check because the lovely people at Blog-City deleted my blog). For my purposes, however, this is not a problem, but it is rather shoddy work if you ask me.

Initially, the import script was ignoring the differences between line breaks and paragraph breaks too, but whereas we could find no cure for this in Blogware's export, Kevin was able to cure it for Blog-City, so I have my paragraphs. However, some of the encoding's screwed, so Kevin had to make a special case for apostrophes in order to turn them from a mush into proper apostrophes. Some of the encoding remains screwed, but I'll have to fix that by hand.

So now I do have all my posts in one database. Any new comments will be missing, but in general I have everything up to 6 December 2006. That's enough for me for now.

My next decision is, do I stay with Blogware or leave? But that's a topic for a different post.

Haven't had a chance to blog before now, but Saturday, as soon as we got off the coach in Dorset, Dad took us down to Poole to pick up my replacement Nokia E61. Phew. I have to say, the staff in the Poole Carphone Warehouse were lovely, and the entire unpleasant experience was very much softened by their kindness, and by the efficiency of the Carphone Warehouse's insurance department, who didn't quibble at all about replacing my mobile even though I'd had it such a short time. Even the excess, which I expected to be quite a lot, was only 30 quid. Compared to the 200 quid nature of the phone, that's trivial.

In fact, I wouldn't ever buy direct from a phone provider now, as I always have in the past - I will always go to the Carphone Warehouse, and I will always buy their insurance. Especially now that I'm hooked on smartphones and am unlikely to go back to the kinds of cheap, minimalist phones that you can easily replace at little cost.

That said, I'm much more aware now that having a flashy phone makes you a target, and being 'normally so careful' - as my amazed parents described me as they tried to comprehend that their diligent daughter had had her phone nicked - isn't good enough. You have to always be careful.

I will, therefore, be much less likely to use my phone outside and in public unless I really, really have to. Which somewhat makes a mockery of bothering to have a phone that's mobile, but I just don't want to go through all that again.

One annoying point, though, is that I can't transfer my number over from Orange to O2, because unlike T-Mobile who will transfer your number at any time after you've bought your phone, 02 want you to do it at the time you buy, so I'm too late. Rats. So it's a new phone number for me, whether I like it or not. Which is a bummer as I've just sent out Christmas cards with the wrong phone number in. Oops.

Anyway, all's well that ends well, and frankly it's not like I'm not easily found online if people really want to find me.

I had a message last night that Carphone Warehouse have accepted my claim and that I can go into any branch and pick up my replacement Nokia E61. Yay!! Very pleased about that (although I'll be more pleased when I actually have it in my hands - tend to be a little wary of getting to excited about such things til they have come to pass).

Because I need my insurance certificate, and because that's in Dorset, I have to wait until Saturday, but with any luck I will have a new E61 very soon. The speed and efficiency with which Carphone Warehouse have dealt with this has been excellent.

I also had calls from the police this morning asking for more details. I now have a case number, but I suspect that will be the end of the matter. They were very nice and polite, though, so it was nice talking to them.

I think I'm going to give up on mobile phones. My shiny new Nokia E61, which I purchased a mere 19 days ago, just got stolen. I was chatting to a friend on my way to Waitrose, and when I got there I put the phone in my coat pocket and picked up a basket. A few minutes later, I thought 'I had better put my phone in my bag, in case it gets stolen', but too late.

I didn't feel anyone reach into my pocket. I wasn't aware of anyone coming too close, or watching me or bumping into me. Whoever it was was a very, very good pickpocket, and I'm sure they'll enjoy the phone for the next 24 hours until the bar kicks in, and after that I'm sure they'll sell it on Ebay for hundred quid or so.

Meantime, I await with bated breath to find out if the insurance got sorted out in time, otherwise I'm fucked. Plus the Treo is seriously buggered now and I can't even make calls on it, so I'm doubly fucked.

Merry fucking Christmas.

UPDATE, 19 Dec: Rang the police back this morning with my IMEI number. Never heard of an IMEI number? No, me neither. Apparently it's very important if you get your phone nicked, though, so find out what it is now, and make a note somewhere safe - you'll find it on the box that your phone came in, or maybe behind the phone's battery. If you lose or have your phone stolen, they'll need this number.

I also got my case number, and rang up Carphone Warehouse's insurance department. They've opened a claim for me, and I should find out by Friday if I can go and get another phone, or if I am going to remain phoneless.

Emotionally, I feel a bit of a wreck. On the one hand, I feel stupid for putting my phone in my coat pocket and not putting it away immediately like I usually do. I feel frustrated because I am normally so careful with my gadgets, but this one time I slip, this 1% of unawareness, and pooofft, my phone is gone. I feel guilty for feeling upset, because really it's all pretty tame, I wasn't mugged like Kevin was - he ended up with three stitches last year after three little yobs jumped him near Television Centre in White City and tried unsuccessfully to steal his laptop, only to find out that he may be wiry but he's very powerful. I wasn't thrown to the ground like the girl whose mugging I witnessed last year. I just had my personal space violated an an expensive gadget taken.

I feel extremely pissed off that some little fucker who probably hasn't earnt a penny his (or her) whole life is gonna profit from the sale of my phone.

I feel upset because London didn't used to be like this. I lived here for five years in the mid-90s, and in that time I personally knew just two people who'd been mugged. I've been back in London just over a year, and the catalogue of crime that has happened to people I know is:

- Kevin got mugged
- I witnessed a mugging
- I got my phone stolen
- our friend Vicki has had two phones stolen
- Karina, her phone and her purse
- the cleaner at Kevin's old house had her phone stolen
- I've been spat on (not a crime, I suppose, but not very nice)
- Kev and I were threatened with a stabbing (no knife in evidence)
- Kev witness a security guard being harassed by yobs on bikes

I don't like London anymore. I don't want to live here. But unfortunately, for the stuff that Kevin and I do, it's the only place we can be right now.

But, to cap it all, I was just starting to really love that phone. 19 days is just enough to start to get used to the way a new OS and a new phone works. I liked the shortcuts that made using the phone simple, I liked the Symbian OS which allows you to run more than one process at a time (in stark contrast to Palm, which has to fake it), I liked the form of the E61, it's QWERTY keyboard and its nice, bright screen. More than anything, I loved having Google Maps on it, and Google Mail. I adored the web browser which made surfing the net on a phone actually doable. I was totally in love with the wifi.

Does this make me a materialistic, spoilt brat? I hope not. This phone came as close as I have ever been to a decent mobile internet solution which, given how much I travel, actually was threatening to turn into a valuable business tool. I still had to find a good AIM client (the built in chat client doesn't like AIM), and a better way of dealing with RSS, but I was really pleased with the way that I could set it up to sync with my Macbook without too much trouble.

If that evil little swine had swiped my Treo, I would have laughed, barred the account and not been all that bothered. But they took my E61, and I bet they don't even bloody appreciate what they stole.

I am grateful that I wasn't hurt, and that they didn't steal, say, my Macbook (I carry my Macbook in a Crumpler rucksack, so pretty hard to steal, I hope). But still. Bastards.

Having decided that yes, I am going to look through all my old posts to see if any of them might possibly work in dead tree form, the next thing to do is figure out precisely how to do that.

My current preferred methodology is to have a local installation of Wordpress on my Macbook, import all my blog posts, and then be able to go through and categorise them as 'yes', 'no', and 'maybe'. That way I can try to filter them on the fly until I have a collection that looks like it might work.

I spent quite a bit of time on Friday night trying to get Wordpress up and running. Thanks to help from my friends on IRC, and the Maczealot tutorial, I got it halfway there. Everything worked apart from the final Wordpress installation page. Then Dan told me that the version of PHP4 that OS X ships with doesn't actually support MySQL, which is somewhat less than handy. However, he pointed me at PHP5 which, once installed, made Wordpress just work.

Nice!

Having done it once, I will now be able to have as many Wordpress blogs as I like on my Macbook, and I can set them up myself.

Now for importing all my various Chocolate and Vodka archives into Wordpress. I tried importing my Blogware and Blog-City archives as 'RSS', but WP wasn't having any of that at all. When I try to import Blog-City XML archive as RSS, it says that it has been imported, but it hasn't - there's nothing there. Well, I sort of expected that as Blog-City has never played well with others, and so I'm about as unsurprised as you can be and still have a pulse.

Blogware, though, that should be different. I tried the RSS import, but nothing. So I had a Google, and I came across a post by Chris Pirillo about importing Blogware archives, which includes a link to a Wordpress plug-in that goes in the 'import' folder and gives you an 'import from Blogware option'. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

I started off with the error 'The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini', so I dug out php.ini and edited the upload_max_filesize to something absurdly big. Then reset Apache by stopping and restarting Personal Web Sharing.

Then I got a new error, 'Unable to create directory /Library/WebServer/Documents/CnVthebook/wp-content/uploads/2006/12. Is its parent directory writable by the server?', so I had to go and set the wp-content and uploads directories to read-writable.

OK, great, at least it's progress.

Then came the brick wall. When I try to import from Blogware I can browse to my archive file, select it, click 'import', and then I get a screen which just says 'Import Blogware'. And nothing else. Nothing to click, nothing to indicate that anything more is happening. Nothing. Nada.

A quick Google gets you a page on the Wordpress forums that says:

In Firefox, I found that I receive "script timeout" errors that offer "Stop" and "Continue" -- if you're using this browser or MSFT's IE gives you a similar error, keep hitting continue.

But I don't get these buttons at all, not in Safari or Firefox.

So now I have a nice shiny new blog, and nothing in it.

It's ludicrous that it should be so hard to export from one blog engine and import into another. These words are my words, and if I want to move them from A to B, then I should be able to do so. It annoys me no end that my words get stuck in XML files that I can't then import into the blogging platform of my choice.

I'm sure that I'll somehow manage to do this in the end. I'm sure that someone kind will write me some script that will tidy the XML I have into a format that can be imported by Wordpress. But it shouldn't be this hard.

Back in August I had a few problems with my trusty ol' iBook falling asleep on me unexpectedly. After a few false starts, I figured out that it must be the DC-in board - the socket that you plug the charger into had become a little loose and would occasionally short out.

I went to the Apple Store and then to an authorised dealer, and they both said that the motherboard would need to be replaced, and that it wouldn't be cheap, and that it would probably take 10 days... or longer.

Well, bugger that for a game of soldiers. Kev got a DC-in board for $30, we did it ourselves, thanks in large part to the fantabulously brilliant iFixit Guides. You even get a little screw guide to print out so you can keep your screws organised.

Anyway, following in the footsteps of the legendary Tom Coates, we used the lovely Gawker to make a time lapse movie of it.

I really hate it when software updates break things, particularly when that update is to Firefox and the thing it breaks is the one extension that makes me love Firefox. I've just installed Firefox 2.0, which means I've just discovered that 'extensions' have now become 'add-ons' and that the one extension I loved is not compatible with 2.0.

I love Tab Mix Plus, and I'm glad to see that there's going to be a new version soon, but surely Firefox is sophisticated enough to scan through our extensions and tell us if there are any that are not going to be compatible? I would have waited a week to install Firefox had I realised that it would break my favourite extension.

So I'm going to try Flock for that week. Annoyingly, you can't import your bookmarks from Firefox into Flock, which means I had to port them from Firefox to Safari and thence into Flock, but I seem to have mislaid some along the way.

Kevin's been raving about how great Flock is - seems it is finally fulfilling some of the potential I saw at BlogOn last year. I'm not sure if I'll move my blogging from Ecto to Flock, but I might give it a shot. Certainly Flock's Flickr uploader is better than either 1001 or Uploadr, so I'm already converted there. Still, I'll spend a little time setting things up, and I've set Flock to be my default browser, and we'll see what we see.

Meantime, shame on you, Firefox. For the next release, how about you work on notifying us when we update if you're going to break things?

I was so happy when my Blackberry Pearl arrived this morning that I nearly missed an appointment because I spent so much time figuring it out and playing with it. It's a nice phone - small, lightweight, nice camera, decent interface. But I'm afraid it's going to have to go back to T-Mobile.

The reason that I decided to buy a phone from T-Mobile was that the Web 'n' Walk tariff looked to both me and Kevin to be one of the best data tariffs in the UK. Data here is dreadfully expensive, but Web 'n' Walk promised 'unlimited internet browsing on the move'. (Where, of course, 'unlimited' means 'no downloading big files'.) One of the reasons I didn't use the Treo for internet activity more often was a general fear as to what would happen to my bill if I went over my 4mb allowance. Orange aren't particularly clear about what the penalties are, but I'm betting they're expensive and I've known people accidentally run up bills of thousands of pounds, so I'm very wary about my usage. But the idea of what is basically unlimited surfing and email seemed like a great idea.

Over the weekend, Kevin satisfied his OC comparison shopping gene and came to the conclusion that the Blackberry Pearl was the best of the Web 'n' Walk phones offered by T-Mobile, so I ordered one online. When it arrived this morning, I noticed that it didn't seem able to connect to the internet via GPRS - the phone's connection status is permanently 'data connection refused'. So I rang support and they told me that the reason I couldn't connect was because I have to pay an extra £5 per month to get access to the web.

Huh. That wasn't on the website. Apparently I need a service called 'Instant Email' which hooks me up with Blackberry's 'push' email service and the rest of the net. I asked if I could just use the net and not have the push email, but the whole thing's tied in together and I can't have the net without the push email. Which means, I can't make use of the Web 'n' Walk tariff I have bought without paying another £5 per month.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn't allowed, and that Trading Standards might have a thing or two to say about it. When you buy a service or product online, you should get what you have paid for with no hidden charges - yet that is exactly what this is.

Let's just review what T-Mobile's site says you get with the Pearl:

Corporate blackberry
Web 'n' walk internet
Instant email
Bluetooth® audio
Bluetooth® data

Look! "Web 'n' Walk internet"... no sign of that extra charge though.

And when you look at the different types of Web 'n' Walk plan, they all say 'web browsing on your phone'. No sign there of an extra charge either.

Indeed, all the way through the sign up process, T-Mobile never once say 'You have chosen a Blackberry phone which will require you to pay an additional £5 per month for access to the internet'. In fact, Kevin's just been through the whole T-Mobile site and has been unable to find any notification of this additional cost. If T-Mobile had mentioned it, I could have picked another phone, or I could have chosen to accept that additional fee (although I probably wouldn't have). But insisting afterwards is just not sporting.

I'm just lucky that I spotted this within the seven day return period guaranteed by The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000, which T-Mobile kindly included a leaflet about. Under these regulations, you have 7 days to notify the vendor that you wish to cancel your agreement, and must return all equipment within 7 days of them telling you where to send it. (And I'm betting the cost of that is going to be borne by me, too.) So that's what I'm doing. It's not that I can't afford the extra £5 per month, it's the principle of the thing. I will not be conned like this.

Tomorrow, I might just give Trading Standards a call... and maybe the Advertising Standards Authority too. Meantime, I'm going to have to struggle along with the Treo, which is now sometimes working, and sometimes not, but always a pain in the arse.

My new T-Mobile Blackberry Pearl came this morning, and I have to say, it's gorgeous! Haven't quite figured out how to make the internet work yet, but so far so good. I'll be emailing everyone with my new number soon, but if you think you need it and I don't get in touch, please ping me.

More later, when I've figured things out.

(And thanks to Kev, for doing all the comparative shopping for me, and for helping me make up my mind on what I wanted.)

Bit of a general notice, this one. My Treo has no officially died, barring some sort of miraculous resurrection when I get home, which I doubt is going to happen. I now have no phone at all, so if you need me, you're going to have to email.

I knew that the Treo was on its way out - it had developed a yellow squiggle on the screen which was progressively worsening and looked as if there were some worm wiggling its way through the liquid crystal. For a while it's been only selectively announcing texts, and sometimes decided not to bother with more than one ring when people called. I've been told the mic was giving up too because frequently people would not be able to hear me.

Then, just now, it started totally freaking out - making gurgling 'boing' noises, flicking madly between apps, and randomly sending gobbledegook texts to people. (Sorry, Kate! I'll email in response instead.) It then threatened to phone Jane McGonigal in the US, at which point I tried a soft-reset. It's now flatlined, and I doubt that a hard reset will help.

Now, when some people I know make noises about needing a new phone or laptop, manufacturers send them things to play with. I'd just like to make it perfectly clear that if I have any phone manufacturers reading, I should be delighted to do a thorough and (brutally) honest review of your product. Just get in touch.

Meantime, I doubt I'll have a phone now til Saturday at the earliest.

A couple of days ago, I lost all the music from my iPod, very little of which I actually had on my iBook. Kevin needed to get a file off my iPod and plugged it into a PC it hadn't been plugged into before. He grabbed the file and said no to some update requests and then a while later called me over because the iPod icon was flashing in iTunes. That was the point at which we released that the iPod had been updated in the background without either of us realising, erasing all my music.

In retrospect, I should have looked when he queried me about the updates, instead of saying 'just cancel them'. And I should have remembered to make sure that his copy of iTunes was set to 'manual update only'. But I didn't. So there we go. Music lost. I have some of it on my iBook, and I have some on some DVDs which I think are in Dorset. But still, lots is gone.

I couldn't really get upset. I mean, it's bits. I can re-rip stuff or I can re-download stuff. It's a pain in the ass but it's not fatal. I haven't lost any *thing* just some replaceable data.

Of course, now that I've imported what little music I had on the iBook onto my MacBook, and now that I've updated iTunes with the new version, it recognised that I had an iPod that had been synced to a different library, and asked if I was sure that I wanted to update it.

The irony of this is not lost on me. I don't think it's lost on Kevin either.

Been having a few problems lately with my iBook, which is now over a year old so out of warranty. Why is it that these things always happen just out of warranty? Anyway, I was very alarmed last week when my Mac suddenly started falling asleep without my shutting it down. It was plugged in and the socket light said it was charging, so I couldn't figure out what the problem was. It would fall asleep on me, then I would wake it up, only for it to fall asleep again.

I consulted my Mac guru friends (thanks guys!) and concluded that maybe the power management unit (PMU) needed a restart, so I followed Apples instructions for a PMU restart and things seemed to get better.

A couple of days later, I'm sitting here typing away, as is my wont, when the screen flickers and then the laptop goes to sleep again. Dammit, I think. That's very annoying. But this time, I actually saw it do it. I'm typing, then it just flickers and goes black. No message, no warning, no nothing. The socket light is orange, saying that it's charging. But when I think about it, it's been plugged in all day and the light was green. Certainly, it's been plugged in long enough that it should be green, not orange.

I check the battery, and the battery is flat as pancake. That'll be why it keeps going to sleep then - not enough power to keep awake. I change over the power brick to my spare, and bingo, it starts to charge properly. I figure that the power pack is at fault, perhaps because the outside ring is c-shaped instead of o-shaped, meaning that it's not touching what it should be touching and is not completing the circuit.

So I used my newer power pack and all seems well.

But today, same problem. iBook has been plugged in all night, with the newer power brick, but when I wake up and turn it on, it lasts a few minutes before going to sleep. I check the battery, and it's down to one flashing light. Oh dear.

So, question is, is it the power brick, or is it the socket? Or is it, perhaps, the PMU or the battery? Guess I'll have to take it to a Genius Bar to find out for sure. Maybe I'll waste hours in the San Francisco store, rather than the UK one because no way am I going have time to get this done before I leave. But if you have any thoughts, please comment. :)

UPDATE (1 Sept 06): Ok, so I took the iBook to the Apple Store and to an Apple reseller, and they both sucked air through their teeth in a very disconcerting manner and said how expensive it was going to be to fix. It seems that the problem is most likely to be with the connection between the socket and the motherboard, and fixing it will require a whole new mobo. Which will not be cheap. Now, I haven't had this confirmed because that would mean being without my iBook potentially for 10 days or more, which is just not possible.

My computer is essential to my life - without it, I cannot earn money, pay rent, buy food. It's no exaggeration to say that losing my computer (nevermind the data) would be a disaster. So there is only one thing I can do - buy a new one. I will then back-up all my data on to DVD, and see if I can't then get a proper diagnosis, and prognosis, for the iBook. I'll update here when I do that, in case it turns out to be useful info for anyone else having the same problem.

UPDATE: Today (12 Nov 06) Kevin and I replaced the DC-in board on the iBook, using one we bought for $30 and the iFixit Guides to tell us what to do. Works perfectly now.