My Macbook is almost approaching its second birthday and it has generally treated me well. Apart from the power cord, I haven’t had any physical problems with it.

Recently, however, the battery has just died. It no longer charges and the computer dies as soon as I unplug it. I have been searching throuh various forums, but none of the solutions that I have tried have worked.

Any body have any ideas?

Rogers, a Canadian wireless provider, announced today that the iPhone is coming to Canada. To that, I say Duh! Rogers is the only Canadian provider with a GSM/EDGE network that could even support the iPhone. Rogers was going to be the only provider all along, which is why I think that today’s news doesn’t matter that much. It only means that Rogers and Apple have come to an official deal. Ted Rogers issued the following statement in a press releases: “We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it now, but stay tuned.” A release date is still not set, which leaves Canada pretty much at the status quo.

Well, that was a long introduction to what I really wanted to talk about. Why is Canada still in the technological dark ages? The iPhone has been out in the states for almost a year and a second generation iPhone is being readied while Canada still hasn’t got the first one yet. I am not just referring to the cell phones. Canada often gets new technology months or years after it is released. Canada still doesn’t have Amazon’s Kindle, Netflix (although we do have alternatives), and videos in the iTunes store. Another example is the recently released Livescribe smartpen. It is only available to people with a US address.

I am writing this post not to answer the above question, but to explore it because I don’t know the answer.

There are a few possible reasons. Firstly, Canada is a small market and it is not worth it for companies to market new products immediately. Also, with regards to movies and TV shows on iTunes, I am pretty sure that there are legal issues. For example, Apple doesn’t have the rights to broadcast certain shows in Canada. The third and most probable reason is that there are only a few wireless providers and they have a huge monopoly. Most of the products that Canada is lacking use cell networks and it is ultimately the Canadian telcos that prevent the release of new products in Canada.

My macbook power cord has been in steady decline for the past few weeks. It had a bad short and I would often lose power. Even though I hadn’t touched it for weeks, it was taped to my desk, it was still getting worse. I’m not quite sure how this happened; I imagine it is a similar process that wires go through when they get tangled without being touched. No one is sure how this happens. Must be gnomes.

Anyways, back to the power cord. I followed the instructions in this Flickr set. It involved cutting around the transformer case with a rotary tool and cutting away the bad section of cord. I then rewired it and taped the original case back on with gorgeous red duct tape. Check out the pictures below and click for the full size image.

To anyone who is having the same problem, I would highly recommend doing this yourself. For 15 minutes of work, you save yourself $85 and your Macbook’s power cord will now look battle hardened.

First off, I apologize to my non-Apple-fan readers, who are going to have to bear with another Apple related post. If you don’t like apple, you can look at my previous post and admire some broken Apple hardware.

Before Leopard, iCal used to have a static date, July 17th, as its icon. In Leopard, the icon is now dynamic and displays the current date. I have made an amazing discovery. As seen below (click for full-size), the iCal icon in the recent applications stack still displays the static date. It was feared that iCal day would fade away into history and be forgotten, but this will keep the holiday alive, which is good news for those who celebrate July 17th.

My MacBook power cord is dying. It has a really bad short just past the transformer that is extremely temperamental. I did not take a picture of the short because I was too scared to remove the tape, but it is very ugly. There are only a few strands of wire left to transmit power. Any tiny movement shorts it out and cuts power to my MacBook. As you can see, I have fixed the problem by securing the transformer to the desk to stop any movement. (click for a larger image)

Mine is very similar to this one, whose owner cut it open and fixed the short. I have not been forced to do this yet, as I do not wander too far from my desk. Eventually I am going to have to repair it as per these instructions on Flickr.

Steve Jobs’s Keynote has now come and gone and I am left wanting more. I admit I bought into the hype and was monitoring the keynote on my new HTC Touch during lectures this morning.

For those of you who missed all the excitement in San Francisco this morning, Steve Jobs released a few new products in his annual keynote at Macworld. These products include new software for the iPhone, iTunes movie rentals, a new network backup device called Time Capsule, and a new notebook: the Macbook Air.

I am not impressed with Time Capsule. This is a niche where Apple shouldn’t have the monopoly. $500 for essentially a 1TB network drive is ridiculous. A network capable hard drive enclosure can be purchased for about $50. I am mad at Apple for not letting Time Machine back up to standard network drives. This might have changed now, but the details of the changes to Time Machine haven’t surfaced yet. I am sure that the release of Time Capsule will make Time Machine much easier to hack; however, standard network drive support is something that should work out of the box with Time Machine.

The new Macbook Air is a nice piece of eye candy, but I can never see myself owning one. The ‘thin factor’ is overrated. Compared to a standard MacBook, the Air has the same footprint, which is much more important that thickness. I don’t see the advantage of a lightweight, thin and slow MacBook that costs more. Apple should have designed a notebook similar to the Asus Eee PC, instead of modifying a MacBook.

Personally, I am not a big movie watcher, so the new movie rentals don’t mean much to me. Even if I was into movies, rentals are not yet available in Canada. On that note, the iPhone’s Canadian availability didn’t get announced either.

The product that I was hoping would be announced, an affordable mac tower (which I have talked about previously), wasn’t mentioned. I still think there is hope for a product like this, and I do believe that there is a market for one as well. There are a huge number of people who use dual monitors, but won’t shell out the cash for a Mac Pro, which are overkill for most people anyways.

…..365 days till the next one…….

I have an image of an ultimate computer setup in my head. The big problem with it is that it cannot be purchased (for a reasonable price).

This computer would be an Apple box that powers three monitors. Two of the monitors would run OS X and the third would run Windows via VMWare. A Mac Pro is capable of this setup, but as I have mentioned earlier, they are ridiculously expensive and not affordable for a student. There is a huge gap in the Apple product line between the Mac Pro and the iMac. In this gap, there should be a uATX desktop computer. Pixel Perfect Productions has mentioned this exact ‘Missing Mac‘ that I am talking about.

I think that my only present option is to build a Hackintosh like Lifehacker did here. Let’s hope that Macworld ‘08 will change this.