MacBook Air 11 inch vs 13 inch battery life

A little over a year ago I wrote about how the battery life on my 13" MacBook Air was really great, a little over 6 hours when it was new.  Plenty of juice to last a Chicago to San Francisco flight.

More recently I began using an 11" MacBook Air, to save a little weight in the backpack and to make it fit a little better on the airplane for those times when the person in front of you decides to recline their seat at full speed without warning, and thus crunching your laptop screen.  (Karma would put such people in front of a 3 year old on their next flight who likes to kick the seat and open and close the tray the entire flight).

Now, this is not an apples to apples comparison because I have wifi on in flight versus not, but the 11" MacBook Air has a substantially weaker battery than the 13".   At a 97% charge, I'm getting a 2 hour and 40 minute time, which I've found to be pretty accurate after a couple flights.

Dimming the keyboard after 5 seconds of inactivity gets me another 27 minutes.   This gets me about what I need for a Eastbound flight from the West coast to Chicago, but not a Westbound flight where it's sometimes an hour longer.

Here's hoping that airlines that are good enough to have in-flight wifi will also consider providing power outlets.  Actually, I need to read a few books an relax for the last hour anyway...

Motorola Xoom won't boot?

My Motorola Xoom a few times has decided to just shut itself off and put itself in a state whereby pushing the power button will not turn it on.

The fix:  hold down the power button and the "volume up" button for 3-4 seconds.   

Not sure what causes this, but this always seems to fix it.

My New Relationship between Real-time Social Media and Sports

Ah, the good old days....when I had enough time to watch college football most of Saturday, pro football most of Sunday, and could usually catch Monday Night Football to boot.  You couldn't get soccer on cable back then, which left me enough time to study and get my degree.

Later on in life, we'd record games on DVR, and selectively watch later.

I came to realize today that now things are different.   I pick up on subtle real-time social media clues and join in on games in progress.  All the time.

Take, for instance, today:

Hmm...we might have a game.  Let me turn that on.

and 

Hmm...well, I don't really care that much about the NFL playoffs now that the Bears are nowhere in the picture, but I better turn this on right now!

Of course there are still games I watch whistle to whistle when I can plan ahead, but this is mostly how it goes.

And it's not like I'm feverishly studying social media instead of watching these games;  it's become a form of ambient music playing in the background - multiplexed into the 10 other things I have going on in the day.

I can hardly wait until each of those examples above has a "click here to join the game in progress" - but I have a feeling it's not that far off.

I don't understand Caribou Coffee

Caribou Coffee goes a long way toward giving you a comfortable cup of coffee.  There's usually a lot of tables, free wi-fi, lots of comfy couches and chairs.  And a nice fireplace, which is awesome in the Winter.   The coffee itself is good, and there's a great assortment of interesting coffee drinks you could probably put an umbrella in if they were Polynesian themed instead of North Pole themed.

But here's what I don't get:  Caribou's baked goods suck.  They are all pretty much horrible.   Why go to all this trouble to spend on this great interior and then have such a crappy collection of baked goods?  It's like they are running a marathon against Starbucks and fell face first 10ft before the finish line.

HUDs for text and tweets

Yesterday, BMW announced that 3 Series cars are going to get full-color Heads Up Display (HUD) capabilities.  I was first introduced to HUDs through military fighter F16 video games and often wondered why they weren't in more cars.  I've seen them in a few cars to display the speedometer, but I can't recall which models.

With texting while driving quickly becoming illegal everywhere, I think the killer app for HUD would be displaying texts from your phone via Bluetooth, and just being able to press a button to speak a response.  This would allow the driver to perhaps keep his or her eyes on the road and not be distracted by the incoming notifications.

I could also see functionality to pipe selected tweets, DMs, or email subject lines as well, though responding to such things would probably be more challenging.

The reality is, I see a lot of people texting while driving, sometimes at stoplights, but mostly going 65 miles per hour on the expressway, and that's kind of scary.  But I have to admit, there are certainly many times I am waiting for a message and when my phone goes off, I pick it up and have a look.   If I have to respond, I will pull over somewhere and respond.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this but look for this feature to be built into applications in the next couple of years if HUDs roll out to more vehicles.

techmeme vs hacker news traffic (one data point)

This is neither here nor there and just one data point, but I have always found traffic patterns on the web interesting, so I'm posting this mostly for my own self interest.  

I always just assumed it would be better to get a link on Techmeme over Hacker News but for this blog at least, it's not the case.

Looking at one post that got one of the "related links" on Techmeme and a post on Hacker News, Hacker News provided over 100X more traffic than the link on Techmeme.  Remember your Calculus 101 - the total traffic is the area under the curve of these graphs, not the max(y).

micro view

Even if you zoom it out and look at two separate posts spanned out over a period of months, the first one which was a "first class" link from Techmeme, versus an entry in Hacker News, you see the same pattern.   It's almost fractal.

macro view

What most non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post

Steve Yegge of Google accidentally posted a great rant on Google not forcing its product teams to encapsulate functionality and expose all data and actions as APIs...essentially that Google internally does not use a Service Oriented Architecture.

This is totally true and while I agree it would have actually been a heck of a lot easier to integrate products in Google if they did (something I know a thing or two about) - having one big codebase and database also had the benefit of allowing engineers to really understand what was going on in other parts of Google and forced them to work in a distributed environment across offices.

The web will make a big deal about his post, but I think what most people don't get about his post is that you see posts like this almost every day at Google.  At least once a week.  I enjoyed seeking out the engineers, PMs, and the occasional sales person, who would take the time to write a well thought out, lucid essay on something that could be changed, made better, or simply challenging a management decision like de-staffing certain projects.

Generally, the Google culture would hash this out, and at times, when appropriate, the exec team would address it.   Eric, Larry and Sergey were almost always aware of these things because they would get asked about them in TGIF (company wide weekly update meetings) and they'd usually have a reasonable response.

So enjoy reading this, as it will give you a peek into the Google culture from a freedom of expression point of view, but it's otherwise not a big deal.