Currently my laptop won't run on its battery. Or rather, it'll only run for 5 minutes without any mains. That's pretty poor and shows my battery is dead (it is over a year old, which is roughly the right lifespan).

Today I bought a new battery. It cost roughly £34 but I was pretty amazed at the distribution of costs for my little laptop battery. Mine was the cheapest I found for my HP NC4000 but others were around £60 in total. Just goes to show you; when buying laptop batteries it pays to shop around.

I'm not sure but I think this one may be specific to the Mac. Still, thought it was worth mentioning.

Recently I bought a Skype kit and decided to have another go at it, having use and left it before. I opened up Skype, tried to login and recieved the error: "Unable to mount database". A quick Google yielded some results; this posting on the Skype forum was the best. Basically, the guy tells you to:

1. Go into <Your home directory>/Library/Application Support/Skype/ in Finder
   
2. Delete the folder named after your Skype username.
3. Close Skype 
4. Open Skype
5. Log in as normal

That should solve the problem; at least it did for me. Some of the other information I came across pointed to some kind of corruption of a profile file in that directory that then caused Skype to throw a wobbly for that particular user. Looks like pretty poor programming on behalf of Skype, though. Us Mac users aren't usd to uninformative errors...

Well, I've done it again. I've managed to neglect my blog beyond belief (you'd wonder why I don't just pack it in and do something I can stick with) and now I'm stuck with this "sorry I haven't blogged" crap. Here's the deal; I can't remember the last time i sat down and thought "bugger, nothing to do".

My final year at University is now kicking into high gear; I'm aiming for a first. Having completed our specification, requirements gathering, design and various ancilleries, my group project is now getting into the coding. This is welcome; we've only got until the end of April.

My Dissertation is being a spoilt little bugger and not playing very nicely. I'm currently running tests on it but an unforeseen and necessary addition of miles of code has set me back somewhat. Still, I'm at 2,000 out of 8,000 words so I'm not doing too badly. And I've had to build a whole computer program!

I've also just purchased a new phone. Those of you who've known me for a long time will realise this is quite a moment; I've had my Sony Ericsson k750i for about 4 years now. When mum asked what I wanted for my birthday (which is, by the way, fast approaching) I decided a new phone was exactly what I needed. The one I eventually picked was the LG Cookie; a cute, cheap little touchscreen phone with some lovely features. I'm very happy and looking forward to getting it on the 12th of Februrary.

Oh yes, and please don't touch the article links. My routing is broken and I haven't fixed it. I'e included a lovely picture of Brewster (who sadly passed away very recently) and a little soft teddy called Cottalon to make up for this.

I've been trying to get the Zotero plugin to work with OpenOffice.org (OOo) 3.0 Aqua today so that I can use it to keep track of my references. This was no mean feat; I had to do a LOT of detective work and post on the forums in order to get the result I needed. With that in mind, I thought I'd document the solution here.

It appears that the Zotero plugin won't work on OOo (see the note on the download page) because Python, which is used by the plugin, is broken in the Mac version of OOo. It boils down to something called PythonUno; a component used by OOo to access Python.

Having discovered this, I then found a post on a thread Mail Archive which discussed the problem and linked to a solution by Daniel Darabos who works for Multiracio. He's, apparently, created a patch that solves the broken Python support. Having applied the patch I found that all my Python plugins suddenly started working, so I can verify this. So, how to install it?

1. Install OpenOffice.org Aqua.
2. Download and run Daniel's patching utility, which can be found here on the Mutiracio site complete with instructions
3. Install the Zotero extension for the Mac on the OpenOffice.org website
4. Open OpenOffice.org, open OOo Writer, click on View -> Toolbars -> Zotero and you're done!

Following these steps should fix it for you. If you come across any problems leave a comment and I'll do my best to help.

 

In the interest of deceminating information, I will now write about how to install the id3-ruby gem on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5).

Basically, you need to compile id3lib. Using Darwin Ports that's easy:

sudo port install id3lib 

Now, the problem comes when we try to grab the Gem for the Ruby interface to id3lib (id3lib-ruby)

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...

ERROR:  Error installing id3lib-ruby:

    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

So what do we do? Well, turns out we need to point it at the correct opt directory because Darwin Ports put the id3.h file somewhere other than where it's expected. Try this (copy and paste this all one line):

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby 

-- --build-flags --with-opt-dir=/opt/local 

And you should be all smiley. I was real stumped on this one until I found an article on it by Larry Karnowski.