apple Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Neil Turner's Blog

How to: fix your MacBook screen

December 31, 2024January 18, 2009 by Neil Turner

Had a bit of a panic this morning when I let my MacBook go to sleep, and upon re-awaking the screen’s backlight would not come on. The screen itself was working, as I could see a small portion of the desktop in the middle where the Apple logo is, but the rest was un-viewable.

It’s working now, but not after trying almost every trick in the book. I’ve listed all of the methods here, mostly for my own reference in case it happens again but also for anyone having a similar problem.

Diagnostics

First of all, make sure that the rest of the computer is working. If you have an external display handy, plug that in and use Fn+F7 to activate it (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac’s settings). If you can see your desktop on the external display then the problem is with the display – if not, you computer may have deeper problems. If you have VNC set up, you could try this too.

1. Set your brightness

Sometimes it’s the basic things – your brightness might be set to minimum. Use Fn+F2 to turn up the brightness (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac’s settings).

2. Zap your PRAM

One trick to deal with minor hardware problems is to reset your PRAM and NVRAM. To do this, power down your Mac, then, turn it on and hold down Command+Option+P+R at the same time, until your Mac makes the ‘ding’ noise again. Command is the Apple key, Option may be labelled as ‘alt’ on your computer.

3. Reset your Energy Saver settings

You may need to use an external monitor or VNC for this. While you Mac is booted, open System Preferences and choose Energy Saver. Under ‘Put the displays to sleep’, set the timer to 1 minute, and then wait 1 minute for your machine to go to sleep. Wake it up, and hopefully your screen will spring back to life.

4. Take out the battery

If your Mac is a portable, turn the computer off, unplug the AC power cord, and take the battery out. Next, hold down the power button for 5 seconds, and the re-insert the battery. Then boot up again. In my case, this is what worked.

Here’s what you could have bought…

March 9, 2025May 15, 2007 by Neil Turner

Apple has updated the MacBook range again, this being the third revision since they were launched last year. Mine is a first revision, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, had I waited 9 months I could have got (for the same price that I paid):

A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, instead of a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor
80 GB hard drive, instead of 60 GB
802.11n Wi-fi, instead of 802.11g (108 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps)
Faster writing of CD-RW discs (16x instead of 10x)

But never mind. It’s had 9 months of very heavy use and yet doesn’t seem to be suffering – the battery is still at well over 90% of its original capacity and everyone else seems to work fine. I guess I’m just envious.

It’s here

April 4, 2026August 21, 2006 by Neil Turner

The MacBook is here, and currently downloading about 10 system updates. Unfortunately, I have an exam in 3 hours so I can’t play with it much, but for now I can say the following:

Wow, it’s so small and light
The battery seems to be charging up really quickly
I really wish my Mac Mini had an Apple Remote

More later (including photos), after I’ve spent 2 hours sat in a room writing about internet security and encryption protocols.

iPod Recycling Programme

April 4, 2026June 3, 2005 by Neil Turner

At the risk of annoying Dave, who’s just bought a iPod Mini to replace his 2G iPod, Apple have announced an iPod recycling programme, whereby if you take your old iPod to an Apple Store in the US, Apple will recycle it free of charge and give you 10% off a new model (if you buy one on the same day). The old iPod will then be dismantled and recycled within the US, so that no hazardous chemicals, such as lead, are shipped overseas.

It’s a good move by Apple. On the one hand, they’re ensuring that unwanted iPods are disposed of and recycled properly, instead of being dumped on landfill sites. And at the same time, they’re encouraging users of old iPods to upgrade to newer models, thus bringing the company more revenue.

Let’s just hope that Apple extends this to other countries and that other manufacturers take a hint and adopt similar policies.

My iPod Mini arrived!

December 22, 2024September 10, 2004 by Neil Turner

At long last, my iPod Mini arrived this morning. It’s now on charge, connected to the bundled transformer that is almost as big as the device itself. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do all that much with it until my laptop is repaired because neither my dad’s laptop or my parents’ PC have USB2 ports, although once I have iTunes installed and have the device fully-charged I’ll try anyway. Experience tells me that if you charge the device fully on first use you can greatly extend the battery life of a device so I’ll wait a few hours.

Still, I’m excited at the fact that I can call myself an ‘iPod owner’ 🙂 .

Apple Lossless Encoder

November 10, 2023May 9, 2004 by Neil Turner

One new iTunes feature that slipped by me was the new ‘Apple Lossless Encoder’. Unlike music formats like MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, lossless encoding results in no loss of quality – the music file sounds exactly like the original. The downside to this is that files compressed using lossless compression are typically quite a bit larger than their lossy counterparts.

With the largest iPod topping 40GB it’s hardly surprising that Apple have adopted this – I’m sure the majority of people will never fill that much (even I have only 6-7GB) so the extra space can be set aside for higher quality files. What is surprising is that Apple chose to adopt their own format, and not one of the (many) other lossless encoding formats.

If you thought there was a format war amongst lossy encoders then you’ll be knocked back by how many lossless ones are out there. There’s at least 14, although not all of them are as good as each other. Thankfully, lossless formats are easier to compare since output quality isn’t a factor, but a good format will have quick encoding, a small output file size, many features, and would preferably be open source too.

The most popular is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which is now being steered by the Xiphophorus Foundation who are also steering the Ogg Vorbis format. It’s arguably not the best format out there but it’s good enough and it’s entirely open source. It’s well represented on almost all platforms and is even in some hardware players. Monkey’s Audio is a little faster but isn’t so well supported, being restricted to Windows and a command line encoder in Linux. Although it is open source, development has been a little slow of late, and it lacks some features compared to FLAC. Shorten is another popular format.

Apple Lossless Encoder (or ALE for short – nice acronym), is, sadly, based on none of these. It’s a new format which is closed source and currently only works in iTunes (Mac and Windows) and through QuickTime, although a dBpowerAMP codec is apparently in the works. It is quite well featured, offering streaming and seeking support (which a surprising number of other formats lack), and is obviously supported on the iPod with the addition of the latest firmware update, so on paper it has a similar number of features to FLAC. It is, however, slower at encoding and decoding, and files are typically a megabyte or so larger, according to this comparison provided by the FLAC project, however this HydrogenAudio topic suggests it is faster. I’m guessing Apple may have optimised it for the PowerPC processor, in which case compile times on Mac OS X would be better than in Windows.

It’s just a pity that Apple took the decision to re-invent the wheel when good alternatives already exist, although this Macworld column reckons this is because Apple may want to add DRM to it in future so that punters can buy higher quality files from the iTunes Music Store. AAC was an open(-ish) format and look how quickly that was cracked. On the other hand, I doubt the record labels would be interested in giving away their songs on the internet at full quality, based on their previous boneheaded decisions.

There may also be reasons, such as patents or problems with embedding FLAC in the iPod firmware, but seeing as other hardware manufacturers have managed it this seems strange.

In any case, it’s an interesting development. Any support for lossless audio in iTunes is a good thing, I just wish that Apple had gone with the herd rather than go on a tangent and then confuse people. What I would like to know is whether the WMA import function of iTunes allows you to convert them to ALE, since then you wouldn’t lose any quality – I couldn’t find anything that suggested this in my research for this article.