I’ve been wondering whats going to happen to all the dell and apple battery’s, it must surely be an ecological nightmare. Are they all going to be shipped to China to be dumped next to the source of a villages water supply?

I haven’t had the end of week delicious best of the web thingy happen since the 7th, turns out they’ve changed their API slightly. the URL has changed and it’s now https only. This is a bit of a problem because i’ve had a tinker and my hosting service haven’t got the openSSL php extension, well, at least I presume that’s the problem, basically php isn’t able to reach the https url. Grr.

So, I’ll either have to give up on the whole weekly delicious thing, do it manually (ugh) or tackle it differently. I was thinking I could write a php page that parses some XM.L-RPC, have delicious post their daily blog feed to it, and store what they send to it in a database. Then have a php page croned at the end of the week to stick them all together and blog it. Sort of the opposite direction to what my code was doing before, pushed instead of pulled.

I’m convinced that since getting my iMac back that the fans are running more loudly than before. It may of cause be my imagination, so anyway, i’ll probably be obsessing over the constant slight hum I’m hearing right now for the rest of the week, driving myself slowly insane. The polystyrene blocks than you sit the iMac between when you box it up don’t seem to be quite as snug as they should be, maybe the box has bulged a little, but it means that whilst you carry it… by the handle the insides rock back and forth a little as you walk. So now i’m thinking all the walking with it has made the fans inside a little loose or something.

Yeah, i’m obsessing. I bet you it isn’t even any louder. It certainly doesn’t compare with the turbines you hear from the average PC. Also, a slight problem with the iMac is that its at the same height as your head, so any noise it emits is right in front of your ears.

I still can’t get my iBook battery serial to validate on the battery recall page. I would take a photo of it so that you can all have a go yourself in case I’m miss-reading one of the letters in a foolish manor. But i’m not sure if there are any implications to telling the world the serial. I can’t think of any reason not to, its not like someone can go on a spending spree with a battery serial number. But somehow it doesn’t feel right to.

Apple have recalled their battery’s. Basically you can say all of them because the numbers in the wild that aren’t affected, macbook’s and macbook pro’s must make up such a small percentage when you’re talking 5 or 6 years worth of products. It’s got to be funny though hasn’t it? I had just got my fixed iMac back home (hurray!) and then straight after I hear about this. So does this mean yet another trip to the Genius Bar? Ugh, I freekin hate trips to meadowhall, it’s a non-stop journey of traffic and roundabouts from the south of Sheffield to that place.

Funny really, I was all for gushing about how fantastic Apple’s service is, how I only took the iMac in on Tuesday and it’s already been done. They’ve also been super super friendly in the store and quite informative too. Ah well. They’re gonna have fun collecting up all them batteries. Damn Sony. OMG yeah! How awful are Sony now? Have they done anything right in the last few years? First the Rootkit fiasco, then the sweat inducing pricing for the upcoming PS3 and now the guilt of having supplied a plague of dangerous batteries to most of the popular laptop manufacturers of the world. Shame on them.

UPDATE: I’d better add that the person who told me about this exaggerated a tad, and in the style of Chinese whispers I’ve ended up making out that all batteries on earth need to be replaced. Any poop, it turns out just 1.1m in American and 700k elsewhere are being recalled. Unfortunately I’ve just had a quick check and mine is one of them Mine’s a model A1061 with a serial of 6C533xxxxxxx. Ah pooies.

UPDATE 2: The recall page is being super super slow, so I guess it’s getting battered by battery fans. Thing is try as i might I cannot get my battery’s serial number to validate, it says “This serial number is invalid or does not qualify for the program.” and I am so sure i’ve got it right, i’ve re-checked it about a million times. Dagnamit, I wonder if this page is only for checking US models.

UPDATE 3: I gave up trying to convince their website so I called Apple’s tech support and the battery did indeed need replacing, so they’re sending me one (4-6 weeks lead time, thats quite a long time to not be allowed to use it off battery). So, methinks Apple should double-check their validation code on the website, and if you suspect you have a recalled battery but the website says it isn’t valid don’t take that as meaning it doesn’t need replacing.