If you have used YouTube in the past, you'd probably find it neat, but wish the video quality is higher. Google has apparently given AppleTV and iPhone users access to higher-quality encoded videos; I mused (on my technical blog) whether the rest of us can get access to these videos as well. Go there, and if you also want this answered, press the Digg It button!

Oh, and if you want to upload your own videos, please also upload them to Revver? It is more sophisticated (allowing advertising-subsidized videos, which Google's YouTube still does not, which is preventing some commercial videos from being submitted), and most videos are available for download in high-quality Quicktime MPEG4.

Originally posted on hircus.vox.com

In sympathy with the overheating Sony-manufactured laptop batteries used in Dell and Apple laptops (funny that Sony's own Vaio range was unaffected), my iBook battery decided to suffer the equivalent of a stroke.

Started noticing it a few days ago when for the first time in a while I actually used the computer as a laptop, and not as a portable: battery life went down to below 50% and then suddenly dropped to 1%, and the laptop went to sleep soon after that.

The second time it happened was worse - the reserve charge was totally depleted by the time I plugged it back in, and the system clock was reset to 1969 (funny that. I thought it's stored in non-volatile RAM).

Every cloud has a silver lining, though: after running the battery down to 1% and sleep mode again today, OS X seems to have finally recalibrated the battery. Recharging it, it went up quickly to about 59% and then get stuck, very slowly inching to, currently, 60%. I still get 2 hours+ on it, which is not too bad for a 2-year-old. If no further deterioration occurs this can probably last me until next spring (yum, 64-bit Leopard Macbook goodness).

Would I be crazy if I go ahead with selling my HP laptop now? Would be a good idea to do it *now* while the new dual-core Turion 64 chip is still relatively hard to find.