Analog vs. Digital Multi Meter

I've had a few multi meters in my life; my father bought me an analog one that I have no idea where it ended up. A few years back, I replaced it with a smaller one that was also analog. Everything that I've read indicated that analog meters were faster than digital meters as the needle jumps quickly to the value. This past week when I was assembling a cable for the MacBook Pro, I had to set the voltage to the 150 V DC range as the lower range went from 0-15 V DC. The MacBook Pro uses 16.5-19.5 V DC. The problem is that it's really hard to tell if the voltage is 16.5 or 19.5 when the full range is 150; the difference amounts to 2% of the scale.

I went to Fry's (the store I goto when I know what I want and don't expect to return anything) and picked up the cheapest digital multi meter I could fine; it cost $10. As I don't use a meter all that often, this would be more than adequate. Here's a case where the digital meter performs much better than an analog meter; you can tell the difference quite quickly. Am I convert to digital meters? We'll see.

Better battery cable

The other day I wrote about the cable I assembled to connect the XPAL Power to MacBook Pro. Well, it was ugly and had far too much room for failure. I decided to try again, but this time a cleaner route. I picked up a 5.5 mm OD/2.1 mm ID DC power jack at Radio Shack (Fry's didn't have any), connected up a MagSafe cable (one was given to me from a broken power adapter), and now I have a clean looking cable with very little room for issues. While this required sacrificing a power adapter, this is definitely the better way to go. This time I was sure that I didn't mess anything up as my searching turned up an article on connecting a MacBook to an airline/car adapter.

XPAL Power to MacBook Pro

I picked up an XPAL Power XP18000 from Woot.com to use when I travel which seems a bit more frequent lately. I knew that they couldn't provide a tip for the MacBook Pro as the MagSafe connector is patented and doesn't appear to have been licensed from Apple. They acknowledge this fact and have indicated that they're working with Apple on it. Considering that the MagSafe connector has been out for about 3.5 years, I'm not holding my breath.

On my last trip I used a battery from BatteryGeek that I borrowed from work. The MagSafe connector is definitely not Apple quality, but it worked, so I thought that if they could hack together a cable, why couldn't I?

I found some MagSafe cables off broken power adapters and will use those when I get them, but in the meantime, I wanted a solution. I read a lot of tips online and found one that said to use a circuit lighter adapter socket connected to the battery and then use a MagSafe airline adapter plugged into the socket. Well, I happened to already have the socket and the MagSafe airline adapter, so I was almost there. In a stroke of genius when I was trying to sleep, I remembered that I had a bunch of circuit boards in the garage slated to get trashed (by law, I have to dispose of them as hazardous waste which I haven't gotten around to doing, so they sit in a metal bucket). Some of the circuit boards had power connectors on it. I took a power connector off one of the boards, soldered it to the circuit lighter adapter and presto, I had a connector. A little electrical tape and it looks pretty good. There is a bunch of extra cable and a few twists and turns, but it works. Once I get the MagSafe cables, I'm going to hop down to Fry's (the store that has what I need, but I dread having to go there), get some connectors and give it another try.

While I hope that XPAL Power manages to get a licensed MagSafe tip, I have a solution in the meantime. My next trip is in about 1.5 weeks and I'll give it a try.

Love/Hate Relationship with Google

I use Google everyday for searching and switched my personal domain to Gmail using Google Apps for your Domain over to Google several years ago. Things work smoothly and are worth every penny I pay for it (it's free). Recently we started using Google Apps Premier ($50/user/year) for one of our domains at work and it works reasonable well. However, we just tried to purchase 10 additional accounts last week and a week later, they still haven't processed the order nor returned any of my several email messages to know what is the status. Was the problem a credit card problem? Did the order not go through? I have no idea and am not really sure what to do.

Anyone have any ideas how to get a human at Google to figure out why they don't want to take my company's $500 for additional accounts? Is it time to consider another provider? Our last email provider was awful and then we moved to doing our own email which works, but at some point in the future, I'd like to stop having to maintain servers.