Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
I've been having a few problems with my MacBook Pro - but today has been a most productive day in resolving at least some of those issues.
The first issue, and certainly the most frustrating was the repeated electric shocks that the laptop would deliver into my wrists. I must confess I actually stopped using the MacBook for a period of a couple of weeks after an evening of being shocked every 5 to 10 minutes. The internet seems to suggest that this is a common problem with the MacBook and Pro lines, with the added bonus that the metal case on the Pro line means you don't have to even touch a screw to get a painful and irritating jolt of electricity delivered into your lower wrists. I noted, as did some other Mac users, that using the computer without the power plugged in reduced the frequency of the shocks immensely, if not curing the problem altogether. Thanks to phaxx, I took a closer look at the power cables supplied, and it appears that the long power cable supplied actually has an earth connection. The direct clip-on 3-pin plug does not. This appears to be an oversight by Apple, and I've been using the laptop for a couple of hours now without being electrocuted, since swapping for the long power cable with the earthed connection.
Secondly, I have been one of the many users frustrated by the almost arbitrary functionality of the backspace key when using Terminal.App to connect to remote servers. I use screen, SSH and vim, and require backspace to work sanely in all three. Again, google and some experimentation uncovered a blog entry from 2006, by fredericiana, which detailed that there were a number of things I had to do. In summary, setting 'Delete sends Ctrl-H', mapping the 'Forward Delete key to \033[3~' (it's set to that by default on my machine), adding 'stty erase ^H' to my ~/.profile (create the file if you don't have one already) and adding '"\e[3~": delete-char' to my ~/.inputrc file (again, creating it if it doesn't already exist) and then executing source ~/.profile && bind -f ~/.inputrc seems to make all three modes of operation work (on the limited number of servers I tested on! YMMV!)
And that entire blog entry written without being electrocuted once. Awesome! :)
posted at: 02:09 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
