There have been many times that my macbook’s battery is almost running out and about to die and I don’t pay attention to the icon in my menubar. The warning itself appears only when the battery level is 10% remaining. Recently however, this problem started causing more pain. My battery needs to be replaced, because of which at about 23% the machine will just shutdown. So I wrote a small script that calculates the battery power and along with some launchctl magic and growl, I now get a notification when my batter level is below 30%.

Here is what you need to do. Download growl 1.2 from here and install it. If you are using Adium you will most likely already have growl. To test, run this command in your terminal after you install growl.

growlnotify -m "test message"

The code for getting the battery capacity notification is below

#! /bin/bash
NOTIFICATION_THRESHOLD="30"
#this works only on snow leopard 10.6.
charge=`/usr/sbin/ioreg -l | /usr/bin/grep -i capacity | /usr/bin/tr '\n' ' | ' | /usr/bin/awk '{printf("%.0f",$10/$5 * 100)}'`
if [ $charge -lt $NOTIFICATION_THRESHOLD ]; then
message="Battery power level is $charge%"
/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -t "BatteryNotifier" -s -m "$message"
fi

The full paths are essential for the next step. Save the above in a file, make it executable with ‘chmod +x’ and run. You will not see anything if your battery charge is above 30%. In order to run this as a cronjob or daemon process create a file of type launchd.plist in
~/Library/LaunchAgents/
and give the file a unique name. My file is named com.abuhafsa.BatteryNotifier.plist.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.abuhafsa.BatteryNotifier</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/opt/scripts/daemons/battery_notifier.sh</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

Remember to change the location of the script to where your file is stored. The ‘StartInterval’ is time in seconds. Change it to whatever you desire and the script will run at that interval. Now logout and log back, which will enable launchctl to add this daemon to its list of tasks.

I’m cross posting this one from an old post on coding horrors. I can’t find the original now, but I had saved the text. I found it on

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

Article 1: Every programmer shall have two monitors
If you want to maximize developer productivity, make sure each developer has two monitors.
Article 2: Every programmer shall have a fast Computer
Developers are required to run a lot of software to get their jobs. The faster a developer’s computer is, the faster they can cycle through debug and compile cycles. Time spent staring at a progress bar is wasted time.
Article 3: Every programmer shall have their choice of mouse and keyboard
Programmers should have the unique relationship with their mouse and keyboard– they are the essential, workaday tools we use to practice our craft and should be treated as such.
Article 4: Every programmer shall have a comfortable chair
Let’s face it. We make our livings largely by sitting on our butts for 8 hours a day. Why not spend that 8 hours in a comfortable, well-designed chair? Give developers chairs that make sitting for 8 hours not just tolerable, but enjoyable.
Article 5: Every programmer shall have a fast internet connection
I’m all for books, but it’s hard to imagine getting any work done without fast, responsive internet searches at my fingertips.
Article 6: Every programmer shall have quiet working conditions
Programmers cannot work effectively in an interrupt-driven environment. Make sure your working environment protects your programmers’ flow state, otherwise they’ll waste most of their time bouncing back and forth between distractions.