Command-Tab

Jaron Brass showed me a great little tool for checking the life of your PowerBook (or iBook) battery, coconutBattery. It works by doing the appropriate ioreg command and extracting the relevant battery information. It can report the number of charge cycles, the current and maximum charges, and the age of your Mac. I wasn’t even aware all that information was even available to software running on every Mac. In any event, it’s time for me to buy a new PowerBook battery, and coconutBattery helped me easily make the decision by showing exactly where my battery life stands.