Voxred International released a little helper today and his name is iTurbo. Yup, the small “i” should be your clue that it’s another accessory but the turbo part doesn’t mean it’ll play your music faster. The turbo actually means it’ll charge the internal battery of the iPod fast. Bringing the name all together, this is a rapid charger for your iPod with a dock connector that runs off a single AA battery. Perfect for when your iPod has drained itself and your miles away from a wall outlet. The turbo gets the iPod running immediately.

You can grab your own iTurbo that’s small enough to put in any pocket on your person for $29.95 direct from iTurbo‘s site. This may just be the perfect after Christmas gift for all you iPod video owners ready to do a spree of Lost on your plane trip to Macworld!

Wow, we really need to fix our MacBook Pro battery issue before things really get bad.

We first reported our troubles with our beloved Mac notebook last week and then the new week started with a replacement program from Apple, direct, explaining our problem. Well, we’ve been just a wee-bit busy here at SOT and haven’t had a chance to fill out that dandy form.

Today when we pulled out our MBP from our Swiss Gear backpack today, we found a bulge on the bottom of the unit. That bulge was from the the battery and it appears it gained some weight and blew up, as in expansion. No evidence of fire or sparks anywhere which made us all happy here at SOT and the Mac booted right up. In fact, it wrote our last session to disk (ala hibernate of Windows XP fame) and put us right back where we started from. Very nice!

After our heart beat came back down to a normal pace, we picked up the phone and called AppleCare (all good Mac-heads slap down the big bucks for this right?). About 30 minutes later a nice young man helped us get a new battery our way. About three days is what we’re told on getting the new puppy and do note, our AppleCare representative didn’t seem a bit surprised with our issue. Seems we’re not the only ones with this problem.

After just posting our odd behavior with out MacBook Pro battery, Apple makes it official today with its voulentary battery recall. If you purchased your MacBook Pro between February and May, then looks like you’re in the cutting-edge boat and will get a brand new spanking battery shipped to you free of charge. You’ll have to fill out a form and then sit waiting by your door for Mr. UPS (actually, doesn’t Apple use DHL?) to drop off that battery that won’t just shut your system off when it feels like doing so. Good times.

Dude, what up? Why is my MacBook Pro just shutting off by itself? No warning, no pop-up from OS X, no nothing. Just off!

Seems like I’m not the only one having this problem as the battery looks to be the issue. Sean Bonner has been reporting his problem for some time now and even has an account of an Apple Store employee tipping his hand that they know about this problem…without actually admitting it is a problem.

In my particular case, I’ll be working and off goes my MacBook Pro. At first, I just assumed my battery was dead and I had ignored the warnings. But when it happened after yanking the green lit MagSafe power cord, I knew something was up and turned over my MBP to find a full row of green lights on my battery. ‘I knew it!’ I thought to myself.

Now it’s happening more often than not while running on battery and it’s becoming annoying. The problem with this is if I call Apple Care, I’m afraid of losing my Mac for a week. Ugh, a whole week without my Mac? Heck, a half working Mac is still better than a fully working PC! But, I want this fixed and maybe I’ll complain about the whining, too, and get a new fan and logic board. We’ll see.

I’ll keep you posted how this turns out and let me know if you’re seeing this on your MBP.