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5.04.07

wait cursor

Today my mac hung when it ran out of battery. Well, it not actually hung in the sense freeze, rather the applications refused to work. I could switch between apps, some worked, but some showed me the spinning beachball of death. The symptoms where just as if you leave the network without unmounting a network volume.

After a while of patient waiting, I force-quitted most of the apps, but I had to use the power switch to really finish it...

wait cursor
After the reboot, I had a look in the console. I found up to 60 entries per 10 milliseconds (!) of the following error:

kernel[0]: SmartBatteryManager: retrying command 0x0f; retry due to absurd value _zero_

Sure, my battery showed to be empty, but still the computer worked. The sensors reported a completely empty battery: a condition under which the computer normally wouldn't work anymore. Probably the software ran into a never-meant-to-reach bit of code.

Suprisingly I found myself to be (according to google) the first person to have noticed this problem.