A guest-post courtesy of my buddy Rob, who has been a Mac guy since birth:
The Staedtler Mars Plastic Eraser. So special. Engineered in Germany and hopefully not assembled in Mexico like the VWs.
You may ask, why is this eraser so special? Legend says, and the internet says, this eraser may be used to remove the brown stains on a white MacBook’s wrist area with just a few quick flicks of the wrist with the Staedtler in hand. Are your hands excessively sweaty? Save that debate for another day because it makes no difference to the Staedtler. Do some gardening, then some computing. Staedtler eats it up. Watch out for eraser offspring though. They could easily take refuge in your MacBook through the spaces under your keyboard or other various holes.
I’ve wanted this for a while. I guess it’s new for Leopard.
To turn it on, run the following command and then restart Finder.
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
It’s not perfect. If the path exceeds the available space, an ellipsis is used — on the right, eww!
Are you the live fast, die young type? Put your Mac to sleep quicker by disabling Safe Sleep:
$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false
$ sudo rm -P /var/vm/sleepimage
If you change your mind:
$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=true
Update 3/22/08: I’ve started using SmartSleep instead of this hack. Check it out. It’s free.
Lots of net-nerds have misunderstood the Apple / Starbucks announcement (I’m looking at you, Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose).
Apple has announced free WiFi in Starbucks, from your iPhone, when accessing the iTunes Store. That’s it. Not the whole internet — just the store. The announcement that some people heard — unconditionally free WiFi at Starbucks for iPhone owners — is at least a hundred times cooler than what’s actually going to happen.
Here it is, straight from www.apple.com/itunes/starbucks:
As long as you have an iPod touch, an iPhone, or a computer with the latest version of iTunes, you get free Wi-Fi access to the iTunes Store and to Starbucks Now Playing content.
It’s pretty hard to blame people for the misunderstanding. Coffee shops which charge for WiFi access are totally cheezy. The internet is like air, you morons. You don’t charge for air.
PS: If you happen to be at my local Starbucks, just cross the street. There’s free WiFi (and better coffee) next door at Tully’s.
Here’s what my buddy Rob had to say about today’s price cut:
$100 Price Drop Expected on iPod Touch!
Reliable sources say the iPod touch will be dropping by $100 in about 6-8 weeks. That’s a whopping 30% on a brand new product! It is highly recommended that you all wait to purchase your sexy new iPod touch until then. When asking my sources how they received this information and explaining to them how absurd their prediction is, they replied “Didn’t you see the price cut on the iPhone today with no refund for people who purchased the phone more than 14 days ago?” Oh right. Can’t argue with that.
In closing, I don’t actually have any sources and my interactions with them are purely fictitious, but I wouldn’t doubt that kind of price cut in a few weeks given today’s iPhone price cuts - would you? Better keep your money and only buy OLD Apple products since Apple stuff looks like it is going to depreciate worse than a car in the future.
See? I learned my lesson. Bad early adopter! Bad early adopter!
Update:
Apple has seen the error of their ways. They are offering a $100 rebate to all existing iPhone owners (in the form of store credit). Nice work, Apple. Nice work.
- Safari 3: ⌘} and ⌘{
- Firefox 2: Ctrl-Tab
- iTerm, Adium: ⌘→ and ⌘←
Can we just pick one and stick with it?
Update 3/28/2008:
I just discovered an alternative sequence for Safari: Shift-⌘→ and Shift-⌘←
The Cisco VPN client on OSX is very very functional (in other words, it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down). Shimo fixes that. Highly recommended.
I just read Jeff Atwood’s post about the sorry state of software installation on OSX. I couldn’t agree more. Since I switched months ago, this is just about the only thing I have found to truly hate about the Mac.
But Jeff didn’t even mention half of the problem: un-installation. Because of the Mac’s drag-and-drop install philosophy, there is no control panel or other UI which answers the question, “What the hell is installed on this thing anyway?” This leads to 3rd party solutions like AppZapper — what a mess!
Apple should solve the install process forever, in the grand tradition of Apple innovation, by ripping off someone else’s idea. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best. In this case, there are much better sources of inspiration than Windows. Apple could completely leap-frog Microsoft and adopt Debian’s fantastic APT system. For the uninitiated, here’s all you need to know:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
(Hint: every freaking piece of software installed on your machine is now up to date.)
All they’d have to do is slap a decent GUI around it and encourage developers to package and upload their software. I suppose they’d also want to add an iTunes-store like payment system, for that pesky commercial stuff.
Hopefully this will save somebody a headache.
This evening I was looking at System Profiler and I discovered that my MacBook’s SuperDrive didn’t appear quite as super as the one in my wife’s MacBook. Specifically, my drive reported 0KB cache, and a greatly reduced set of supported DVD formats.
Turns out that this was because I was running Parallels.
Here are the details from System Profiler:
Continue reading ‘SuperDrive Suddenly Not So Super?’
Briefly, undervolting is the process of manipulating a processor’s P-state tables to cause it to run at a lower voltage, while keeping frequency unchanged. This has no effect whatsoever on performance, but can extend battery life and reduce heat dissipation.
Undervolting cannot damage your CPU, but it can cause your machine to crash. You should be prepared to boot your mac into safe mode, in the event that something goes awry.
I’m going to assume a basic knowledge of undervolting, and merely describe the process and results for my MacBook. (For more detailed info, there’s a great article at Nordic Hardware.)
OK lets get started. Here’s what we need:
Continue reading ‘How to Undervolt a MacBook’
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