Phil Windley’s Technometria | Fixing MacBook Pro Sleep Problems

2/3/2009

Here’s how to fix your Macbook Pro’s busted sleep function


RSS Reader for Mac – NetNewsWire

1/10/2008

Yays! NetNewsWire is now a free download!

I used NNW for ages, a few years ago, but switched to Google Reader after NNW started asking me for my moneys. I find that NNW’s keyboard shortcuts are a lot faster than Google Reader’s, and the general experience is better. Another nice new feature is that news subscriptions sync between multiple copies of NetNewsWire via Newsgator.


Seismac

7/7/2006

SeisMac is a Mac OS X Cocoa application that makes your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It access your
laptop’s Sudden Motion Sensor in order to display real-time, three-axis acceleration graphs.

This is really frickin’ cool!


MacBook Pro

5/24/2006

I’ve been really excited by virtualization lately, so of course I’ve been drooling over the potential of the MacBook Pro.

I considered the Macbook, but decided I enjoyed the large screen and fast graphics of the Powerbook too much to give them up.

On Monday I sold my G4 Powerbook to a friend of mine, and ran to the Apple store to buy the MacBook Pro. I spent a full ten minutes explaining how I was buying one “today” to the spiky-haired Mac sales guy, who promptly walked off. I found another salesperson, named Sulgi Kim, who was very nice and gave me a discount on my .Mac subscription along with my new notebook.

So far, the Macbook Pro is hands-down faster than my Powerbook. It’s hard to quantify, but in user-experience terms, things that used to take a moment now take no time at all. For example, Adium always took a second or two to load. Now it’s virtually instant.

The migration from Powerbook to MacBook was relatively painless: when prompted, I connected a firewire cable between the two laptops, and waited for about an hour. When I logged into the MacBook Pro, everything was there, just as I’d left it on my Powerbook.

Well, sort of.

Little Snitch, a nice little “outbound firewall”, kernel panicked on login, so I had to remove it. Apple’s X11 doesn’t seem to work at all, and was in fact missing until I installed it. I’m still working on it.

Regarding virtualization: I haven’t yet installed Bootcamp, but I will soon. Meanwhile, I’ve been working with both Ubuntu Linux and WinXP under Parallels, which truly rocks. WinXP is very fast under Parallels, much more so than it ever was under Virtual PC. And for $40, Parallels is a steal.


My $3000 Carpenter’s Level

1/24/2006

This neat widget uses Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor to display positional information, making my new PowerBook the world’s most expensive carpenter’s level.


How to Safe-Sleep Your Mac

11/12/2005

One of the few useful features WinXP has that OSX doesn’t have is “Hibernate”. WinXP is able, upon power loss, to save the contents of a sleeping PC’s RAM to disk, so that the system state and user data isn’t lost.

OSX’s sleep feature drains power, albeit slowly. On my work iBook, it can sleep for just about 3 days with no power, before it goes dead.

The new Powerbooks have a feature that is called ‘Safe Sleep’, which is pretty much ‘Hibernate’. Since the feature is software-based, it’s fairly easy to implement on non-Powerbook Macs.


Jed’s Other Poem

9/22/2005

Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) is an unsolicited video for the song of the same name by the band Grandaddy. It is programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48k RAM.