Apple

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

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 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!

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.

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.

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 (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.

I really love having my OSX apps launch as enemies from Megaman, complete with the starfield and the bad video game music.

[link] to MegaMan Effect

Here’s a neat tip: iTunes can manage PDFs, which is handy if you keep a lot of ebooks and reference manuals saved on your system. You can edit the PDF’s ID3 tag for author and genre info, and set up smart playlists as you would for MP3s.

[link]

Here’s how to set up syslogd on OSX to log base station activity.

Note that Tiger is a bit different, so you’ll need to refer to this other article.