Newton’s Lore

The folks over at StorageMojo have a battery life comparison of MacBook Airs with hard drives and SSD drives. Also a comparison of MacBook Pros with and without SSD drives.

Anybody with a MacBook Air with SSD care to comment if they’ve got a /.hotfiles.btree file on their machine? This would possibly indicate that Mac OS X is still shuffling around their file system to optimise file access as if it was on a hard drive.

ZDNet Australia reports that Apple Australia have reduced the premium on putting a solid-state drive into a new MacBook Air to only AU$769, almost halved from the previous AU$1409.

Some friends of mine have written an article for Media Culture called iTunes Is Pretty (Useless) When You’re Blind: Digital Design Is Triggering Disability When It Could Be a Solution.
Check it out!

Although I’m somewhat suspicious that the claim that pod in iPod stands for “Portable on Demand”, seems more like a backronym coined by those wanting to use it to attempt to avoid being sued by Apple’s Lawyers.

Meanwhile some folks find podcasting less than inclusionary (sadly for a lecture series on Disability Inclusion!)

Personally I think the iPhone will suck from the ‘You have to look at it to use it’ point of view. Buttons at least make phones easier to use without looking at them. Perhaps some accelerometer based gesture user interface (although difficult to use in your pocket without looking somewhat suspicious Roll on the haptic iPhone.

Sun’s open source virtualization package xVM VirtualBox is out of beta for Mac OS X and available for download. Note that it can’t currently host Mac OS X (aside from the licensing issues that only allow you to virtualize Mac OS X Server). According to ZDNet Sun sells a commercial version with USB support and an RDP server.
If you download it and can’t open the archive you may need to remove the ‘.bz2′ from the end of the filename.

Incorporating some iPhone categories this year (because hey, they’re cooler than those boring old Macs), we have

• Best iPhone Web Application - Remember The Milk for iPhone and iPod touch 1.0 You’ll never forget the milk again! (runner up was AP Mobile News Network 1.0)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Application - ScreenFlow 1.1.1 from Vara Software Limited for capturing and producing screencasts. (Runner up was the cool Bee Docs Timeline 3D Edition 2.1 for producing 3D timelines, strangely enough)
• Best New Mac OS X Leopard Game - Guitar Hero: III Legends of Rock 1.1 (Runner up Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars 1.09)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience Macnification from Orbicule BVBA (Runner up, Checkout 2.1 point of sale system from Werck BV)
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application - Screenflow 1.1.1 (Runner Up FotoMagico 2.2 from Boinx Software Ltd.
• Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product - Squirrel (alpha), a financial management application from Axel Péju (runner up Flow 1.0.1, an FTP client with editor and QuickLook from Brian Amerige)

According to The Australian’s IT section, Apple Australia have announced the availability of iTunes U in Australia. Content will be provided by some of Australia’s leading universities including

• The University of Western Australia
• The University of New South Wales
• Griffith University
• Swinburne University
• Otago University
• Australian National University
• University of Melbourne

Conveniently these universities are already running automated lecture capture or recording systems.

Well, a full Time Capsule backup in hand I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.3.

Unfortunately, after the install the machine seemed hung during the shutdown process.

After a forced shutdown and a restart, it seems that BOINC was running, but that BOINCManager wouldn’t work. Killed that.

Now it seems that CPU is being chewed up by

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mdworker MDSSyncScanWorker com.apple.Spotlight.SyncScanWorker


man mdworker says:

mdworker is the metadata server worker process. It is used by mds to scan and index files as a volume is mounted or a file changes.

There are no configurations to mdworker, and users should not run manually.

Which isn’t particularly revealling. I guess I’ll wait and see if it finishes anytime in the near future. On the plus side, the Airport reception seems better.
 

• Optical drives aren’t recognised in Vista after installing iTunes 7. But it’s ok, you can fix it by editing the registry!
• The call it “Time Machine” because when you run Time Machine off your install DVD it thinks it’s on Pacific Standard Time
• Big list of keyboard shortcuts. I had forgotten you could hit the control key whilst using command-shift-4 to get the screengrab on the clipboard. Also didn’t know you could command-click the window toolbar button to get different views.
• Troubleshooting procedure for your mac not starting up in 10.3.9
• How to use your iPod as a storage drive. Remember, if you use FAT32 you won’t be able to put files larger than 4Gb onto it!
• How to troubleshoot locked files
• The New User’s Guide to the iPod shuffle (put your right foot in, take your right foot out…)
• You need to use shift-control-option to reset the SMC on your MacBook Air
• You can get the MacBook Air DVD or CD sharing software here
• A diagram of the MacBook Pro’s ports. Omitting the Firewire 800 port?
• To change your default Mail or Web Browser you need to use Safari or Mail, even if you’re not using them. Because since InternetConfig went away Apple doesn’t know where to put these things.

Mikey Sklar lists some software tools available via the fink packaging system for hardware developers using Macs .

The LA Times reports that as a result of a class action suit filed in 2006 Apple will pay US$25 to US$79 to customers who bought a power adaptor to replace a faulty one. This affects adaptors for PowerBooks and iBooks. Presumably some variant of the refund will be available in Australia, without having to ship the things to the US by the suitcase-full