Newton’s Lore

A Gartner survey shows that Mac sales in Australia grew 52% in the last quarter

Remember, it’s already tomorrow in Australia!

If you’ve got the sewing skills (or you know someone who does), you could try making this very cool Etch-a-sketch themed laptop cozy.

via Redbraids.

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.

It seems that some people’s 2008 MacBook Pros are exhibiting vertical light/dark screen stripes, as seen here, as if half the LED backlight is not on. There is also Apple support forum discussion on the topic.

Fortunately it seems the problem can be resolved by sleeping and waking the machine, but unnerving nonetheless, especially on brand new machines.

In addition to the instructions on how to clean a MacBook’s MagSafe Connector, there’s also a KnowledgeBase article on how to unstick pins in a MagSafe Connector.

If you have a MacBook Air you might want to make sure that you don’t accidentally throw it out like Steven Levy did (or at least he thinks his wife did).

I attended the WAMUG meeting the other night and amongst other things saw a pretty cool art skin on a MacBook Pro. Check out gelaskins.com for some excellent art skins for everything from iPhones to 17″ MacBook Pros. They’ve got a special 3M adhesive which makes them removable, and the one I saw looked stunning. With thanks to Peter for the link.

Someone on Macintouch noticed that the Apple Developer Tech Note for the 17 inch MacBook Pro mentions a 500Gb 5400RPM configuration. Interestingly, Engadget notes both 500Gb Fujitsu and Hitachi drives, but notes they’re a non-standard form factor that’s an extra 3mm higher for a total of 12.5mm. The Developer Tech Note notes that the SuperDrive is 12.7mm high, so there’s probably a whole 0.2mm to play with otherwise perhaps we need the MacBook Pro Fat? FatBook Pro? Currently the Apple Store only lets you bump the hard drive size up to 300Gb for an extra AU$110
[Edit - Ok, so Samsung have a 2.5" 500Gb 9.5mm drive due out in March (ie now). Can we stop mixing imperial and metric now please?]

After introducing the multitouch user interface in the iPhone and iPodTouch, and then in the MacBook Air Apple has now introduced it across the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.Interestingly, this means that the desktop machines don’t have multitouch, which given it will no doubt be more widely adopted by developers as SDK’s for it become available, which may leave desktop users in the lurch. The obvious move would be for Apple to incorporate multitouch in the screens it manufacturers. However this answer would probably be a bad solution given the problem of gorilla arm. Perhaps a multitouch pad built into keyboards? A third party Kensington multitouch USB trackpad? Then again the MacBooks already use a different input method to mice, however it’s not clear how easily the rotational gestures would map to a mouse (scrolling and zooming is already usually mapped to the scroll wheel/ball). Mouse with a knob?Or perhaps Apple has an even more revolutionary input device up its sleeve…

Worried about the little green light on your MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac turning on (Or rather, not turning on at an inopportune moment? Maybe you need an iPatch.