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.

• 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.

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).