fplanque: glob

There’s 2 problems to mouse speed:

• The acceleration curve of the mouse mouvement which I’ve talked about before
• maximum mouvement speed

The maximum speed can be set through the System preferences panel, but even when the slider is all the way to the right, the speed may be too slow… especially if you line up 3 monitors side by side.

You can get faster speeds through the Applications > Utilities > Terminal. To see the current setting, type in this:

[codespan]defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling[/codespan]

To make the mouse faster, set a different value, for example:

[codespan]defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 6[/codespan]

Did you know there were actually 5 different fans inside a Mac Pro (early 2009 version)? They are named Intake, Exhaust, BoostA, PCI and Power Supply! By default, all of them turn pretty slowly; in the 600 to 850 rpm range! Which makes the whole thing pretty silent… yet… anoying because of the complexity of the sound (yes, it’s 5 different spining motor sounds combined, not to mention the hard drive spinning!)

You can monitor that with iStat menus – which is very cool for monitoring a lot of things, except voltages & power consumption which do not seem to work, at least on the Mac pro 2009.

Now my problem is I’d like all these fans to run faster! Yes, faster! Not because I want some extra fan noise, but because I believe Uncle Steve pushed it too far when he asked his engineers to reduce the fan noise! I wouldn’t mind the noise to be a little bit higher pitched than it currently is.

I first tried FanControl from Lobotomo Software. BEWARE: it’s a pain to uninstall (unsinstall instrutions on their page). Because it’s designed for the macbook pro (yes, the laptop), it only controls 2 of the 5 fans and the minimum speed it allows is 1000 rpms. Up from 600 rpm, that is too much! I wish I could run every fan at 850 rpm!

Then I found smcFanControl from eidac. That one has the advantage of allowing settings for all 5 fans on the mac pro. However, again two of them cannot be set lower than 1000 rpm. Worse: it doesn’t actually do anything on the mac pro. It probably works on other apple computers but on the mac pro 2009 it has absolutely no effect on fan speed. :’(

From what I undrestand the fans are controlled by a chip called “SMC” as in “System Management Controller” and apple doesn’t give you much control over it, apart from a clunky procedure to reset it! Note: resetting the SMC allowed me to get back to original rpms for all fans after FanControl had messed them up. Resetting teh SMC also seems to have reduced the tempearture of the air mesured at the exhaust – at equivalent fan speeds and system load (that is: idle!). Strange…

If any of you knows a way to effectively control fan speed on the mac pro, please let me know.

I’d be up for some watercooling too :)

If you have multiple macs (and an iPhone), mobile.me is a must have, of course, but it only syncs so much… basically:

• Address book
• Calendar
• Mail (but I’m using IMAP anyways)
• Safari bookmarks
• System preferences

mobile.me does not auto-sync:

• All kinds of documents
• Application settings & preferences
• iPhoto library
• iTunes library
• VMware virtual machines
• Firefox bookmarks

For merging all kinds of bookmarks I use Foxmarks. However for the rest, I’m pretty much down to manual sync every time I leave for a trip where I have to move all mods over to the laptop and then back to the desktop when I get back. When synchronizing the entire home folder there are actually a lot of files that need to be left out or you’ll just break apps on the other computer (erase serial numbers, etc.). So it requires a lot of manual supervision.

It feels like an entire wasted day every time. (At least I’m doing some packing/unpacking during large file copies, but still…)

Most sync tools are too stupid to handle exceptions nicely. The only way synching home folders could actually work over time in my opinion would be for the sync toll to start by asking you for each subfolder what should be done: Ignore, Sync, Sync with curent contents, Sync with future contents. Then at each subsequent sync, any new found folder should trigger the question again, unless it was already included in a “Sync with future subfolders” parent.

Some folder would also require a “Sync as a whole” function, where contents from both sides should never end up mixed as a result of a merge (I am thinking about iPhoto here).

Still looking for something smart enough…

Beyond the software issue I think I need to buy a Firewire 800 cable in order to transfer files faster direcly from one mac to another. Believe it or not but file transfers over Gigabit Ethernet remain pathetically slow… like 14 MB/s which is roughly only 0.14 Gigabits/second.

Tonight, for the first time, I rented a movie on iTunes…

And I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised by the fact the movie came with 2 soundtracks: Stereo & “Surrond".

Well, “surround” turns out to be AC3 Dobly Digital 5.1  and it does work on the Mac Mini too! It goes straight to your optical out.

Awesome! I’m gonna be doing some more of that renting :p

PS: Does your average downloaded AVI have surround sound? (I doubt it… ;>)

What do you do if you have, say, an encrypted sparsebundle and some day you try to open it and you discover it shows up as a plain folder in the Finder instead as a bundle icon?

Double clicking will just open the folder and show you the bands that make up the bundle.

So I don’t know how you fix the issue in the Finder but I know how you mount the sparsebundle and access the files: just open a Terminal window and type this:

Code

Then you’ll have your virtual drive mounted on teh desktop, and if need be you can just copy them to a new sparsebundle.