A review of AC power adapters for Mac portables

TidBITS#803/31-Oct-05 has an unsual review -- of power adapters.

MBS: Hardware Monitor for OS X

ThermographX is a nice app, but for slightly more money MBS: Hardware Monitor is very impressive indeed. I use it now to constantly look for problems with my iMac 2GHz ALS rev B overheating. There's also a free app called Temperature Monitor.

Note the drive check may wake the drive from sleep, so be careful about using it. (There are two ways to check drive temp, maybe one doesn't wake the drive?)

Sync disaster #257 - New Missing Sync 5.0 wipes out address book on my i500 cell phone

Computers have caused me vast pain over the years, but nothing has hurt so much as synchronization. I had disaster #257 when an attempt to sync my Samsung i500 PalmOS 4.1 address book with my OS X Address Book using Missing Sync 5.0 locked up and then wiped out my phone book.

Why does sync cause so much pain?

I think it's one of those marvelous problems that is:

1. Actually quite trickly and complex, since it involves syntax, semantics, data model reconciliation, mapping and more. To anyone who's worked in the knowledge representation industry these are words to inspire deep fear.

2. Thought by management to be quite simple.

That's an equation for disaster. The only thing worse than a fundamentally hard problem is a hard problem that's grossly underestimated. Mapping disasters killed Palm (Outlook data model reconciliation issues). It won't kill OS X, but it's interesting to see how Apple bodged this one.

They made a big deal about iSync, which was really pathetic and confusing, but now they have 'Sync Services' in Tiger as well as iSync (probably because they want iTunes on Windows to sync Outlook data to iPods, so they had to move sync into a layer that could be shipped on Windows). Add in something like Missing Sync 5.0 and disaster is well nigh unavoidable (MS 5.0, for example insists on including an iPod in the sync melange, as though two device sync wasn't hard enough!

So, now I'm trying to recover my address book. addressbook.data tiger - Google Search helped. The file is AddressBook.data in Tiger and it's easy to find using Spotlight. There are previous versions too, so I'll try swapping one of those, or just restore from my backups. Don't be fooled by all the cache files that contain addresses; those are generated to help Spotlight work.

Update 11/7/05: I'm not sure this wasn't due simply to the fact that the i500 appears to be USB 1.0, I have about 3000 contacts, and there seems to be a lot of work going on with each contact synched. I let the thing run overnight and it might have completed.

iMac heating problems and the curse of the Canon printer driver

Apple's forum has a not-yet-deleted thread on heat concerns with the iMac (ambient light sensor Rev B) model.

Some excerpts:

Apple - Discussions - OVERHEATING (of new iMac & version-B)

... fans started revving higher over the last couple of weeks. Didn't change after I installed 10.4.3. I reset the smu, no change. Then i remembered some one mentioning a dust factor in the bottom vent. So I took off the back and looked. No blistering (actually I've only heard of one case of als blistering yet many seem to have this belief that the rev b hardrives blister from excessive heat.), no capacitors messed up and clean as a whistle. However when I took some air to the vent there was quite a bit of dust in the vent. I made sure all of it was out and the inside were clean, closed it up, reset the smu again and for the last week its been even quieter than when new. temps are normal, except the harddrive is cooler and the fans have been great. If they do start to get louder do to a load, they come back down very quickly after. In short, its behaving better than when I got it.

... I've had more fan noise in the past few weeks. (machine specs as in footer, 3-4 month old ALS G5 2GHz 400MB 1.5GB RAM 20")

I can't tell why, but I think the system runs hotter. I had upgraded from 512 to 1.5GB and I wonder if that's tipped something to a higher temp. I switched to 10.4.3 and did some system maintenance (reset the SMU

Using ThermographX I find:

- low speed mode: CPU 145 F, drive 114 F
- high speed mode: CPU 192 F, drive 126 F with a noticeable persistent fan hum
- automatic: behaves like high speed mode, for some reason I don't seem to stay at the low speed temp once I go to automatic

By your note my system is running consistently ABOVE the "critical point" for the CPU (187F) you referred to.

... AppleCare is not a panacea however. My impression from Macintouch reading is that Apple outsources AppleCare and that the 'repairs' can be questionable. If time is an issue one may be better off going with the extended warrantees that are available with some credit cards and using them to pay for repairs done by a non-Apple authorized service center -- if you can find one! We do have one such in the twin cities.

In the meantime I think persons who bought a Rev B thinking Apple had fixed the design problems with the Rev A need to assume that the Rev B is similarly flawed. Clean the air filters, monitor temperature (themographX is $7), set the machine to sleep when not in use, don't use it as a media server, set the CPU to lower speed.

Update 11/7: This was solved.

When I set Activity Monitor to show ALL processes, not just my processes, I discovered that PrintJobMgr was occupying 90% of my CPU. A google search revealed this is a known problem; a stuck Print Job can drive CPU utilization up, shift the iMac to highest CPU setting, and drive system heat up. The print job was stuck because my Canon IP 4000 ink jet has been flaky ever since I attached it to my Airport Extreme USB print server. I don't like print servers! In this case my wife initiated the print job and I had no idea it never completed. I've also read a comment from an expert source that Canon printer drivers in OS X seem to be very CPU intensive and can cause heat spikes.

The CPU is now running abou 100-110 F and the hard drive about 100-110 F.

In Print Center I found the stuck print job and removed it. The machine started to cool down almost instantly. In automatic mode again the temperature continued to drop, as tracked by 'Hardware Monitor' (which I will buy).

When I figured this out I felt a bit guilty about lambasting Apple for their iMac Rev B persistent heat problems. After further consideration, however, I think a bit of basting is in order (I'll take my lumps too.) There's something wrong when an errant print job can cook a $2000 computer. Four things in particular:

• Why did this job hang in the first place? Why is printing to Apple's Airport Extreme print server unreliable with the Canon IP4000? How much of this is Canon's fault vs. Apple's fault?
  
• Why does PrintMgr hog so much of the CPU?
• Why didn't some process notify the user of a rogue job?
• Lastly, of course, this does emphasize that the iMac G5 remains vulnerable to overheating with CPU intensive processes.

So Apple does have something to answer for.

BTW, this issue of heat and computation, and monitoring systems for thermal burden, isn't going away. Heat production and power consumption are the key drivers now of system and CPU design -- and this will be so until we cook the planet. (The physical limits of computation are, I dimly recall, somehow related to the ability to dump heat ...)

Update 11/8: A few odd thoughts and tips related to managing heat output on all iMacs

• via Macintouch: turn down LCD brightness
  "The LCD brightness setting has a significant effect on power consumption: minimum 82 W; midpoint 88 W; maximum 106 W. With this in mind, I've set the brightness to minimum, which is perfectly adequate (the factory setting is maximum). This should reduce component thermal stress issues and extend display life, because much of that power is being dissipated as heat, rather than going into actual light output."
• have machine sleep often and rest hard drive aggressively
• this is not a great machine to use as a video server!
• run at temperature monitor and activity monitor routinely -- look for spikes and rogue processes (caveat: I'm seeing some odd system instability doing this, I need to investigate further.)

And a thought on fan noise:

• If the fans are loud -- ask is the system hot (appropriate fan activity) or not (OS bug). Just put your hand in the exhaust stream and feel if it's hot.
• If the system is cool, reset the system management unit (SMU) or even zap pram or reset the open firmware, repair permissions, do a safe start, sacrifice a chicken beneath the full moon, etc.
• If the air exhaust is hot, find out why. Check active processes. Clean the intake vents. Consider the preceding voodoo -- but it likely won't help. Don't let the system run hot -- this is bad.
  

Getting started with automator: MacWorld feature

Macworld: Feature: Take Automator for a trial run

Socialtext: a commercial and open source enterprise wiki

An interesting product for distributed collaboration: Socialtext -- Enterprise Social Software. They notify via email, I can't tell if they notify via RSS as well.

Microsoft Office SP2 disables ability to edit an Excel spreadsheet via Access

This morning a routine tool I use stopped working. My access query that appends to an Excel spreadsheet gave me this unhelpful error message: Operation Must Use an
Updateable Query.

I spent an hour fruitlessly trying to figure out what had happened, then I gave up and rebuilt it using another approach. I asked around on usenet and got a quick and accurate response

The response pointed to this Microsoft kb article:

You cannot change, add, or delete data in tables that are linked to an Excel workbook in Office Access 2003 or in Access 2002

...This expected behavior occurs when either of the following conditions is true:

• You have installed Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2).
• You have installed the update for Access 2002 (KB904018) that is dated October 18, 2005.

...
MORE INFORMATION

Because of legal issues, Microsoft has disabled the functionality in Access 2003 and in Access 2002 that let users change the data in linked tables that point to a range in an Excel workbook. However, when you make changes directly in the Excel workbook, the changes appear in the linked table in Access.

The kb article includes a set of workarounds that are pretty humorous, along the lines of 'open Excel and type in the data'. Evidently Microsoft has fallen afoul of a patent (a stupid patent I'd wager).

Wow. I wonder how great a productivity hit this is around the world. I would really like to know why Microsoft didn't put a prominent warning in the installer for SP2 or on their SP2 web site. Did the courts forbid notification? Did Microsoft think no-one would notice?

This combination of non-notification and loss of functionality from a "service pack" is unprecedented. Microsoft seems to have become a very troubled company very quickly.