Thursday, June 30, 2005

iMac G5 rev 2: a lot cooler?

iMac G5 (Part 11)

Macintouch has done excellent journalism covering the heating and reliability problems with the G5 iMac initial release:
...I have been told recently that Apple is no longer replacing the midplane assemblies, they are now replacing fans with a newly designed fan which tells me they have been having problems with their rev.1 boards. I guess the new rev. 2 boards are being reported all over the net. I can attest that the first version fans were horrible, at least the heat issue was a problem and it certainly didn't do much for quietness.

[A new 1.8GHz Power Mac G5 is almost identical to our 20' 1.8GHz iMac G5 in architecture, but we find it's running a *lot* cooler in the big aluminum case, according to ThermographX - by some 50 degrees F. -MacInTouch]"
The new 20" iMacs are a lot cooler than the prior model. I think they may be safe to buy.

OmniOutliner 3.0.3 is out (via Macintouch)

MacInTouch Home Page: "OmniOutliner 3.0.3 is an outliner and organizer that offers styles, columns, attachments, inline notes, AppleScript support, and other features. This release adds Automator support, improvements to recorded audio and HTML export, speed improvements when editing large outlines, and other changes. OmniOutliner 3 is $39.95 ($69.95 Professional) for Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.4."

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Creating child and restricted access accounts in OS X Tiger

macosxhints - 10.4: Create safe, simple accounts without passwords

Nvu 1.0 has been released

Download Nvu 1.0

WYSIWYG HTML editing and simple web content management for Linux, Mac, Windows. Based on Mozilla.

Changing Tiger screen capture formats (via Tidbits)

ExtraBITS

Calibrating a new LiOn battery: iBook example

Macworld: Secrets: Laptop Battery Smarts

I do this sort of thing unintentionally fairly often, but it's worth knowing about. I suspect a similar procedure might be of value for other LiOn battery devices.
Calibrate the Battery New Apple batteries, those included with a machine and those bought separately, arrive partially charged and need to be calibrated. This procedure provides a baseline for the processor built into the battery, so the processor can effectively regulate power consumption. To calibrate your battery, first plug in the laptop and charge the battery to 100 percent capacity; the light at the end of the Apple-supplied power cable will go from orange to green when the battery is fully charged. Next, unplug the power adapter and let the battery run down. The machine will put itself to sleep and refuse to wake up. Plug the adapter in again and fully recharge the battery. (You can use the laptop as you normally would during the calibration process.) You need to calibrate the battery only once.
The rest of this MacWorld article is excellent. Great advice.