If you’ve been keeping up with MacBook sans-Pro news, you may have heard something about an infamous “moo”-like noise coming from the fan. Basically, the fan goes on and off and on and off and on and off continuously, in a vain attempt to keep the machine cool. Now, I’m no engineer, but it certainly doesn’t take one to recognize that this isn’t normal behavior.

I took my black MacBook to the Genius at the Apple store (Oakbrook,
by the way) to get this fixed, and his response? “It’s normal. A fan
will do what it needs to do to keep the machine cool.” Gee, thanks.

Apple Genius says: Moo’ing normal – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

technorati tags:MacBook, MacBookPro, Moo

(more…)

Sorry MacBook users, this one requires a keyboard backlight.

iSpazz is a plugin for iTunes on OS X, controlling the MacBook Pro/PowerBook backlit keyboard and optionally the display backlight.

To use this yourself, download the plugin uncompress it and copy it to Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins in your home folder.

Pressing the “i” key toggles the display flicker.

iSpazz

technorati tags:MacBookPro, PowerBook, Hack

(more…)

Judging by my column the past couple of days you’d think that I didn’t like iChat AV or something. Au contraire! I only point out it’s deficiencies because I think that video conferencing is nothing short of revolutionary and I want Apple to invest more R&D into iChat so that more people will start using the tiny cameras embedded in their machines rather than less… Click through to read about a must-have plug-in for iChat AV that allows you to enhance your video chat with Quartz Composer effects.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

(more…)

There are far more interesting topics on the intersection between open source and commercial development than the binary-only kernel for Intel non-story. Tim Bray�s Time to Switch? and John Gruber’s Why Apple Won�t Open Source Its Apps both discuss the potential risks and benefits Apple would face in open sourcing their consumer applications, such as the Finder, Mail, iChat and their iLife apps, to worldwide perusal.
Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RoughlyDrafted

(more…)