If you have ever used a MacBook Air for more than a couple seconds outside a deep-freezer you will know that it gets hot. I am assuming not many of you work inside a deep-freezer, if you do stop reading.
A Bit of Background
The MacBook Air (referred to as MBA from here on out) gets hot mostly due to it’s incredibly thin form factor, it’s powerful dual core processor and the unfortunate placement of the air vents. Laptops are meant to be used while on your lap. It is impossible to not block the main MBA vents while the machine is sitting on your lap. This is a problem.
If you are using the computer in a room that is hotter than 70F (21C) and the vents are at least partially blocked, the machine will get hot, the fans will spin up from the lowest 2499 RPM to the peak at 6248 RPM.
The Problem
If however you continue to block the vent (or you are in a hot room) and you use it to say play a high definition video, or any other processor intense task the processor temperature will continue to climb up. A couple years ago apple introduced a neat “feature” to prevent system meltdown. The kernal_task process puts on the superman cape and goes to work. It steals processor cycles from whatever you are doing. In reality it isn’t doing anything with those cycles, but the extra load it pretends to put on the CPU, usually 150% (both cores combined) allows the processor frequency to lower from say 1862 MHz to a much slower 786 MHz. This cuts your processor speed to less than half but it allows the machine some time to cool down. Still with me? At this point the machine becomes very slow, and the beach ball takes center stage.
The kernal_task process is not doing anything special other than setting a cap on how much work your processor is allowed to do until it cools dow. This is indeed a feature as it prevents a meltdown, just horribly implemented. There is nothing you can do to easily fix this. Apple has not acknowledged this as a problem. Their response is to just let the computer cool down or use it in a cooler environment.
Another major negative side effect of this situation is accelerated drainage of battery power. When the fans are spinning at their maximum rate the battery consumption is increased by at least 25%. This is obviously bad.
Calling apple will not help. Bring it to a “Genius” and they will ask you to reinstall the OS. They know what the problem is yet they undervalue people’s time by asking them to perform tasks which will clearly not fix the problem.
The Solution
After reading hundred of topics on the subject, I finally found a solution that works.
Let me start by saying I am not responsible if your MBA explodes while doing anything suggested here (although I strongly believe it won’t). Again use whatever you read here AT YOUR OWN RISK (repeat it 3 times before moving on). If this solution does not work for you, there is something else wrong with you MBA, bring it to the apple store and have them take a look at it.
In order to make your MBA usable again you have to under-volt the processor. The frequency won’t change (frequency determines the “speed” of the processor). You can’t destroy the computer by under-volting but you can cause a kernel panic which will immediately lock your machine. The system normally throttles frequencies from 789 MHz to 1826 MHz depending on demand (this is why when you computer is mostly to idle, the fans are quiet and the encasing does not feel hot). The higher the frequency the hotter things run.
Download and purchase CoolBook ($10). Read the documentation that comes with the software. If you have a MBA 1.86 MHz you won’t have to do as much reading as I will tell you exactly which setting to use.
Under both the Adapter and Battery tabs set the Frequency and Voltage number to the following:
789 MHz - 0.9250 V
1596 MHz - 0.9500 V
1862 MHz - 1.0125 V
Set the throttling level to medium and temp limit to OFF, now hit save. After a few batteries of CPU test you are good to go. Make sure the throttling checkbox is active and go on with your day. You now have a usable MBA, with stable temperatures, fans and kernel_task will behave like it should.
How it Works
It works by making the processor run with a tiny bit less voltage than it normally does. Essentially CoolBook accomplishes the same thing kernel_task tries to but much better. Since the frequency, not voltage determines the speed of the processor, there is no performance loss. In addition to a cooler, quieter machine there is significant battery performance improvement as well.
Hope that helps.
Let’s face it. Most meetings are a waste of time.
Here are a few factors that contribute to pointless meetings:
- Lack of concise agenda.
- That one person who never shuts up.
- Meetings which include too many people, too few decision makers.
Meet TIM (Time is Money)
TIM calculates how much money is being wasted, and displays it for everyone to see.
Bring TIM to your next meeting.
This has been a public service announcement for the safety and sanity of the software development community.
Best to start at 47 minutes.
Very Inspiring!
Seen on http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/dont-you-dare-waste-your-fucking-time/
I have left my full-time position at Hoodiny Entertainment Group to pursue new horizons. The wife and I will take a couple months off work to travel the world. After working nonstop for the last 10 years of our lives we are in desperate need of a mini retirement.
Photo by: ccdoh1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccdoh1/400731487/
We started entertaining this idea quite a while back and have taken all the necessary steps to make this happen. We sold our condo, we got rid of our cars. We have now freed ourselves of most material possessions in the interest of practicality and portability. I can’t express how great of a feeling that is. The ability to fit all that you own in a backpack and travel the world searching for new experiences.
I will continue to run my company Bopia albeit I’ll be slightly less involved. I am really glad to be able to leave it in the hands of extremely talented people that work with me in this venture. I am sad to be leaving a talented team at Hoodiny (I may continue to advise). They are in route to success and know that they will continue to make strides in the right direction.
With extremely few material possessions and no kids to attend to we are free to roam the earth. Our plans are somewhat vague as to where and for how long we will be gone. I will have a camera and a laptop with me and will be blogging most of my experiences my new travel blog TravelingShorts.com.
I am keeping an extremely open mind about the whole process. I am not sure how much or how little work I will be doing, I may write a couple web apps, pick grapes vineyard in the south of France, or teach english in Thailand. That’s the beauty. I don’t know, I don’t have to know, and that feels great.
This blog will likely be seldomly updated in favor of TravelingShorts.com yet I will keep it live. The travel blog will include pictures, latest tweets from @brupm and reflections from the road. You will also be able to contact me as you wish, all my latest contact info will always be on BrunoMiranda.com.
Someone asked me yesterday what I plan on doing when I get back. I honestly don’t know. I have been developing and designing software and web applications for most of my life. I want to perhaps be more involved with the business side of things. I am not sure exactly what kind of business. I am open to suggestions, so if you have any interesting ventures, please do contact me.
If you’d like to find out more and stay current with our journey, subscribe to the TravelingShort’s RSS feed. I will be posting where we plan to go/start soon.
I may still occasionally post here while away about non travel related topics.
Transcript
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are.
The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while.
Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever. Because this is just a ride.” And we…kill those people.
“Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.”
It’s just a ride.
But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok?
But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, not work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.
Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
Bill Hicks
I have attended FOWA for the past 2 years and can’t say enough good things about it. One of the major highlights for me was meeting and chatting with people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose, Jason Fried, and Kathy Sierra.
This years line up is incredible as well. Here are just a few: Alex Payne, Fred Wilson, Gary Vaynerchuk, John Resig, Molly Holzschlag, Steve Huffman and Tara Hunt. If there is one Tech conference you should not miss, FOWA Miami 2010 is it.
Checkout some of the photos I snapped at the event last year.
Space is limited and you definitely don’t want to miss this conference. Also this is your chance to come out and enjoy sunny Miami Beach.
I used to have a very large collection of books and sold most of them before I purchased a Kindle. A few of them still remain and I would like to give them away.
If you would like to have any of these books shipped to you, please paypal $5 ($9 international) to bruno at bopia dot com to cover shipping costs, make sure to mention on the payment which book you would like and your shipping address.
Why do people start projects and don’t finish them? Why does something seem so much more fun when you first start doing it. Do we get that quickly jaded? Or is it just how humans are pre-programmed to operate?
Remember when you purchased your first car? You drove it around the block a couple times before you came home (I remember I almost got a speeding ticket on my first ride home). The point is that you were super excited about your newly acquired vehicle. The first weekend came around and you spend an entire morning washing it, vacuuming and waxing your new toy. A couple months went by and suddenly you lost interest. Washing the car became a chore, you no longer looked forward to driving it. You took the quickest route home, as the goal shifted from enjoying the ride to arriving at your final destination.
How did that happen? What changed so drastically that made you shift priorities? I don’t know exactly but I suspect it has to do with focusing on the outcome instead of the journey. Before you purchased the car, you spent a lot of time thinking about it, comparing prices, looking up reviews and pros & cons. All of these tasks kept you focused on the desired outcome. When the outcome was achieved, you quickly started losing focus and interest.
The same can be said for completing projects. You decide to refinish your kitchen table, you focus on the outcome: having a nicely re-stained table. You start building a new web application or a piece of desktop software, and your focus is on the final product. How nice it will be when your application is being used by 2,000 people. What you are gonna do with your time when you have hundreds of users purchasing your iPhone app for $2.99 a piece. There is great power in visualizing the outcome, as something to strive for but the focus should be on the journey. How are you going to start? How will you market it? When will you ship version one? Who will likely be your first customer? Focusing on the journey will hopefully keep you motivated the whole way.
Achieving small daily goals goes a long way towards renewing your energy. Starting is easy, because you focus on the end result. You tell your friends about a new idea, and it makes you feel like you have already started. You spend a ton of time selecting a name, and this part is fun, but in reality you are no closer than you were when you first began.
Next project you start, try to focus on the steps and daily goals necessary to achieve the outcome, instead of focusing on the end result.
It is easy to waste an entire day chatting online, IM, Email, you know the rest. Being succinct may allow you to get the point across more quickly and get on with your life. However people may mistake brevity for lack of interest and sometimes even confuse it with rudeness.
A typical online conversation tends to start off with a greeting followed by mutual exchange of small talk. Usually people ask you questions just because it is the norm, even thought they couldn’t care less about the answers. This is pointless and wastes time.
My days of over-productivity incentives are done. I am not advocating filling every second of your day with ultra-productive tasks, multi-tasking to the extreme to cross off hundreds of items from the almighty to-do list. I am talking about getting the small talk out of the way in order to allow focused time.
Why do we need the initial greeting? I can understand when you run into someone at the mall, you certainly don’t want to startle the person by walking up and them and completely skipping to the meat of the message without at least saying the usual ‘Hi’. But online is different. You are not going to be startle if the first message on a Skype window is: “Please resend the resume file”.
Why not just drop online chatting altogether? If you do, people will call more often, which is even more distracting. Not only that but people will email you asking you to get on IM. I find the combination of GTalk inside Gmail perfect, at intervals which I am checking email, I get to answer a few succinct chats online. On a schedule daily, I am on Skype for about two hours to iron out some work discussions. This has been working really well.