It’s been a year since I started posting at Command-Tab, and it’s been a great learning experience for me, and hopefully you as well. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about my site, and every bit of it is appreciated. I’m enjoying sharing my technological adventures with anyone curious enough to read, and I have no intentions of stopping now. Thanks, everyone, for your continued support and interest.

I just finished watching the MacWorld Boston 1997 keynote where Steve Jobs made his return to Apple and, with the help of a new board of directors, began to turn the company around. As he said, the Mac OS is one of Apple’s core assets. That’s never been more true than ever today, almost ten years later, with Mac OS X. The Mac hardware would be nothing without the increasingly great system software to go along with it. All iPods aside, the Mac OS is the best thing Apple has going for them. Mac OS X receives dramatic improvements with every release, leaving little room for reasons not to upgrade.

I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer. I think the people who buy them do think differently, and they are the creative spirits in this world. They are the people that are not just out to get a job done, they are out to change the world, and they’re out to change the world using whatever great tools they can get. We make tools for those kinds of people. — Steve Jobs

This was back in 1997, but you wouldn’t know it’s not this very day. Apple is most certainly stronger than ever, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a loyal Mac user in today’s market.

So far so good — both Apple and me.

John Siracusa at ArsTechnica points out a bug I’ve experienced more than once with various Macs. High frequency changes in CPU power draws on some Macs’ power supplies can cause them to emit sounds.

Then I noticed a strange noise…a chirping sound. I chased down the source, I searched the net for solutions, and I eventually wrote about it here at Ars in March of 2004. The summary: the power supply in the revision 1 Power Mac G5 made chirping noises, and there was no hardware-based fix in sight.

Sure, it’s hardly an OS crippling bug, but in a quiet environment it can be quite distracting. This bug also affects more than just G5 hardware — I can hear my PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz 15″) making sounds at I type. I’m positive of the source for two reasons. For one, I use MenuMeters to display a small CPU usage graph and ATA bus read/write indicators in my Mac’s menu bar. Neither are active, yet I can still hear the faint clicks. Second, John links to a utility called SystemLoad which will actually play a scale on the power supply by adjusting CPU usage levels. Hearing my machine’s power circuitry play a tune is, well, creepy and unsettling.

John goes on to say that a feature of the processors, CPU “napping,” allows the unit to temporarily lower its power consumption and “wake up” as needed, often many times a second. I’ve found that this feature can be controlled by installing Apple’s CHUD (Computer Hardware Understanding Development) tools and disabling the napping option in the new Processor system preference pane. (As a side note, the Processor prefpane icon changed from a Motorola chip to that of an Intel Pentium 4 style chip many months before the Intel transition. At the time I wondered why they made the change, but only recently has the tiny interface tweak become clear.) Upon unchecking the box, the change is immediate and the clicks are silenced. SystemLoad no longer plays tunes with my analog hardware. With napping disabled, though, the CPU tends to generate more heat. In return, the fans come on more often and kick up even more noise than the faint clicking. This situation is lose-lose, and is one I should not even be dealing with considering the original selling price of the machine. Apple needs to get with the program and start producing quieter analog electronics. I know digital is all the rage these days, but electricity isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time. Or, more accurately, it’s going everywhere all the time, but it should not make noise doing so.

I just completed the WordPress 2.0.1 upgrade I’ve been avoiding for a week or more, put off by the structural changes I might have to make to get everything working again. Surprisingly, the upgrade took mere minutes and went off without a hitch. Did I ever mention how much I love WordPress?

While I was in the process of tidying up, I also fixed the ugly /index.php/post-name/ addressing system I used previously. For the time being, I’ve fixed all past posts with a rather large .htaccess hack, hinting to browsers and search engines that the content has permanently moved to a new address (HTTP code 301). All old links should point to their new locations, and the new system should work as well.

If anyone happens to notice something broken around here, a comment or email would be appreciated so I can get to fixing it!

On a reader’s blog, I just discovered Textpander, a small utility which turns small segments of text into large, expanded ones. Back in the Mac OS 8 and 9 days, I used to run TypeIt4Me to catch common typos and handle a few conversions, and I’m delighted to find Textpander is a perfect companion to Mac OS X. When the preference pane is opened, Textpander launches a small background process to watch your keystrokes for a given trigger from the defined list. Personally, misspelling “and” as “adn” is one I always look for when proofreading, but now those days are gone. What’s more impressive is that Textpander can match the case of the misspelling such that the replaced word is exactly what you intended to type. Great software that Just Works. This handy utility is offered as donationware, so I highly recommend giving it a try and sending the author a tip if you find it useful.