Somewhere out there!

Some SSD numbers for the MacBook Air from Mac Rumors:-

AnandTech: The MacBook Air CPU Mystery: More Details Revealed:

Why did Apple and Intel opt for a hotter than necessary chip for use in the MacBook Air? Here’s where our trail goes cold but we suspect that in order to bring the smaller CPU/chipset packaging to market earlier, some tradeoffs had to be made. Remember that CPU packaging controls far more than how big the chip is, but also governs FSB frequency, power delivery and getting data in and out of the chip itself.

The shiny die connects to hundreds of pins on the bottom of the package. The more pins that need to be connected, the higher the FSB frequency and the smaller the chip the more strain this puts on the packaging technology itself. It’s quite possible that one side effect of the small form factor CPU package is worse power delivery, requiring that the chip be given a higher than normal operating voltage.

The bigger concern however has nothing to do with packaging technology or operating voltages, but overall thermals. The MacBook Pro runs very hot and while the 20W TDP of the MacBook Air is significantly lower than the 35W TDP of the Pro, it’s high for such a small chassis. We won’t know for sure how hot the Air will get until it’s in our hands but the SSD route seems like an even better bet now that we know a little more about what we’re dealing with. Cutting down heat in that thin chassis will be very important, and moving to solid state storage is the only real option you have there

An iphone review.

Via Planet g33k Aotearoa.

We’ve standardised on the E61 as our business phone and it is really good. Now there is a Sync client for OSX I might set it up for my mother at home on her iMac.

Running Asterisk on an Apple TV is clever. I wonder if Ubuntu would run, maybe the Apple TV is something that could replace my SLUG. Will have to stop in the Apple Store and see how noisy it is.

Fast OS Switching a good reason to consider the Mac Mini as your next workstation.

Not quite a pro-blogger yet.

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Back in June I decided I’d try out NX and my MiniMac as a possible active working desktop solution. The genesis for this was mainly based on my decision back in March that iBooks were the best portable solution. Reasonable battery live, hardware/software combination that just works, together.

I was trying to figure out how to launch X11 based OO2 (v109) open-document format files from Finder. Initially I found this useful OSX/X11 FAQ, but the particular item on “Launch X11 applications directly in the Finder” was good only for applications and not associating file types with an application. After hunting around a bit more I discovered X11 Extension.

X11 Extension is a background application that makes it easy to X11 apps, X11 documents, Window Managers and Desktops.

Now by next is to figure out how to manage remote filesystems and map uids from my NFS mounts to my OSX uids. It would be nice if I could do this without having to change (find -uid #uid -exec chmod #nuid {} \;) all the uids associated with my current OSX user.