TechnowledgeBase

Coding Horror is doing a three part series on building a brand new, utterly kickass computer. For development purposes. He covers everything from installing hardware to using benchmarking/testing tools, to installing the OS and even overclocking. All of it is documented with full color hardcore nerd pornography.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Why?
Mysterious random reboots? Sluggish performance? There is a long list of things that could cause these symptoms, but with the heat of summer upon us, you may want to add something to the list that you hadn’t considered before: Heat.

Electronics and heat don’t mix well, and computers bring them both in dangerous proximity to one another. In a full-sized machine there are usually enough fans to keep things cool and functional, but laptops can be different. The space is tight, the airflow is restricted, and the users (i.e. YOU) are more likely to do things that can literally cause the heat death of their machine… like block the vents with a book. More on that later. Monitoring the temperature of a perfectly functioning laptop every once in a while is a good idea. But if the machine is acting strange, then taking its temperature is one of the first things you should do.

How?
There’s no hardware needed in most cases. Most laptops already have a temperature sensor on the CPU and the hard drive. All you need is an application that can report the temperatures that are already being measured. I recommend the FREE application MobileMeter. It’s small, light on resources, and its free. Plus, its free. And free.
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Popularity: 96% [?]

My webcam, a Creative LIVE! Notebook Pro, didn’t want to work with my MacMini. They wouldn’t talk. They had “issues” that needed to be resolved. True… the cam was never originally INTENDED to work with a Mac, but when the wife torched, destroyed, couldn’t use the laptop she had any more, I dragged the Mac Mini out of semi-retirement and plugged it in for her. My experiences getting her files and applications transferred from failing PC to Mac will probably be the subject of other blog postings, but I figured that the webcam would at least be easy. Find some MAC drivers, install them, and plug it in, right?

WRONG! If Creative had Mac OS drivers on their website, they had ‘em hid pretty good. I’m not saying that there AREN’T any, but at this point I had to proceed as if there weren’t.

The Problem:
My webcam won’t work with Mac OS X. There are no drivers to download from the vendor, and if I simply pug the webcam in, the light on the cam turns on but the operating system (and all the programs on it) tells me that there’s no cam attached. Damn.
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Popularity: 15% [?]