techiehenry

That would be the system fan of the MacBook, by the way.
The early releases of the MacBook apparently were having temperature problems, so much so that users reportedly experienced random shutdowns during the course of using their beloved notebook. It was found out that the fan was unable to change its speed as the temperature of the MacBook’s internals went up.

A utility was released by a third party developer that allows the user to explicitly control the fan’s speed as deemed necessary. Though the problem with the MacBook was fixed partly through a firmware update, the third party utility is still popular and is considered a must-have for MacBook owners.

What I’m referring to is the smcFanControl utility:

The program does just one thing: it lets you set several profiles where you can control the speed of the MacBook’s internal fan. It also provides a display of the current temperature and the fan speed:

If you’re paranoid and you want to make sure that the temperature of your notebook is maintained at the minimum, you can set the fan speed to maximum. However, one side effect of this is that the fan gets quite noisy at higher speeds.

Try it and feel the difference!

In just 9 steps:

1. Mount the USB drive
2. Backup its contents, if there are any
3. Format the USB drive as FAT32
4. Download dsl-embedded:
   ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/dsl-3.4.3-embedded.zip
5. Download syslinux:
   http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-3.52.zip
6. Unzip the contents of dsl-3.4.3-embedded.zip into the root directory of the USB drive. Make sure that the directories within the zip file is recreated
7. Unzip syslinux-3.52.zip
8. Run syslinux -ma [drive]: where [drive] is the designated drive letter of your USB drive
9. Reboot the computer (make sure that the boot sequence would place the USB drive as the first boot device)

Voila! You now have a system you can use to troubleshoot nonbooting systems and networks.

I learned about this trick a few weeks ago as I was reading through a local Mac User Group. Wouldn’t you like to know when and where you Mac was built?

coconutIdentityCard does just that for you. As the screenshot shows below, you can see the location where and date when your Mac was presumably created.

I’m not sure as to why it would place the date of creation on a particular week and not on a particular day. My guess would be that computers are released in batches, and the date indicated may be the date when that current batch was being assembled.

It can also check the same information about your iPod and other Apple products that use the same 11-character serial number format.

Another newbie tip.

One great attribute of Mac OS X is that the applications reside in only one location, that is the Applications folder. However, it can also be a bane since you have to open Finder, and navigate to the Applications folder to be able to run an application that is not in the Dock.

This tip aims to lessen the number of steps to access the Applications folder, making it close to the manner that Windows lets its users access the Programs installed in the computer.

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This is one for Mac OS X newbies like me.

I’m quite amused when I see screenshots of Mac OS X desktops showing the Macintosh HD with an icon different from its default, which is a picture of a hard disk.

I keep on getting tips to use icon management applications, like the freeware LiteIcon. However, I’m more interested on how to do it manually, since I won’t be changing a lot of the icons anyway, just that of the Macintosh HD. It turns out to be quite a simple process.

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