ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

How do you keep an Apple Macbook cool? Simple: ice.

Seriously.

I have a first generation Macbook Pro that is known for it's overheating and fan issues. My laptop is no longer under warranty and I don't want to shell out a lot of $ to replace the motherboard and fans.

Initially, not much of a problem. A fantastic program, smcFanControl allows you to adjust the fan speed based on your computer temperature. A manual process but my laptop is still usable.

That is, till the right fan completely dies. Running one fan at full speed is not enough for this Macbook -- this sucker gets really hot. Continue reading to see how I built my own solution...

Everytime I add an event to my Mac iCal Calendar, I set a reminder so I don't forget. But overtime this gets annoying, so many popups. Sure, I could open my calendar, but if it's not in front of me, I'm going to either ignore it or forget to check. There must be a way to stick your calendar on your desktop?

Well I googled and tried a bunch of apps but nothing really worked--till I found iCalViewer. What a wonderful program! I can select any of my calendars to show on my desktop, specify how far in the future I want (configurable for each calendar!) and it includes all day events along with birthdays (if you enter those into address book). Now, no more forgetting about some upcoming event. Well worth the $11!

Here's a snapshot of it running on my desktop:

In a previous post, I posted about some of the most gorgeous desktop wallpapers I’ve found on the internet.

Today, I’ve found another great resource: Really stunning desktop wallpapers over at Smashing Magazine, a great webzine on design.

Definitely worth checking it out, I especially liked the Mac OS X Simpson one :)

In a previous post, I outlined how to backup your Mac very easily with an external harddrive and the wonderful program SuperDuper.

Stumbled upon a great blog post talking about RAM today. At the bottom of the post it recommended 2 places to buy RAM that I hadn’t heard of yet.

I hopped on over to OWC MacSales and found to my liking that it would be only $27 to add 1GB of RAM to my aging Macbook Pro, whoo! I didn’t realize RAM prices were so cheap now. This should seriously speed up my notebook, a 1GB and 512MB sticks isn’t the best combo, doh!

I’ll keep this place in mind when I buy a 4th gen Macbook Pro (when they come out soon) and want to upgrade to 4GB of RAM... only $125, just slightly cheaper than Apple charging $700 for this option when you buy your Macbook Pro ;-)

So I’ve been using my Mac for quite a while now as an alarm clock. The benefit here is when I travel, I instantly have my alarm clock with me and I’m used to how it works—-don’t have to fiddle with some other clock that may or may not work.

Probably the absolute best website for wallpapers:

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/

Absolutely gorgeous, enjoy!

For backing up my important files, as of late I’ve just been simply burning a DVD-RW, but that has become quite a chore, not to mention slow. After talking with a few people, a LaCie external harddrive came up several times as highly recommended. So I found a great deal at Buy.com and the next day had my drive (even though I specified free shipping and it said 5-9 business days, rock!).

What a difference! So much faster and easier to use, not to mention I have have tons more space to play with :-D

Stumbled upon an awesome little plugin for Mail today: Letterbox. Very cool! It sets up Mail to display as 3 columns, instead of the default 2 columns/2 rows typical appearance. Works a whole lot better on this beautiful widescreen :-) Not to mention, having a narrower column for the actual message is much easier to read, a nice usability boost!

Ever needed to find a free wifi hotspot easily? Notice how slow Mac OS X is about that? Enter iStumbler! Makes it super easy to find hotspots, showing both signal strength and whether the network is protected or not, very handy!