BigDiver

It has been reported many times that the Macbook Air overheats to the point of burning your legs. On the positive side we could possibly use it on the next corporate BBQ to get some ribs grilled to perfection.

It has been my experience that the fastest way to get the Air burning is to have it play some HD video. After a few minutes the playback starts hanging, the CPU goes to 100%, and that is the end of the movie.

I knew that undervolting could be a solution but I did not know how to use it on the Mac
Undervolting is basically a process to lower the CPU voltage by software in order to improve battery consumption and lower operating temperatures.

Due to the manufacturing processes each CPU has slightly different voltage tolerances. Chip manufacturers, instead of optimizing de lowest voltage possible for each individual CPU, they basically set it to a know stable configuration, that some times is far from optimal.

The higher the voltage the higher the power dissipation, i.e. heat generated by the CPU. This has nothing to do with speed. Do not confuse voltage with frequency and clock cycles. Lowering the voltage will not make your computer run slower, or damage your CPU in any way. It will save battery and cool it down.
The idea is to lower the CPU voltage while keeping the frequency at its maximum.

The “risk” of lowering the CPU voltage is instability, again you will not, repeat not, damage the CPU. At a certain point the CPU will be unstable and cause a kernel panic in the operating system. So all you need to to is find the lower possible voltage that still keeps the CPU stable and you have a winning configuration.

After searching the Web for days on end I found a cool (no pun intended) small utility called CoolBook that allows you to do just that, play with your voltage settings in order to find the optimal lowest voltage for your CPU to run.

I have been playing with CoolBook for a day or so and I will report back my findings soon.

What has been your experience with Mac Overheating problems?

Hi I feel that this  a prety common request: Bind the Home/End keys to move to the beginning and end of lines respectively.

In Mac OS X (10.5 and 10.6) some applications use the Cmd-Rigt and Cmd-Left to perform these actions but, call me old fashioned, I like to use Home and End instead.

It is actually very easy to change the Cocoa Key bindings for any user under Mac OS. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in ~/Library/KeyBindings directory

   mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings
   cd ~/Library/KeyBindings
   touch DefaultKeyBinding.dict

2. Edit your DefaultKeyBinding.dict file so it contains:

   {
   /* home */
   "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Left */
   "@\UF702"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
   "$@\UF702" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* Cmd-Right */
   "@\UF703"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$@\UF703" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* end */
   "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
   "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
   
   /* page up/down */
   "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
   "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
   }

3. Restart the Cocoa Application.

This example works very well with TextMate.

In order to bind other keys you need to find their Scan code, and you can use the following modifiers
For more information please check this article

When running Outlook 2007 inside Parallels in MAC OS Leopard, I could not send email. If I used the “Test Account Settings” in when configuring my email account Outlook sent the email and said all was ok, but when trying to send regular email from the Outbox everything was not ok and no email was going out. I could not send email no matter what changes I tried in Outlook. 

Tested the connectivity with the mail server using telnet and Thunderbird and all worked fine. So the problem was in Outlook it self.I then downloaded DRTcp and configured the MTU to 1492. After a reboot all email was going out with no problems! 

If Microsoft Outlook chases you even in your MAC, and you can receive email, but cannot send this may help you.