Powerbook – Page 3

March 15, 2005

NOW’s the time to try this

iScroll2 0.18

iScroll2 has just been updated.

via Joel’s blog

I posted a review comparing this little hack to SideTrack a while back, where the former failed dismally to oust the latter. But as I said in the past: it had a lot of potential. That potential already became a reality in its past releases, but the biggest hassle was it never saved your preferences… until now.

There’s only one problem remaining: making sure it doesn’t break on a OS system update. Other than that, for people interested in trying the hack out, I can honestly say that now’s the best time to do so. I’ve personally un-installed SideTrack for good in favor of this hack.

March 7, 2005

More covert technology

The 2005 Powerbooks have an accelerometer chip to take measurements of the laptops’ motion (e.g. during falls, etc.)

Bubblegym 0.1

This is a tilt-sensitive game which uses the accelerometer in the new Powerbooks!

via Joel’s blog

The real purpose of said chip is:

Apple’s PowerBook laptops now have a little accelerometer inside that’s used to protect the hard drive if you drop it (it notices the sudden speed increase and parks the drive heads).

However, is it just me, or can that chip also be a safety precaution for Apple – so that people can’t just claim warranties left and right. Sorta like the black boxes of aircrafts… to determine wether it was “mechanical problems” or “pilot error” hehehehe.

But then again, you can disable it if you wanted to:

$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power 1* AC Power 3 Currently in use: acwake 0 … ams 1 $ sudo pmset -a ams 0 $ pmset -g … ams 0

So I guess it’s a cool safe thing to have after all!

February 18, 2005

iScroll2

There was news before that pre-2005 Apple portables/laptops had “w-enhanced” keyboard hardware. A hack was made available, which can enable two-finger scrolling on these trackpads.

The new 2005 Powerbooks have hardware scrolling features too, but do not necessarily mean they have the same type of trackpad as the pre-2005 models do.

Anyways, when news first came out about a month ago, I tried it. My system hung, good thing I prefer navigating using the keyboard, so that problem was quickly solved.

Today I tried it again, and this time it worked. But I found myself going back to SideTrack after a few hours. The rest of this post is input that I hope may help other people in trying out the said hacked drivers.

November 30, 2004

Of last Sunday

Sunday was a loaded day. We kicked off with a mass in UP, wherein there was an interesting homily about some rich person who now dedicates his life to helping the less fortunate. It’s interesting because later that night, I actually met his wife! hahaha.

Afternoon was spent practicing for the Christmas concert… so nothing to talk about there save for that fact that it was tiring

Later that night was Juan’s birthday dinner. I thought it was a small dinner followed by a team meeting… little did I know that he actually threw a party at the roofdeck of their condominium.

November 9, 2004

Ramadan #5

“Nono Felipe”

“Canon EOS 20D”

Nono picked me up this morning to accompany him to an ocular inspection – the real reason however was our planned ramadan (Hidalgo trip) that day – wherein he had to get some blank DVD-Rs and MiniDV media.

I, on the other hand, was going to recieve my replacement 20D that same afternoon.

We ended up getting what we wanted… and as a bonus – treated ourselves to 500-peso PCMCIA CF adaptors for our respective laptops. Now we don’t have to rely on our ImageTanks all the time.

Anyhoo, the replacement unit was supposed to have come from a better/refined production batch (I expect no less from the wait I had to endure) and everything seemed to be in order. I’m happy for another ramadan.