Breakage! Exploding laptop!

Okay, so that was a bit of a sensationalist title. My laptop has not yet exploded.

Here's the deal. I applied the 10.5.3 update to my MacBook a few days ago, when it was released. It took a moment, rebooted, and I was back up and running. Nothing bad seemed to have happened. At least, for the first five minutes.

Then my fan started a-crankin'. For no apparent reason. Now, sometimes that'll happen when Spotlight re-indexes, or when Time Machine says "I'm backin' up, and nothing on earth will stop me!" So I didn't think too much of it. Half hour goes by, and now I'm a bit concerned.

I took a gander at the MacRumors forums, which is a great place to look for mac help. A few people had issues with 10.5.3, but nobody really had my issue. So, I put up with it for a few days - this wasn't hindering my use of the computer, it didn't seem to slow anything down. Activity monitor didn't show anything obvious, either. And even at its loudest, the MacBook isn't very loud.

Typically, I use it plugged in, so battery life is not an issue. But this weekend, I was carrying the 'book around the house with me. I expect it to usually get around 4 hours of battery life.

With the fan crankin', I got less than 2. Something is definitely up.

Checked the forums again, checked Activity Monitor again. Nothing obvious. So I did a quick

ps aux

Right at the top of the list, pid #85, was the IPSecuitasDaemon, trying to start up - and eating 94% cpu, whenever I wasn't doing anything! OS X clearly knew that that was not a particularly important process, but it was a constant process. According to ps, it had tried to launch at startup. Now, Activity Monitor wasn't showing me that daemon in it's default view, but I'm sure I could have tweeked it and found the right screen.

So I run

sudo kill 85

and sure enough, the fan noise fades itself out. And my battery life index jumps significantly.

Point of caution: Be careful with that sudo. su-DON'T use it unless you know what you're doing. The '85' comes from ps, it's the pid, or Process ID. And kill terminates the process - the UNIX equivalent of Force Quit (in fact, often works better than Force Quit if something is really misbehaving).

Well, that was an extraordinarily geeky post. Rock & Roll all!

Flip Video Review

Hey, folks!

I'm trying to get on here and post a bit more often. Since tonight is a Co-op night, and since Twitter is totally borked, I figured I'd got on and do this.

Flip Video Camera Review

So I've had my Flip Video camera - the Ultra, 2GB model, by the way - for a whole 3 hours, tops. I don't know absolutely everything there is to know about it yet.

That said, this device is the iPod of video cameras, so within the first 5 minutes, I knew everything I needed to get going. Basically, that was "Where do the batteries go?" Speaking of, this gadget takes double-A's. Yeah. Not some crazy, proprietary $40 NiCd that you'll misplace. Trusty, good 'ol double-A's.

The video quality is remarkable. These sensors these days - I would put this easily beyond the quality of the old Canon ZR-70's we used to shoot with at BCTV. For a $150 camera, this handles high contrast, and motion, extremely well. I don't know that I can say the same about the standard Flip Video - the Ultra, according to Pure Digital has almost double the bitrate, and is using an updated codec for storage. I would assume that both of those upgrades would result in a jump in quality.

The unit has a whopping 7 buttons. Four for menu navigation, one to record, one to play, and one to delete. There's also a slider to turn on and off, and a flip-out USB plug - hence the Flip camera name. Operation is completely self-discoverable. Play with it for more than a few seconds, and you'll know how to recorde, playback, and delete, as well as zoom and shuffle through your previous videos. Extremely simple and smooth. Recording response is nearly immediate, no waiting for tape to pre-roll. Stopping is also snappy.

There is also a standard tripod mount on the bottom, and a TV-out. I haven't tried either of those, because I've not been near a tripod or a TV.

My only complaint at all is the software. The 3ivx codec it comes with doesn't really enable solid playback in OS X - I've read that Perian does better. Fortunately, I have MPEG Streamclip, which will open and convert the files with no complaints.

Directly out of software, I can upload to Youtube, so the codec switcheroo only comes into play when I need to edit something.

Here's my first Youtube post, and my very first recording with the Flip.

Rock and roll folks. Questions? Hit the comments.