Dean Scarff’s perpetual struggle with technology, and other anecdotes
Computer applications, scripts, and code snippets that I’ve written.
I have Muxic, my music player for Mac OS X, working to the point that it’s suitable for public consumption. There are still features to be added, but the basic previous/play/pause/stop/next stuff is working.
Caveats: it’s built against the macports xmms2 0.5 DrLecter, installed with the default prefix “/opt/local”, against the Mac OS X 10.5 SDK. Download and try the Muxic 1.0 Beta 1 binary, or check out the Muxic source with git:
git clone https://scarff.id.au/git/muxic.git
XMMS2 is cool. In my experience, its architecture does everything The Right Way, and their support tools (git, mantis, mediawiki, doxygen-generated documentation) are all modern.
The clientlib is good enough that clients (frontends) can be very lightweight. FWICS there are some good Qt and GTK based clients that would probably run fine on OS X, if you can be bothered getting them and their dependencies working.
Even then, other Qt and GTK based applications I have on scud always feel slightly out of place (or very out of place for those using X11). There were no Cocoa/Application Kit based GUIs on the old clientlist. I set out to create a Cocoa UI.
I like Winamp Classic’s UI; it is functional and compact, especially in windowshade mode. If you are used to the keyboard shortcuts (and they make a lot of sense with a QWERTY keyboard), you don’t need huge buttons.
Hence I made a client with similar minimalism, without trying to be Winamp-skin-compatible. I’m quite happy to use the CLI and other clients for managing the media library, but for something that’s sitting on my desktop all the time I wanted small, and I wanted it to fit in with OS X. It’s got Growl support too!
Muxic is a minimal user interface to XMMS2. It should be ready for a release soon, meanwhile you can browse the Muxic source.
Here’s another patch for some third party software, this time for keeping your intel mac CPU cool.
I’ve been using Lobotomo’s Fan Control preference pane and daemon to control my 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro’s fan speeds since I installed OS X.
It’s useful because it means you can idle with quieter fans in a cool environment, but still have them rev up to max before you burn your fingers. However, one thing that’s annoyed me for a while is that you only really control the floor and ceiling thresholds of a linear response curve.
In my experience (engineers or physicists can correct me), at a constant CPU load, there are multiple equilibrium temperature/fan-speed combinations, but they’re not collinear. In the original Fan Control, the response curve is linear. Taking a hint from gamma correction, I have patched Fan Control 1.2 to use an exponential curve. Where T is the temperature, the target fan speed F is governed by the equation:
I also reduced the minimum upper threshold temperature to 60˚C.
You can browse the source in git or download the binary installer. I’ve only tested on the MacBook Pro (running Leopard). Feedback is welcome as comments here on the blog.
Of course, there may be more effective measures to combat a hot macbook pro.