processes
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Samsung i8910 HD thumbs nose at Pre Plus, runs 50 processes of its own
PreCentral's 50-app demo on the Pre Plus was insanely (if not excessively) impressive, but is it the only phone out there with the kind of multitasking prowess that mere mortals could never possibly need? No, turns out. Adam Fullerton of iUnlock does a pretty wild demo on Symbian-Guru where he flashes his i8910 HD with a custom ROM that significantly lowers power-on consumption of the phone's 256MB of RAM, starts running apps, and makes it all the way to 50. Even better, they aren't all throwaway apps, either: he's got Gravity, Skyfire, Opera, Quickoffice, Adobe Reader, and S60's built-in music player and browser all running, among countless others, and it looks like he still comes out of it with a bit of headroom at the end. Is it practical? No -- nor could you likely do this with a stock i8910 ROM -- but it's comforting to know that the hardware's entirely capable of this kind of tomfoolery.
iStat menus 1.2 monitors your Mac's innards
I'm definitely a big fan of iSlayer's iStat Pro widget. Whenever my older Powerbook acts a little weird, I can just pull up the Dashboard and tell at a glance what's going wrong ("Oh my, the CPU is running at 150 degrees again. Time to quit a few apps"). Now they've sent word that iStat menus, an even bigger and better stats program available to sit on the menubar, has hit version 1.2.New to this version is process monitoring, better temperature and fan support in G4 Powerbooks (like mine), and a disk activity graph that let's you monitor disk performance over time. For keeping an eye on what's happening under your Mac's hood, there's almost nothing better, and all the iStat stuff is free.Of course, if you do use one of their apps, make sure to send them some cash to help them keep up the good work. Always support good software, people. Just like NPR, if you don't support it, you'll lose it.
Kill those runaway processes
The Hacks Blog addresses two issues in one today: white hot Macs and runaway processes. As they explain, if your Mac is consumed by a stuck process that's putting the hurt on your processor, the machine will run very hot. So what does a geek do?Find that process and kill it dead. The Hacks Blog explains how to do it, as well as likely culprits: third party drivers or apps that may need an upgrade.
Widget Watch: miniStat2 v1.81 adds Intel Mac temp, more
While I'm still a bigger fan of the iStat pro widget, miniStat2 definitely wins points for compactness, creativity and for quickly incorporating a monitor for Intel Mac temperatures. Other updates include the ability to change the currently monitored network interface right from Network tab of the widget, the storage tab only displaying physical hard drives (as opposed to including .DMG files and the like) as well as a Spanish localization.A demo of miniStat 2 is available from ShockWidgets, and a license will cost $5.
List of Mac OS X's processes and their purpose
Have you ever opened Activity Monitor to check on what processes and apps your Mac is running, only to be greeted with a list that's about as understandable as ancient Greek? (This of course assumes that you don't know how to read ancient Greek). Well, through the beauty of diggdot.us (all the del.icio,us, digg and Slashdot posts with none of the snarky comments), I found this fairly thorough list of Mac OS X's processes that attempts to explain just what is going on under the hood. Scott blogged this a year ago, but I figured this couldn't hurt even if it is review for some of us.The author reminds us that this list is by no means complete, so don't panic if you have a process running that isn't on the list. With that said, this should be a fairly educational resource for most of us, as the list is written in plain English (as opposed to the aforementioned ancient Greek) to help make sense of just what our Mac is doing with all those little processes. Check it out.
