drivers
Latest
UK drivers trust GPS more than their own eyes
We've heard reports before about the dangers of driving while under the influence of GPS, but it looks like drivers in the UK have taken trust of their navigation units to the extreme. Twice in the space of the last two weeks, we've seen reports of British drivers taking serious risks because they trust the info displayed on the small screen more than what they see through their windshield. In the most recent case, drivers passing through the village of Luckington have found themselves landing in the River Avon, by following a GPS-recommended route that pointed to a bridge that has been closed for a week. Despite warning signs on both sides of the road, and nothing but water straight ahead, local villagers have found themselves pulling an average of two cars a day out of the river for the past week. "When you ask what happened, they say, ‘My sat-nav told me it was this way,'" one resident told The Times. Meanwhile, the village of Crackpot (yes, that's really its name) has had to deal with drivers whose navigation systems have directed them to the edge of a cliff with a hundred-foot drop. So far, there have been no serious injuries, but drivers have found themselves stranded on a rocky path. "It's only a matter of time before something happens," said one resident. Listen, we like GPS as much as the next sense-of-direction-impaired driver. But we also do our best to use our eyes, as well. And if you don't, well, there's a village in England named for you, and it ain't Luckington.Read - LuckingtonRead - Crackpot
Info on New ATI Drivers & WoW
For all you Radeon card users out there, it seems that the latest version of ATI's drivers, the just-released Catalyst 6.4, contain an issue that may affect WoW players. From the official notes:"World of Warcraft: Enabling CrossFire may intermittently result in the character appearing off center. Further details can be found in topic number 737-22017"So, for god's sake, people...turn off Crossfire - whatever it is - and keep yourself centered. The new drivers can be downloaded from ATI's site here.
Griffin Updates PowerMate Driver to v1.6.4
I've had my PowerMate for quite awhile and it remains one of the coolest accessories attached to my Mac. It's not quite as spiffy as Hubzilla, who provides me with extra firewire ports, but I use my PowerMate often for volume control while watching TV on my Mac (via a Miglia capture card) or when I'm listening to iTunes. The problem is that since I upgraded my main Mac to Tiger, my PowerMate hasn't been working very reliably. Sometimes it just isn't recognized by the OS and I'm forced to reboot to make it be recognized again. Other times, it drops off after waking from sleep. I love my PowerMate, but it hasn't been as useful to me since my Tiger upgrade.Today, however, there's hope. Griffin has released an updated driver for the PowerMate which provides better integration with the iLife application suite, GarageBand, and Microsoft Office applications, and also brings universal binary support for Intel Macs. Here's hope that the new driver will help with the problems I've been having. I'll install later tonight and update this post when or if the problem recurs or vanishes.
Apple needs to fix their PowerBook DL trackpad software
Ever since I picked up this 15" PowerBook DL (Dual Layer SuperDrive) about a month ago, I have occasionally run into situations where I see the kernel_task in Activity Monitor spiking to about 60% CPU usage, grinding my machine nearly to a halt and making it generally unusable until I restarted. None of the typical maintenance tasks seemed to help matters, and since I was planning on wiping the book clean this weekend for the upcoming semester anyway, I simply chalked it up to some little utility I had been playing around with. Oh the troubles I go through for you readers...Well after wiping the book this morning and getting everything reinstalled (huge time-saver tip: keep all your 3rd party apps in an Applications folder in your Home folder, this way OS X can still find them, yet it's easy for you to back them all up), I found I was still having these kernel_task issues - even before I installed all my extras. Getting frustrated, I finally decided to do some googling and discovered that, once again, MacOSXHints had already gotten to the bottom of this issue.As it turns out, this kernel_task usage problem is a result of Apple's own trackpad software horribly misbehaving on these latest PowerBooks, even on a 100% clean system, which I verified this morning. MacOSXHints did find a 3rd party solution in the form of SideTrack, a shareware trackpad software replacement for PowerBooks and iBooks that has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. While I can verify SideTrack fixed the issue on my PowerBook, it alters the behavior of two-finger scrolling and, of course, costs money ($15). I also can't stand some weird thing it does to mouse movement and acceleration; it feels and acts differently than Apple software, and these two dings caused me to uninstall it and take my chances with keeping kernel_task happy again.Moral of the story: Apple needs to fix their PowerBook trackpad software, and soon. This kernel issue destroys productivity, usability and battery life, and also causes a PowerBook to get pretty hot. If you're running into issues like this (or any other kind), I urge you to add your voice to the pile at apple.com/feedback.
