So my unibody mac has passed it’s one year birthday. Awesome piece of hardware (and software), been really great to me.

One complaint - occasionally my fan starts making abnormal noises. Not just the high RPM noise, but another more disturbing rattling noise. I may need to get it repaired, which I’m OK with – just not OK with the downtime…

Some useful tools I have found while running some MacBook health checks…

• smcFanControl – a cool tool shows you core temp, fan RPM’s and best of all lets you tweak the RPMs (I’m trying with setting a higher minimum speed to combat the rattle)
• Coconut Battery – sweet App that tells you how many times you have recharged your battery, and it’s current capacity (compared to new capacity). Remarkably, mine is 97%! This just saved me a few hundred bucks because I was thinking of replacing the battery to refresh it.
• iStat Pro – awesome dashboard widget showing you many vital statistics of your mac.
• Disk Inventory X – useful tool to show disk utalisation, cousin of WinDirStat

It was tempting to upgrade to the new Unibody 13″ Macbook Pro with it’s 7 hour battery.  For me that is a very compelling feature, in that it greatly enhances productivity (more than a few extra CPU cycles or RAM).  However it is hard to justify the ~$1000 upgrade price tag (assuming a good ebay sale).

The amount of times I had to stop work this year due to my battery being empty is probably only 2 or 3.  Even on a long 9+ hour flight, I generally only clock a few productive hours working, and the remainder resting off the travel, or watching movies on the inflight entertainment.

This MacBook line upgrade was released in June 2009.  My guess is they will next update the model on around June-October 2010 which seems to be their standard release cycle.  I’ll upgrade then.

in finder will dismiss all finder windows. which is good because they seem to breed like rabbits – and can persist even when you reboot.

Two very useful tools for getting video on an iPhone:

KeepVid – Lets you download iPhone compatiable (and high quality) MP4 files direct from YouTube – just wack the YouTube URL in the box and you’re done. Thanks Pete.

MPEG StreamClip – it’s not often you find a useful and free video tool – but this is one. Drag-drop, convert to MP4 and click “iTunes” for one of the iTunes presets. Pretty straight forward. Mac only.