Macbook exhaust fans spinning up at night? Check your screensaver!

I often leave my Mac running overnight, and I sleep in the same room.

I kept noticing something that annoyed me which was the fans would often start whirring at full pelt just as I was going to sleep. The strange thing is that my MacBook (especially the new one) rarely makes a sound during the day. After a while they would spin down.

Last night the penny dropped – it’s the screen saver. The fancy, 3D hardware using screensaver. The moment I woke up the computer, the fan RRP started to reduce. So I promptly set my ‘Display Sleep’ time to 1min, and went to sleep soundly. Before, it was set to 15min – so it would eventually spin down (hence my previous observation as well).

Moral of the story: if you want your computer to stay quit right when you need it to be, use the ‘Display Sleep’ feature without screensavers (as attractive as they may be).

wow, OS X

OS X really makes setting up a LAMP service dead easy. I need to do some offline dev (and lets face it, I’m very sick of uploading over slow connections).

Apache and PHP are installed out of the box. Yep – installed *by default* on everyone’s OS X install, not just developers. This is used for the web-sharing feature.

But you have to change one line in Apache to enable the PHP module. This doc was useful (I used vi for everything though, of course). Or the apple docs which make it look harder than it actually is.

Installing MySQL is as simple as downloading the DMG from MySQL.com and running the installer.

And that is is. No ./configure, no make, no make install. Just tweak some settings, and run an installer.

Love it!