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An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

fanfan.rambo.codes

101–110 of 454 posts

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#101
post #25

Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm comprom…

As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback to a more mechanical age, like a manual transmission vehicle where you can judge when to shift by engine speed.

... and then you get an electric car, and the only time you have any auditory feedback is when it's very hot out and you supercharge.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#102
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a tangent but I am quite impressed how Apple's marketing campaign was so effective that they've managed to redefine what PC (personal computer) means

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

> PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone".

You're misremembering history. It eventually evolved into that, yes.

Apple didn't really buy into that until the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).

"PC" was "personal computer" years before the IBM PC. Just look at old computer magazines. The whole reason the phrase "IBM PC" existed was to differentiate it from the other PCs that already existed. "IBM" was the adjective. "PC" was the noun. Because of its success in offices, "IBM PC" became just "PC" the same way other words like "omnibus" became just "bus" because it's simpler to say.

Wasn’t ‘home computer’ the generally used term before the IBM 5150 ?

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#104
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.

Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technolo…

>It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.

Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#105

I’ll wait for the Pro… But honestly - the last Airs and Pros are a joke especially while using a second Monitor. The Pro has a known bug and can get pretty slow. The Air - unresponsive as hell if a second monitor is used and u are in a virtual conference with screencast and cam on. We must always look at the price value tag and at that point Apple really disappointed recently. Don’t get me wrong… I am a Dev and i app…

I’ve been using the Mini for 7 months without a single hiccup – daily routine requires several Adobe apps running simultaneously and a couple of dev node servers plus browsers, mail and the like, on a 4k/5k double monitor setup.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#106
post #82
post #53

Haha! I sort of need this. It's amazing how the only time I realize I have a runaway process is if my laptop heats up. It's truly incredible how much serious heavy work I do on a "little" M1 Air. MySQL and Postgres, Redis, Sidekiqs, Mailcatcher (small, but still), a couple of Rails apps, Spotify, Spark mail app, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Safari, Calendar, Photos in the background hopefully identifying faces, etc.…

Makes me want to replace my i7 MBP sooner than I was planning!

I thought this Air would be a placeholder until the M1 MBP, but unless you need a real GPU, I find this more than good enough. I won’t need to upgrade.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#107
post #43

This is funny. For the last ten years I've used Mac laptops as my primary machine. Of course the fan noise was a great auditory clue to tell me to check out Activity Monitor/top for rogue processes and help me optimize which tasks took too many resources. I didn't realize how much I relied on that cue until I temporarily switched to a Mac desktop machine during the pandemic when I didn't need to travel. The desktop f…

I'm also trying to figure out a solution for remote access/file sync. I've been using resilio sync to sync my files between my laptop and desktop. It works great, but it destroys battery life on my laptop, so I've been looking for solutions. Syncthing is next on my to try list, but its very similar to resilio sync so I don't have high hopes. iCloud drive/dropbox/etc have issues with syncing git repos, so not sure abo…

Syncthing is great, however the biggest issue Ive found with thr Mac version is you explicitly need to end the task in the upper taskbar or it will just drain your battery. Also, if you sync a Mac with anything besides, be prepared to see a .nomedia file in EVERY.SINGLE.DIRECTORY. (i cant recall what exactly it is). It's very annoying to say to least.

That being said, Syncthing works great for a wholly cross platform sync tool. I have used it with a PC, Macbook, Android setup. Never have I not been able to get it to work.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#108

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…

Are you using an AdBlock? If not, maybe that's why Chrome is struggling. All these adverts eat resources like crazy.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PC" was "personal computer" years before the IBM PC. Just look at old computer magazines. The whole reason the phrase "IBM PC" existed was to differentiate it from the other PCs that already existed. "IBM" was the adjective. "PC" was the noun. Because of its success in offices, "IBM PC" became just "PC" the same way other words like "omnibus" became just "bus" because it's simpler to say.

Wasn’t ‘home computer’ the generally used term before the IBM 5150 ?

I don't think so. Comparing use of these terms in books:

https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/?q=home+computer

https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/?q=personal+computer

Personal computer was used a lot more when books were eventually written about the era.

Re: An app for M1 Macs that plays the sound of a fan as CPU usage goes up

#110
post #77

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "cl…

Want to use "apps" that run in a browser. Then just open them in a browser. That's what I do with Teams, Discord and so on. Much better than opening many isolated browser runtimes for what's essentially badly optimized webpages.

And if you want the separate window so you can pretend they’re apps, use the “create shortcut” option in the menu.
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