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

fanfan.rambo.codes

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

#201
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a habit of touching the strip of metal above the keys on my old macbook air, since that heats up before the fan becomes audible. The sensible approach, of course, is to add a load monitor to the menu bar; now with my new m1 macbook, I can simply make the appropriate noises myself, as necessary. This is the UNIX way.

"MenuBar Stats" has a versatile collection of widgets to add to the menu bar. I'd prefer something open source though, if anyone has recommendations, please share. Once you're running a tool like that, it is interesting to see the efficiency cores often saturated and the performance cores usually sleeping.

I've been using this one: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters

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

#202
post #102

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 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.

And even then they still used the PowerPC chips and branding.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you do research without going beyond 10 tabs? I typically go horizontal. If i'm trying to solve problem, will middle click on top 5 results etc and go through them until problem solved. Then there is research on various topics that require deep dives into papers, those papers then have citations that require other papers or open up other queries. Then going through email generate various links that I need to…

My workflow for research is like this: - open link, determine if it’s relevant or not. If it’s relevant, but not relevant right now, I’ll dump it into my notes. - then I close the tab. Pretty simple. - when the time comes where that link is relevant again, I’ll find it in my notes and open it. - I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upp…

> I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upper limit of focus for me.

It's clear that you do understand the value of preserving tabs that aren't immediately relevant to what you're doing. What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?

I'd understand if there weren't tree-style tabs - you can organize things better in your notes. There are tree-style tabs, though, so you can organize your tabs as you need them, and dropping into a root node is just like dropping into an old thought process.

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

#204
post #115
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…

I just looked up some benchmarks. Apparently a m1 is 2-4x faster at many tasks than my wife’s gaming desktop from 5 years ago. It’s comparable in many benchmarks to my ryzen cpu as well? What’s the catch?

You can only use one external monitor

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

#205

No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.

If you compile on the command line, modify your compiler, such as mvn.sh, to end with: ‘say “Done”’

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I believe that as developers we don't use audible feedback enough in our tooling. Imagine diagnosing your app health like you could diagnose your connection speed of a dial-up modem.

Agreed. I usually laugh at TV shows and movies that use a bunch of beeps and boops in their computer scenes.[1] But sometimes I actually want that! Like, if there was a switch I could flip to turn on audio cues every time a window's contents are updated, or new lines appear in a terminal window. And every window update would be tagged with a different sound for error, warning, info, success, etc. I know you can confi…

I make extensive use of “say”, the built-in macos program that can say out loud anything you give it.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CRTs are potentially worse. It takes the electron beam 16 ms to paint the screen. If the electron beam is halfway down the screen and you change a pixel right above where the beam just painted, you'll have to wait 16 ms before you see anything change. All CRT displays attached to computers in the last 40 years were driven from memory buffers just like LCDs, and those buffers were typically only allowed to change whil…

> CRTs are potentially worse. Video game aficionados would like to have a word with you: https://www.wired.com/story/crt-tube-tv-hot-gaming-tech-retr... To be fair, much of this is the color and shape rendering, where pixel art had been tailored for CRTs. Twitchy gamers do swear by “zero input lag” but are perhaps just nostalgic, difference is likely to be 8ms vs. 10ms: “Using the industry-standard definition of inpu…

As you said that article seemed to be more about the appearance of objects on a CRT than lag, and I kind of agree with the nostalgia crowd in that respect. But [raster] CRT lag is always going to be 16ms (worst case) and will never be better, while LCDs can in theory run much faster as technology improves.

If we shift the discussion to vector CRTs (which have no pixels) such as the one the old Tempest [0] game used, the CRT has a major advantage over an LCD and the lag can in principle be whatever the application programmer wants it to be. I miss vector games and there's really no way to duplicate their "feel" with LCDs.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game)

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

#208
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yes. This has been an ongoing problem with "sleep mode", which users think means "off", but isn't really. Some Windows docs for hardware makers indicated that "sleep mode" should stop the fans, to maintain the illusion that the machine is "off". Some machines do that, and some stick to temperature-based fan control, so the fans continue to turn if the machine is warm. Some users then complain that sleep mode does…

I bought a Lenovo P1 Gen 3 a couple of months ago and the fans spin while the machine is sleeping. I'd love to know if it's crappy thermal design from Lenovo, crappy CPUs from Intel, or Windows sleep mode being too demanding. Maybe it's all three?

It might also be naive firmware that expects the same thermal/cooling constraints when everything else is otherwise going to cool passively. Or even a design choice to actively cool so a quick wake will be in a better thermal state.

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

#209

No troll, the fan shutting off was how I knew my app had compiled and I could start debugging. With the M1, I now have to check the cpu usage history occasionally.

If you compile on the command line, modify your compiler, such as mvn.sh, to end with: ‘say “Done”’

command && say done

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

#210
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up some benchmarks. Apparently a m1 is 2-4x faster at many tasks than my wife’s gaming desktop from 5 years ago. It’s comparable in many benchmarks to my ryzen cpu as well? What’s the catch?

You can only use one external monitor

That's not too bad if you're using an ultrawide.
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