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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

#371
post #277
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the cooling solution the temperature can drop like a brick. On my desktop I can go 75deg to dead silent in about three seconds.

And laptop heatsinks have less thermal mass

A copper MacBook when? Would be also nice for the anti bacterial properties.

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

#372
I love apps like this that sonify different data about your computer and your usage. I wrote something similar for Windows. It lets you listen to the different parameters like CPU usage, disk usage and RAM usage in realtime.[0] [0] https://www.iamtalon.me/charm

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

#373
post #336

Funny. I spent a summer in 2009 in Vietnam, working on one of those old unbeatable Powerbook silver models, in an apartment without air conditioning. The fan would run at full power constantly, and finally gave up the ghost. There was no way to repair it where I was. So what I used to do was keep a bunch of Wired Magazines in the freezer, and put them under the laptop, changing them out every 20 minutes or so. The ma…

SE Asian humidity was brutal on those older Intel-based MBPs. Even with A/C, it's still so damned hot and humid that you don't have to push the rig too hard before the fans start spinning. And heat is the enemy of Li-ion batteries.

The humidity in the region was also a problem for earlier iPhones, the indicator stickers used to check if the phone had been dropped in water could change colour just from the ambient humidity https://www.cultofmac.com/13571/the-tropics-may-be-too-humid...

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

#374
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…

There is actually one reason to do a software development on a laptop: if I don't have a good enough place for work. Laptop is essentially a set of compromises: between computing power and battery life, between screen size and weight, between sense of pressing keys and thikness, between using mouse and forgetting to take one on the go.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol 30 tabs is a lot? I'm running 32 gb ram on windows i7-6700 3.4 ghz on mini ATX and currently have 883 tabs open, using marvelous suspender and few other tweaks, but still have 95 windows opens (1 tab typically alive in each window minimum excluding my suspension blacklist...). Also have photoshop, notion, and a few other apps going and am running smoothly at 40-70% cpu utilization and 85% memory...

> using marvelous suspender Did you even read my comment?

GP does say that the amount of tabs actually running still exceeds the number quoted by GGP

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

#376

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…

> "Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute."

Open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the memory pressure graph, as well as checking for individual apps that are running away with huge amounts of memory. Also, make sure your SSD isn't too full, as pressure on the NVM will reduce swap performance!

M1 Macs certainly seem to "do more with less" than Intel Macs, but as another poster said, they're not magic. Paging in and out vast amounts of swap will still eventually cause performance issues.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"suddenly" was because that's when they started existing in noticeable numbers.

No, it's because vehicles before then were not required to meet minimum sound requirements by law. Check the spec sheets of HEV/PHEV/EV vehicles made before then -- they don't have acoustic alerting systems. Now they all do (in the jurisdictions that require it).

The law didn’t exist until there were enough electric cars to care about this. The cause and effect starts with the number of quiet cars.

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

#378

The M1 line up seems great but... I'm very surprised by all the comments from people discovering what a quiet computer is like in 2021. I've been running PCs so quiet they're inaudible since, what, nearly two decades now!? (since basically the first consumer SSDs started hitting the market: don't remember when that was but it was a long time ago) An ultra quiet PSU, a gigantic CPU heatsink, a huge CPU fan running so…

Computers like the "HUAWEI MateBook X" are fanless with a powerful CPU (10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-10210U Processor, 1.6 GHz 4 cores, Turbo up to 4.2 GHz). https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-2020/specs... I have used also a Surface Pro for a long time, and not being modern as this new Apple laptop, it is a full-fledged Windows 10 machine that can run any programming IDE, virtual machines, etc. and comple…

> the "HUAWEI MateBook X" are fanless with a powerful CPU

Please note that a MateBook with a i5-10210U gets around 1100/2500 in GeekBench while the also fanless M1 Air gets 1700/7400.

Silent computers are nothing new under the sun, but silent ultraportable laptops as powerful as some people's desktops haven't been around until last year.

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

#380
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I'm looking for a better remote access solution so I can consider sticking with a desktop at home and then maybe just an iPad for travel with good remote access and file sync. This is my solution. I don't really need to do any file syncing as rsync or scp works fine for my purposes. It has been a fantastic dev experience. I remote in, bring up my last tmux session and pick up exactly where I left off, regardles…

Can you tell me more about your setup? What apps do you use on your iPad for remote access? Is it just remote shell or do you do Remote Desktop too? What do you use for Remote Desktop?

Not the original poster but I use my iPad Air for a similar setup. Development environment runs under Docker Compose/WSL2 on my desktop, which I can start/stop using Chrome remote desktop. I've got code server and portainer in that compose file which are accessible from my iPad using tailscale, it makes for a passable development environment if I want/need to work away from the desktop for whatever reason
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