soapbox

For those unfamiliar with iFixit.com, it is a pretty useful site if you ever are faced with opening up and attempting to fix an Apple product.  More excitingly, they also take a peek under the hood of every new Apple product.  After the dissection they then post step-by-step post-mortem photos and a discussion of what they found.  Good times.

First of all, note that the battery is by far the biggest internal component.

Additionally, the hard drive is protected by both a layer of hardcell foam and by a rubber bumper, similar to the iPod Classic design. I’ll not complain about mechanical data safety, but could that be a lifetime issue (increased spin-flip rate due to running hotter)?

The Intel Core 2 Duo chip is protected by an unusual thin aluminum heat sink - necessitated by the ultraslim design. The L-shaped aluminum bracket on the heat sink rests tightly against the lower case, and the inside of the lower case has a patch of non-conducting material to provide thermal dissipation without electrical conductivity.  Moral - don’t rest this on your nuts.

Nice work (as always), guys.

I unfortunately don’t have any pictures to share since my little point and shoot digital camera doesn’t have a long enough zoom, but I saw a Sharp-shinned hawk eat a little bird yesterday on a branch right outside the living room window. Took about 5-10 minutes and he ate everything and only dropped a few feathers. (onto my car)

The issue is that it’s not clear if the bird was a Sharp-shinned hawk or a Cooper’s hawk.

Cooper’s Hawk:

Sharp-shinned Hawk:

They’re pretty similar

While lots of people may think of dactyl as just being “the blog”, it actually does a wide range of things on the web.

Off the top of my head, it:
is a secure email gateway
serves individual people’s web pages
streams music to iTunes
works as a samba server to mount a network drive on your desktop for backup/etc.
works as an application server for some fancy scientific software
could serve as a true random number generator (with a little bit of work)

The issue that I’ve run into lately though is that I have my laptop that I haul back and forth to work as well as an iMac at home. Frankly, it’s kind of a pain to try to keep web browser bookmarks, iCal, and other things coordinated between the two machines. Luckily, there’s a solution! Dactyl is now a WebDAV server and can be used to synchronize all those various files.

The only issue is that configuration is a little bit tricky. I have to manually configure it for each person who wants access. As an added bonus, it also gives you a fast web-based disk that you can mount on your computer no matter where you are.

(Oh, and I just fixed some things with dactyl email if you use that.)
(Oh, and you should notice the blog running quite a bit faster because I just added some advanced caching.)