QuintinSmits.com

Just a quick test with a random Youtube HD movie I grabbed from their frontpage. The (quick and dirty) screenshots should say it all:

Safari:



Firefox:



Opera:



Why does Safari perform so badly? My regular browser is still Safari, but I'm thinking about switching to Opera on my MacBook Air, it will probably run cooler and use less power... (I haven't tested CPU usage under normal browsing conditions, but considering a LOT of pages have at least some Flash ads...)
I did however test this with multiple movies, all of them show this kind of difference in CPU usage.

My old home server is a LARGE machine with two Xeon processors, 512MB memory and an old 120GB SATA disk, I only use 16GB...
It also uses about 150 watts of power when idle, which is it most of the time... It is just massive overkill for this blog and my email.

Quite a waste! So, I decided to "upgrade" to something a little bit slower but about 10 times less hungry:

I've been seeing screenshots of people with their Dock in all kinds of colours and with a 2D Dock on the bottom of their desktop. Curious how that works?

Here's how:

Because I now have 16 logical processors, according to OSXs Activity Monitor (8 cores with Hyperthreading), I've been looking for any and all software that can make use of them. I was dissapointed to find out that almost no compression software supports more than one thread.

Until I found pbzip2!

Last week I decided to move to SSD's as my main storage on my Mac Pro.

It may not be as much as a difference on a Mac as it is on a Windows or Linux system. (OSX caches everything after it's started once..) It still is one of the most noticeable upgrades I've ever done. (also the most expensive...)

I decided 240GB of storage would be enough, to make things even faster I also decided to go for a RAID0 array of 2 SSD's.

After some searching and comparing of prices I settled on two OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD's. I also considered Intel X25-M 80GB SSD's, but the price-premium of these SSD's was too high, compared to the performance benefits.

I used two of these to make the 2.5" SSD's compatible with the drive-sleds of my Mac Pro. They work really well!

Continue reading for some stats!

Update: I was contacted by Trent from Metageek about this post!


Ever since Metageek announced the Wi-Spy I've wanted to have one. It was just too expensive at first. Then new models came out and they lowered the price of the old model to $99.
Unfortunately, the eBay sellers and Dutch stores selling the Wi-Spy don't seem to be aware of this fact, they're all selling the thing for close to $200 or even €189!
Early last week I saw an ad on eBay from someone selling a Wi-Spy for $99, including shipping.
I now finally have my Wi-Spy!

Click 'Continue reading...' to read my review.

I used to use Synergy to control multiple Macs with one keyboard and mouse.

A few days ago, I decided to try Teleport. It is Mac-only, but that is not an issue, as I'm only using Macs at the moment.

I am quite impressed! Synergy requires editing a configuration file: not very user friendly. Teleport, however, adds a preference pane to your System Preferences, from there you can share your Macs screen or request to control another macs screen. All shared Macs on your network will appear in the list, allowing you to drag them to a location relative to your screen.

The only downside I found is that you can not put a Teleport-controlled screen next to another Teleport-controlled screen. All the screens controlled by teleport need "touch" your own screen.

The only solution I've found for this is "daisy chaining" Teleport instances. My Mac Mini is controlling my "hackbook" which in turn is controlling my girlfriends iMac (when she isn't using it).
This works over a wired network, but becomes way to slow to use when some of your Macs are connected via wifi.

A few weeks ago I posted pictures of the speaker-kits I got for my birthday. Last weekend I finally painted them and hung them on the wall in our study/work/computer-room:

The sound is much better than I expected!

For those of you who are not reading LifeHacker: earlier today they posted an app that I'm already a big fan of: F.lux



It adjusts the color temperature of your screen, depending of the time of day and your location. (US-users can enter a ZIP code, others must enter their latitude)

You'll love this next time you're waking up your computer in the middle of the night! (and the "Preview..." button is very cool...)

If you need to edit any photos and want the correct color temperature you can right click the menubar icon and select "Disable for an hour":



It is also available for Windows XP/Vista.

For my birthday, my girlfriend gave me a new bluetooth headset. Read on to see some pics and read about my experiences with this headset.