Screenshots of Snow Leopard\’s User Interface tweaks

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Designer and photographer Michael \’Flux\’ Chang has posted a wide range of Snow Leopard screenshots on his blog. The images detail a number a number of interface tweaks, including changes to the stacks in grid view, symbol substitutions, keyboard shortcuts and the voiceover utility. Apple has also provided new options in the MIDI setup, while enhancing the controls for movie playback.

(View the rest of the article at MacNN | Screenshots detail Snow Leopard interface tweaks)

Switch Power Management Plans With a Shortcut

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Have you ever wanted to quickly switch from High Performance to Power Saver mode to save some battery life? With a quick command line in a shortcut, you can do it with a keystroke.
Here\’s a quick-and-dirty method to create a shortcut for switching between Windows power management plans—and once you have the command line, you can make a shortcut (for on the Desktop) or assign a hotkey to switch on the fly. Simply create a shortcut to the following, substituting the name of the power management plan.

powercfg /setactive \'Plan Name Here\'

Once you have tested the command line… the sky is the limit.
You could make a windows shortcut with the command line, or use other tools to create a hotkey that will activate the different power modes….

Laptop fan running constantly? Check this first…

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Typically Mac OS X is configured to set the default printer to the last printer you just used…  But that\’s not always correct…
In some cases, people with laptops have attempted to use a printer that isn\’t available, and that has caused the laptop\’s fan to run constantly, since Mac OS X is attempting to retry to a printer that is no longer available.  For example, a work printer that is not available from home…
So, if your machine is running the fan alot, check your printer queues, to see if you have orphan print jobs…  Open System Preferences, go to Print & fax, and see if there are any print jobs stuck in the queues….

Air France 447 – A detailed meteorological analysis – Satellite and weather data

Benjamin SchollnickNo Comments

Here is some information from Tim Vasquez, regarding Air France 447…

Air France flight 447 (AF447), an Airbus A330 widebody jet, was reported missing in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean in the early morning hours of June 1, 2009. The plane was enroute from Rio de Janeiro (SBGL) to Paris (LFPG). Speculation suggested that the plane may have flown into a thunderstorm. The objective of this study was to isolate the aircraft\’s location against high-resolution satellite images from GOES-10 to identify any association with thunderstorm activity. Breakup of a plane at higher altitudes in a thunderstorm is not unprecedented; Northwest Flight 705 in 1963 and more recently Pulkovo Aviation Flight 612 in 2006 are clear examples.

I did flight route forecasting for the Air Force in the 1990s. One of my assignments in summer 1994 was forecasting the sector between Mombasa, Kenya and Cairo, Egypt for C-5 and C-141 aircraft. The Sudan region had tropical MCS activity similar to this with little in the way of sensor data, so this incident holds some special interest for me as one of our C-5s could easily have followed a very similar fate.

Air France 447 – AFR447 – A detailed meteorological analysis – Satellite and weather data.