The Warne Account

The personal blog of Dan Warne, Australian tech journalist

Archive for category Apple

HOW TO: Fix Bluetooth A2DP audio quality on Mac OS X

Jul 29

Posted by danwarne in Apple, Mac, Mobile tech | View Comments

If you've paired a Bluetooth audio device with your Mac, even if it supports A2DP, you might have noticed how awful and rough the sound quality is. I've always put this down to Bluetooth being a rubbish standard when it comes to sound, but I noticed how good a set of Motorokr Bluetooth headphones sounded when I connected them to my Blackberry tonight, even though they sound awful on the Mac.

Turns out that OS X uses a horribly low bit rate for Bluetooth audio by default — who knows why. Perhaps it's to allow for maximum compatibility with all devices.

The easy way to fix it is to copy and paste this line into your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 40

The "40" is the quality — depending on your Bluetooth headset, you can adjust it up for higher quality, or down if you have connection problems. 40 worked for me with a Motorokr S9 headset.

HOW TO: set disk spindown time for hard drives in a Mac

Jun 18

Posted by danwarne in Apple, Mac, Technology | View Comments

I've recently installed an MCE Optibay with 750GB WD HDD into my new MacBook Pro, alongside the 512GB SSD I got from Apple, providing me with a beautiful 1.25TB of total storage in a slim MacBook Pro. (The MCE Optibay replaces the optical drive in the MacBook Pro, allowing you to install a second 2.5" hard drive of your choice securely in its place.)

I'm planning to use the 750GB Optibay drive for storing music and video files, since they don't need high performance, and the drive can be allowed to spin down when I'm not listening to music or watching videos, which seems like an ideal arrangement from a power efficiency perspective.

However, by default OS X seems to take about 10 minutes to spin down the drive after it was last accessed. I found a great tip on MacOSXHints.com which describes how to set the system spindown time — you just open up a Terminal shell and type:

sudo pmset -a spindown 1

(where 1 is 1 minute; 0 disables entirely).

So now, my Optibay drive spins down one minute after it was last used — perfect! (Especially good since my MBP is near-silent with the SSD just in use, thanks to Apple's really quiet fans when running at their default 2000rpm, and the WD hard drive in the Optibay is actually quite noisy — it's an audial relief when it spins down!)

The same tip above can be used to disable spindown if you don't want it to happen.

The only thing I'm wondering is what effect a spindown has on an SSD, if any. The value set using this tip is system-wide, affecting all hard drives, so if a spindown did happen to put the SSD into some sort of powersaving mode that might not be ideal, however, I haven't noticed anything yet.

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Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

May 1

Posted by danwarne in Apple, Firefox, Software | View Comments

One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on Mac OS X is the way it spawns a second dock icon for itself after it applies any sort of update to itself (including plugin updates).

Here's a screenshot of the offender in action (I removed some icons from the middle of the dock to make it easier to see:

dock problem Why do I get a second Firefox dock icon?

For those of you who might assume I am a moron, no, I don't have two copies of Firefox, and no, I am not running one copy of Firefox from a DMG or anything like that.

Nobody on the web seems to have found a solution for it yet — as far as I can tell from Googling. There are several bugs on Mozilla's Bugzilla system related to it, and the main one seems to be bug 432520, which is unfortunately not yet assigned to a developer for resolution.

One of the big problems has been that nobody's been able to define a clear set of steps to reproduce the problem. I believe the second dock icon appears after Firefox auto-updates an extension at startup time, and then silently restarts itself to allow the extension update to take effect. However, it's difficult to test because the hypothesis requires an updated extension to be available — which only happens every now-and-again.

Anyone else got ideas?

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