The Warne Account

The personal blog of Dan Warne, Australian geek and tech writer

Archive for category Technology

Dual TomTom & iPhone charger – the options

Sep 5

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple, Technology, Travel | No Comments

TomToms are tricky little suckers to get third-party USB chargers for, because they use an unusually high amount of power. While most USB car chargers put out a maximum of 0.5A, TomToms need 1.2A – 2A depending on the model.

If you want to charge your iPhone and TomTom at once, the choices are slim; you can:

- buy one of these dual cigarette lighter adaptors from Dick Smith and plug in two chargers at once…

P1691LGE Dual TomTom & iPhone charger the options

- install a car stereo that has an iPod cord and charge your iPhone off that, and use your cigarette lighter jack for the TomTom charger
- manually swap between the chargers…!

Now Scosche in the US has released a $US24.99 dual USB car charger with one port that puts out 2.1A and another port that puts out 1A. The former is perfect for TomTom and the latter for iPhones or most other USB devices.

Its marketing name is Scosche ReVIVE II, but confusingly there is another product called ReVIVE II that only puts out 2 x 1A — so you are better off searching for it using the product code Scosche USBC3.

scosche usbc3 revive II Dual TomTom & iPhone charger the options

Only trouble is that they're currently out of stock on Scosche's website. Scosche reckons they were in stock as recently as 10th August — so they must have sold out quickly. They are, however, in stock at Amazon.com, if you use a US buying agent such as PriceUSA.com.au.

The WORST argument in support of internet filtering

Jul 9

Posted by Dan Warne in Politics, Technology | No Comments

There are many arguments that Senator Conroy has pulled out in support of implementing nationwide internet censorship on every Australian's internet connection — all of them bad. But the WORST, in my opinion, is that the previous government's "NetAlert" program, which provided government-funded PC software which filtered a home internet connection, was an abject failure due to low take-up.

In the last week or so I've noticed active participation in online forums with clearly pro-Conroy comments (such as one from "BTDT", who I assume works for DBCDE in some capacity, but doesn't declare it.) He makes the argument above.

The thing is, NetAlert was only an abject failure if your measure of success is widespread implementation of filtering onto people's internet connections.

Why assume this is what the public wants? The NetAlert program was extensively marketed at a cost of millions of dollars to the government, with mailouts to every household in Australia, and so on. The fact that takeup was low doesn't mean the program was a failure — it simply indicates that only a very tiny minority of people want their home internet connections filtered. Which is still the case now, given opposition to the government's planned mandatory internet filter by literally everyone except christian lobby groups. I'm yet to hear from anyone who's not affiliated with a christian lobby group who is in favour of the plan.

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

Jun 18

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple, Mac, Technology | 3 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.

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

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