»In which we cook eggs

After the second rev of the PowerBook arrived, I found my legs burning from the searing heat dissipated along the body of the laptop. Now with the MacBook Pro, the heat is even more intense, but Marcel Bresink has released a Universal binary of the OSX Temperature Monitor, a fantastic piece of software that reads the hardware monitors to report on CPU and hard-drive temperature. The configuration and ease-of-use are tremendous, and the app as a whole is very OSX-er-iffic. It offers dynamic reports in the menu bar, in the dock, as a dashboard widget, and in its own application pane. So far I have recorded temperatures as high as 82º, mostly while compiling. Over-night, while idle, the CPU temperature will drop down to the teens.

Another mac tip: To eject a stuck disc from a PowerBook or MacBook Pro, try $ drutil eject.