Apple | Appleaddiction

Solar Charger for your iPad 1 & 2

By Luke On Sep 14, 2011 Apple | Gadgets | iPad | iPhone/iPod 0 No Comments

The SunLeaf Pro is an iPad Solar Charger. We tested it out on an iPad 2. It brought our dead unit to 80% in just under 6 hours. That’s the better part of the day, but if you are miles away from any power outlets, it’s a small price to pay.

There are six inter-linked solar panels that provide up to 15 Watts on a sunny day. The included voltage regulator converts the 15v down to 5v for USB charging. The SunLeaf is capable of charging any device which charges via USB, not just the iPad.

Thinking about picking one up? Use coupon “promoaa” for $20 off.

Supercharged Mac Pro. An 8-core 3.3GHz mod.

By Luke On Aug 7, 2011 Apple 0 No Comments Tags: Intel, MacPro, XEON 5350

Dual quad-core Intel 5350′s clocked @ 3.3 Ghz is a recipe for lots of power and lots of heat! If you are interested in turning your Mac Pro into a power hungry unstoppable beast, read along. If using a conductive pen on CPU pins is to much for you, you may want to skip this mod.

From the OWC Blog.

“So I swapped my new 5350ʼs for the 5160ʼs and finished the project.

The End

Boy, I wish I could say that…

You know that story Jerry Clower tells about coon hunting, and his friend John is stuck up in the tree doing battle with a lynx? I think I know how John felt now.

So because Iʼm a masochistic retard, I went ahead with the BSEL mod. Over and over I tried, but it just wouldnʼt work. It would chime (POST) but immediately choke like Cass Elliot on a ham sandwich.

Google, Google, Google.

Read, Read, Read.

You see, to get a 5350 to run at 3.3 Ghz you gotta do the volt mod too.

Wait? Whu’d he say”

A whut mod an a whut mod?”

Continue reading the full story here.

Mac Mini overhauled. Better GPU + CPU, no more optical drive!

By Luke On Jul 20, 2011 Apple 0 No Comments

What’s hot, What’s not with Apple’s new Mac Mini.

Hot: New AMD Radeon 6630m with 256MB of GDDR5 memory. ($799 model only)

Not Hot: No more optical drive! This is probably okay, seeing as you can pick up an external DVD burner for under $40 online. Besides, we would have wanted Blu-Ray drives anyways, and we all know that isn’t happening.

Hot: Apple’s new Thunderbolt tech is available in both models. That’s 10Gbps. Real life speeds are expected to be around 700MB/s

Not Hot: The difference in tech doesn’t justify a $200 pricing gap. $100 would have been the sweet spot. $499 and $699 would have been reasonable, seeing as Apple just posted $30B in profits in Q3.

~~Hot~~ Luke-warm: Comes preloaded with OS X Lion!

With the removal of the optical drive I would have expected some sort of price drop. Like I said earlier, I believe $499 and $699 would have made more sense.

Looking to pick up a quad-core Mini. Take a look at the new Mini Server!

The iPad 3 and the Future of Mobile Graphics

By Luke On Jul 12, 2011 Apple | Gadgets | Hardware 0 No Comments

With consumer desktop CPU’s reaching 8-cores per CPU, we can expect to see similar tech find it’s way into our upcoming tablets and mobile CPUs. Playstation’s Vita for example features a mobile GPU with 4 cores! It’s called the SGX543MP4. It’s little brother, the the SGX543MP2 is a dual-core variant and it is at work in Apple’s iPad 2.

In OpenGL benchmark tests (3D Graphics and User Interface) the iPad 2 is 4x faster then the original iPad and 3x faster then the Motorola Xoom. 1.

SGX543MP2 – 2 cores -iPad2 – 67M polygons – 2Gpixels/sec @200MHz
SGX543MP4 -4 cores- PS Vita- 134M polygons – 4Gpixels/sec @200 MHz

The PS Vita as mentioned early has a 4-core GPU and a 4-core CPU. That’s double the power in half the size of an iPad 2. It’s only logical assume that Apple’s next iPad will be at the very minimum 4x faster than it’s predecessor. I don’t think it is out of the question to expect a 4, or possibly even 8-core A6 chip in the iPad 3.

10.7 Lion, Coming in July. $29 – Download Only

By Luke On Jun 6, 2011 Apple 0 No Comments Tags: 10.5, Lion, OS X

Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote just wrapped up and we heard some good news. Steve Jobs said that OS X Lion will be available this July, and it will only cost $29! No extra costs for physical distribution or media means apple can let it go for much less.

4 Great New Features in OS X Lion:

AirDrop – With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can send files to anyone around you — wirelessly. AirDrop doesn’t require setup or special settings. Just click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, and your Mac automatically discovers other people nearby who are using AirDrop
Resume – Whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it. So you never have to start from scratch again.
Mission Control – Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive look at what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything
Mail 5 – Demo’d in the recent Keynote, Apple’s Mail 5 has a beautifully updated user interface with some exiting new features like threaded messaging.

Check out all of the sweet new features here.

FireFox 5 now available for PowerPC Macs!

By Luke On Jun 6, 2011 Apple 0 No Comments Tags: Firefox, PPC

FireFox 5 brings some cool features to the table. Specifically CSS animations. Although only available for Intel Macs through Mozzila, The TenFourFox team has already ported us a PowerPC version.

You can learn even more about the awesome features that TenFourFox features by following the link below.

TenFourFox Five is available here.

Apple removes DIY upgrades of 2011 iMac Hard drives

By Luke On May 12, 2011 Apple | Hacks/Mods | Hardware 0 No Comments

Sad news for Apple fans everywhere as Apple has now introduced a proprietary connector for SATA drives in it’s new lineup of 2011 iMacs.

“For the main 3.5″ SATA hard drive bay in the new 2011 machines, Apple has altered the SATA power connector itself from a standard 4-pin power configuration to a 7-pin configuration. Hard drive temperature control is regulated by a combination of this cable and Apple proprietary firmware on the hard drive itself. From our testing, we’ve found that removing this drive from the system, or even from that bay itself, causes the machine’s hard drive fans to spin at maximum speed and replacing the drive with any non-Apple original drive will result in the iMac failing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT).” - OWC Blog

Here’s to hoping a remedy is just around the corner.

You can still play WOW on your PowerPC Mac

By Luke On Apr 23, 2011 Apple | Software/Freeware 0 No Comments Tags: Warcraft

But you’re gonna have to leave your friends and guild behind (or convince them to move to a free server) Here’s How You Do It:

Visit xtremetop100.com/world-of-warcraft and sign up for any server that supports 3.3.5 (Almost every server does)
If you have already patched your current version of WOW to 4.0 from 3.3.5, you will have to reinstall.
Go to wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors. Using the links provided, download and patch your WOW install all the way to 3.3.5
Before you log in you must first patch your realmlist.wtf file, so you log onto the private server and not Blizzards. To do this navigate to Applications ->World of Warcraft->Data->enUS->realmlist.wtf. Open with text edit and replace the first line with the serer address provided by the private server. Save the file.
You can now log in and play WOW on your PowerPC.

If you are having trouble I would be happy to help you out. Just leave a post below in the comments.

OS X menubar apps.

By Luke On Apr 19, 2011 Apple | Software/Freeware 0 No Comments Tags: menubar

Some of the best apps , are the smallest apps. Here is a list of my favorite OS X menubar apps.

F.lux – It makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. (You need to try it to get the full effect)
MenuMeters – A set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools, nestled away in your menubar
CalendarBar – Supports Facebook, iCal, and Google Calendar so you can keep track of all your events with ease

Shown but not mentioned is the menubar icon for Dropbox.

Final Cut Pro X: Best new features

By Luke On Apr 18, 2011 Apple | Software/Freeware 0 No Comments Tags: Final Cut Pro X

Apple’s pro video and film editing app is finally getting a fully Cocoa-fied, 64-bit rewrite, including a UI overhaul and underlying support for full background rendering.

The rewritten app takes full advantage of underlying Mac OS X technologies introduced in Snow Leopard, including OpenCL, GCD, Quicktime X, and Core Animation, to deliver background rendering. Final Cut Pro X can now natively handle up to 4K resolutions as well as the ability to automatically scale CPU-intensive tasks to fully utilize multicore processors and offload certain tasks to available GPUs.

Available June, $299

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