Newer laptop Mac’s by default use ‘Safe Sleep’. This means that when you put your Mac to sleep, it writes the contents of RAM out to the hibernation file before going to sleep. This means that if it completely runs out of power (or you remove the battery to swap it) you wont lose your work, because it will automatically have gone into hibernation.

However, this takes time, particularly if you have a large amount of RAM, and during this time the hard drive is still spinning - and writing data. If you want your Mac to go to sleep straight away and don’t care about losing the ’safe’-ness of your sleep mode, you can change your hibernation mode using this terminal command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Before doing this, you might want to check what your current hibernation mode is:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

By default it will either be 3 (Safe Sleep) or 7 (Safe Sleep if you have secure virtual memory enabled).

Now your Mac should go to sleep much quicker.

This information is strictly for sharing applications you have a right to share - for example between multiple iPhones and computers that you own, and educational purposes only.

I discovered today through experimentation that it is possible to share applications you have purchased on different accounts, onto one or many iPhones, using the iTunes ‘Authorize Computer’ feature, even if applications are no longer available for purchase.

ffmpeg is a collection of components that makes the backend for a lot of GUI media convertors. If you’re a fan of the command line, you can do quick and easy video conversion from just about any video format to just about any other video format. For example, you can convert a video to a format suitable for an iPod Touch or iPhone using this command:

ffmpeg -i source_video.avi -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 900kb -mbd 2 -flags \
+4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320x180 -title Title output_video.mp4

If you wanted to, it would be fairly easy to make this into an alias or a bash script so you don’t have to remember it all. Maybe I will at some point and update this post, for now I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Using this command, I transcoded a 42 minute XviD video in just 12 minutes on a 2.2Ghz Athlon (and just using one core, I’m not sure if ffmpeg supports multicore encoding). And the quality was more than good enough, though you can increase the quality by simply increasing the number after the -b (bitrate).

Discover more quick ffmpeg commands

Since getting my iPhone 3G I’ve bought and installed two games: Wurdle, and Asphalt 4 Elite Racing. They are at extreme ends of the gaming spectrum; Wurdle is a very casual 5 minute game, whereas Asphalt 4 is targeted at more serious gaming (IGN say it’s a must have for any serious gamer). I thought I’d give my opinions on both, and also discuss how the iPhone fits in the handheld gaming market in my opinion.

For it’s first test, my new iPhone 3G was to accompany me on a 5 hour (in total) train journey from where I live to where my girlfriend Elysium lives, involving three different trains. It was a good test of signal, GPS, and it’s ability to help me pass the time and still be a useful phone to text saying where I was and so on.

I am now a proud owner of a black 8GB iPhone 3G. I’ve been using it for a few days, and so decided to give my first impressions.

I was spurred on to get an iPhone 3G as an upgrade from my Nokia N73 after being exposed to the RDF by x5315 - in the form of his iPhone 2G and Apple’s conference about the iPhone 3G. Also, I was kinda bored with Nokia’s offerings; don’t get me wrong, I loved my N73, but they seem to do the same thing all the time, and I wanted a decent Internet platform - because all my previous phones weren’t that great for browsing the Internet etc. and were also on contracts with no inclusive browsing. I found myself often thinking ‘if only I had the Internet on my phone’ when I wanted to randomly look something up, or for something to do on a train, or to check my email on the move. I also really didn’t like the offerings from HTC, my Dad recently got a TyTyn II and I didn’t like the user environment at all. I needed something that worked really well as a phone (particularly for texting), as well as a great Internet platform.