In Detroit

First time in Detroit, the so called the motown or the motor capital of the world (US?). I am here for a week long workshop in Ann Arbor. The flight was not bad. I flew with KLM from London to Amsterdam and then with NWA. Movie-on-demand for economy class, good food but not-so-friendly cabin crew. After arrival, we headed to a National car rental 'farm' and picked up a chevy malibu.

Damn this jet lag. Its 5am and I can't sleep and am hungry. Its all very quiet and am doing some casual browsing when I notice the regular 'click clunk' noises from my powerbook's hard drive. Afraid of loosing my hard drive, I did some googling and discovered to my comfort that this is quite normal on powerbooks (and also other laptops). The culprit for these annoying noises is the Advanced Power Management (APM). To save power, the hard disk heads are parked very often. Infact even between keystrokes and also while the system is idling. The solution for this is an APM Tuner. For G4s, Mr. Eiji Maekawa’s APM Tuner has been much appreciated. After installing it and setting a value to its max, the hard disk became much quieter. However, doing so is not recommened when running on battery power and it needs to be set everytime the system reboots.

More info on APM
http://www.macopinion.com/columns/roadwarrior/02/07/30/
http://www.ehmac.ca/showthread.php?p=208929

Mr. Eiji Maekawa's APM Tuner is no longer available at the original website. The one below is for MAC OS X. Find it here:
http://freespace.kb-hosting.de/smat...ner_X_1_0a2.zip. give the Readme files in the package a good read before starting anything.