The bad thing is, despite having a W8215 MacBook Pro, it seems to exhibit every single noise problem discussed. It moos, whines, and buzzes! It also happens to have one of those misshapen function keys. I’m disappointed in the sense that I just dropped $3,000 on this (about the same price as a similarly configured Thinkpad [2.16GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 100GB 7200RMP drive]).

On the other hand, I can’t stay mad – this thing flies. It loads the Firefox 1.5.0.2 (Universal build) in one bounce. That’s with SessionSaver, Firebug, the Web Developer Toolbar, SwitchProxy, Adblock Plus and Filterset.G Updater installed. This is the first Mac portable I’ve had that’s had teh snappy going on. (Look at it beat a Dual G5 in FCP; I can’t wait to import some HD footage and see how it handles)

The MagicNoiseKiller gets rid of the whine, so I’ll have to see if I can stay sane with the rest of the rattles. If I can’t deal after a week, I guess I’ll have to keep doing the swap and dance, although I have a feeling that these issues probably won’t be solved until the next major rev…

Yes, my Mozilla leaks memory like a sieve on my Powerbook, but I’ve really been pretty spoiled by using Macs. I just put together a new gaming rig, which yes, is quite zippy, but also seems to have weird funky things, like oh, network data corruption. Apparently, using Nvidia’s network and IDE drivers are bad news for system stability and uncorrupt data (oops!).

Source	MD5
Mac (uncorrupt)	9c0b53c07f2e02fbfcbf46a1264a402a
Firefox on Nvidia	2bd3033e581d816e22011e26d5bffa1a
IE on Nvidia	c801b2b558209fb1197318c90eed0f6a
wget on Nvidia	3358c3f7b06f06e287eade0bf26639fd
Firefox on Marvell	9c0b53c07f2e02fbfcbf46a1264a402a

The Marvell LAN port appears unaffected since it doesn’t use the Nvidia firewall (which corrupts downloads even when turned off. Also, the Nvidia tools load a local version of Apache, which wastes around 15MB of memory…)

One of my goals this year was to get myself secure (network-wise) for SXSW w/o having to using the corporate firewall. This is useful for a number of reasons:

• Less brittle connections
• No worries about connections while the firewall is down – this is an issue w/ auto-connecting applications like Adium/iChat
• The ability to participate in Rendezvous/other local networks while being secure

So, it turns out that on OS X, this is trivial.

SSH comes built w/ a built in SOCKS server. Just SSH as so:

ssh -D 1080 user@example.com

And then set up your SOCKS Proxy to localhost:1080 in System Preferences -> Network Preferences -> Airport -> Proxies.

Go into each application (Safari, Adium, and iChat all support using the System SOCKS proxy setting. w/ Firefox you just enter localhost:1080 again) and you’re all set. (I have my email, IMAP/SMTP using SSL/TLS already, otherwise you’d want to look into proxying that as well. That, you can also just use a straight SSH tunnel)

You can use manually SSH to create the connection, or if you’re lazy like me, you can use the SSH Tunnel Manager for one-click action (you have your authorized keys set up (alternate guide) already, right?

To double check that everything’s hunk-dory, cut off ssh and watch all your connections fail. Or run netstat in your terminal and make sure all your connections are localhost.socks (except your SSH ones of course).