In case anyone else has had this problem, that was driving me nuts: seems that Macbook Airs have a serious overheating issue that causes the CPU to max out and disable.

The problem happens with CPU intensive applications like Video or Flash. In other words, ordinary web browsing can be difficult. Not all MacBook Airs seem to have the flaw, but a large number do (it may be to do with excessive thermal grease being factory applied to some, which messes up the airflow).

The solution is to throttle the maximum temperature at which your Air will run at 1600 MHz and to run the chip at a lower voltage (which reduces stability). This requires a $10 app called coolbook: downloadable here and using settings here.

Perhaps this causes warranty problems, and you may be asking yourself 1. why can’t Apple sort this out and 2. why do I have to do something like this anyhow, isn’t this a major design problem.

As regards 1, it looks like Apple don’t have a solution yet, so you will just end up wasting hours and hours dealing with them.

2. The Air is clearly a new and innovative machine. First generation, innovative design has a much higher chance of problems. This is why the Hubble runs a 386 Chip. When I was an architect, I worked for what is arguably the worlds most famous practice and at that time almost every building they had designed resulted in a law suit because the roof leaked. You would think that being able to design a building with a non-leaking roof would be a minimum level of competence required of an architect, but that misses the point. The architect was fully capable of designing an ordinary building with a non-leaky roof, but a truly innovative building increased the chances of problems.

Apple is capable of designing a computer that doesn’t overheat, but a laptop that fits in an envelope has increased the chance of problems. Of course, its a bit galling to be throttling your MacBook Air at a time when overclocking a MacBook Pro is making headlines.

No idea of the source of this. Perhaps its some kind of Apple ad making fun of the PC guy, more likely a Stephen Colbert spoof Someone from an ad agency or production company was on the phone, in our lobby, talking about an Air ad and it sounded pretty amusing:

“…so we were going to run the ad, Stephen wanted us to run the ad where he takes a MacBook air out of a manila envelope, writes an email on it, puts it back in the envelope and mails the Air to the email recipient - because thats how he thinks email works on the Air.”

Intravenous tea, Radio 4 and doctors calling themselves Mister again, when becoming surgeons, are the lifeblood of a particularly understated and delicate cultural facet that, along with aggressive guitar music and appropriate use of swearwords like cunt, are the things that I miss about the UK.

Even when I worked in an office designing rock concert sets for bands like the Rolling Stones, all we actually listened to all day was the calming sound of BBC Radio 4.

My favorite show was Loose Ends, presented by Ned Sherrin. He died Sunday. Bugger.

Ned Sherrin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OObject the latest Wists site launches today.

Oobject is a gadget blog, but with a difference. Instead of posts, there are ‘charts’ constantly updated image galleries with the best items in each category, voted on by users. As usual, the focus is or quirky, unusual or well designed lists of things.

OObject is a bit like Billboard charts for gadgets.

OObject is a major leap forward in terms of the way our sites work as it completely couples the wists publishing system into a customized version of Wordpress, and uses the new editorial back-end of wists for management.

According to the Global House Prices blog: “At the peak of the Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California”.

Looking at the graph of US and Japanese Real estate prices is sobering, the US one is like a ski slope and the Japanese one, a mountain.

But none of this seems to make sense to us Brits. Housing in America still seems cheap, by UK standards, even in New York. Consider that the average house price across the whole of the UK, not just the expensive bits, is over $400,000.

The fact that I could barely afford to buy back the building that I bought in my 20s, despite having earned much more than most, since, means that something is fundamentally out of whack in the UK and by an order of magnitude that is much larger than in the US.

And it’s not just housing. When I was last there I bought a glass of wine in a pub in a smallish town several hours drive from London. It was $17. A drink in a five star hotel in the center of Manhattan is cheaper.

Yet despite this, when I go back to the UK, this is what I hear “house prices may stop rising, but they’ll flatten out, they never go down”. Then I get a lecture about how stupid I was to have sold.

People in the US are waking up, while those in the UK are deluded.

Global House Prices: Housing Bubble Facts and Figures

Wists users continue to rise, and monthly uniques are around the 350K mark, but our Alexa is dropping and deliberately so.

The reason is that we have decided to ruthlessly cull spam users, which account for a large number on many social shopping sites and social networks.

Social network spam doesn’t tend to be that visible since the items on front pages and showcased category links (top items etc.) of many social websites are hand picked by editors or users. But do a search for high value Adsense terms within many user generated sites and you will see that the automated publishing tools have blasted them, creating useless ballast that companies are reluctant to get rid of since it generates organic search engine traffic, and makes the numbers look good.

Since the type of spam we get is SEO spam and a greater percentage of these people use Alexa toolbars , this is a risky thing to do for your ‘industry’ image, since it lowers your numbers - but we think it is the right thing to do in the long term, since it obviously makes a better product for users.

Social shopping is extremely prone to spam, for obvious commercial reasons, do a search for Viagra on Kaboodle, for example, and ponder as to how many of those users that Hearst just bought are useful. Of course I shouldn’t single out Kaboodle, they deserve congratulations on their acquisition and their technology is very solid, but they show the considerable pressure these days shared by many Internet startups to quote raw numbers and eyeballs, which sometimes obscures true, long-term value.

After the dot-com crash, the somewhat obnoxious phrase ‘eye-balls’ seemed to disappear. It’s back, but with Wists we are ultimately only interested in what people see, not how many people are looking.

Wists

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