The folks over at MacStories noticed their 2008 Macbook Pro getting a bit drowsy when they let their iPad get too close (see video below). What seems to be happening is placing the iPad over the lower right hand rest area of the Macbook Pro makes it to go to sleep. Repeating the procedure then wakes it up. Odd indeed, but explainable.

It’s seems to be a magnetic switch that activating to put the Macbook Pro to sleep when the lid is closed. If you take a paper clip and place it about 1/3 of the way down the right edge of the Macbook Pro screen it will stick to it. There are also a bunch of magnets along the top edge of the screen, but those appear to be there just to hold the Macbook Pro lid shut when it’s closed.

The sleep switch also seems to be magnetic and about the same distance down along the right edge of the Macbook Pro top case just behind the right speaker grill. It does appear to be a little further in, more toward the keyboard so I assume it gets pulled out to the edge when you close the lid activating the switch. Now the key to triggering it with the iPad is to place the back of the iPad, specifically the area just under the iPad speaker holes, over that section of the Macbook Pro. Viola! The Macbook Pro should go to sleep. I believe it’s the magnets in the iPad speakers that act like the magnets in the Macbook Pro lid and cause the Macbook Pro to think you shut just the lid effectively putting it to sleep. No mystery, no magical forces, just science.

Maccast listener Connor really deserves the credit for discovering this quirk. He emailed me about 3 weeks ago to say he was seeing this behaviour when he got an iPhone 3GS near that part of a 15″ Macbook Pro. At the time I couldn’t repeat the behaviour, but I was able to confirm this with my 15″ Macbook Pro and my 32GB Wi-Fi iPad.

Electronista has a post reporting that Adobe has a new Flash preview release dubbed “Gala” (10.1.81.3). With the arrival of “Gala” Adobe has added support for H.264 video hardware decoding on Macs with OS X 10.6.3 and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M graphics chips. Since I own a 15″ unibody Macbook Pro with an NVIDIA 9400M I decided to see how much of a performance difference the new Flash build might offer. For my testing I didn’t use any traditional benchmarking suite, so please take the results accordingly. I do think my tests should represent a “real world” type scenario. Basically, I played back a 720p HD video from YouTube and monitored the resulting Flash Player Plug-in CPU load in Activity Monitor. I found that when running the test on the latest “non-Gala” version of Flash the CPU load on my 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM went up to about 90% CPU utilization. Also the fans on my Macbook kicked in about halfway through the video which runs about 4:30.

When I ran the same video after installing the “Gala” build of Flash I saw a significant drop in CPU usage. The CPU load hovered between 30 and 40%, roughly about a 50 to 60% decrease in load. I also didn’t have my fans kick in.

With “Gala”, you can tell when the Flash hardware decoding has kicked in by the appearance of a small white square in the corner of the video. Adobe says that in addition to improved playback of H.264 video the hardware enhanced version of Flash should also result in improved battery life. Might be welcome benefit for long Hulu video watching sessions when away from a power outlet.

To be fair I also switch YouTube over to the HTML 5 beta and tested the same video at 720p. Again in my very non-scientific benchmark test I noted that Safari’s CPU load went up to about 20% with the video playing.

I finally received my iPad Keyboard Dock yesterday. Here’s a quick unboxing video and overview of the specialized function keys.

Unboxing images
You can also checkout my unboxing images on Flickr

In case you missed it on my YouTube or Facebook pages here’s my video unboxing the iPad WiFi 32 GB

Unboxing images
You can also checkout my unboxing images on Flickr

I just got word that the Microsoft Mac BU has released Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 Beta. Now normally I wouldn’t get excited over an update release of a chat client, but this version finally brings audio and video support to Messenger on the Mac. I mention this specifically because I know a number of you who have wanted to do video chat with friends and family who are on Windows and won’t run anything except Messenger. I haven’t tried the new features yet, but would be interested to hear from any of you who have. You can download the Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 Beta here.

Update:
The observant folks over on 9 to 5 Mac just noticed something in the release notes PDF for this beta:

2.3 You cannot make Audio/Video calls on some network configurations.

Interesting to note, but likely not a huge cause for concern. The section goes on to explain that you may need to open up some router ports to make the audio and video connections work properly. Details can be found here. Another significant point from the release notes is this beta version is for personal accounts only. You will need to have an account registered with or an ID on the Windows Live Network. Corporate users with an Office Communications Server won’t be able to use the Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 Beta.

See full images on Flickr

As promised. Here are the images of myself and Jeff Gamet before and after shaving for Movember. In case you missed it, during the month of November (aka. Movember) I grew a mustache to help in an international effort to raise money and awareness for the fight against prostate cancer. This year globally the effort raise more than 30 million dollars. In the US we raised almost 3 million and the US money will be split between The Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong LIVESTRONG foundation.

For our part, the Maccast community raised almost $600 ($589.97). And Jeff really helped push things forward by agreeing, on this episode of the iPhone Alley Podcast, to shave off his signature mustache and goatee if we raised at least $250.00. As you can see from the above images, we obliterated that goal. So thank you Jeff and thank you Mac Geeks.

After mentioning on Twitter that Apple doesn’t support momentum scrolling on their new Bluetooth Magic Mouse under Leopard:

a helpful listener sent me a reply with this handy Terminal command to enable it.

defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseMomentumScroll -bool true

After entering the command above into the Termial and hitting enter, simply turn Bluetooth off and then back on to update the setting. After that scroll away with full momentum in Leopard.

To change things back issue the same command, but rplacing the last word ‘true’ with ‘false’ and turn off and back on Bluetooth again.

A short unboxing video of Apple’s new Magic Mouse. I also, share some of my early thoughts and impressions on Apple’s latest attempt at this input device.

Some sample video comparing the video quality of the new 5th generation iPod nano against the iPhone 3GS and the Flip Mino.

I’m not the best photographer in the world and I just used my trusty old point and shoot, but these will give you a good idea of the “out of the box” experience you get with the new 5th generation iPod nano.

Can’t view the Flash? View them on Flickr