For the last month, I’ve been manually recording my automobile fuel consumption. Its been an evolving process, as the amount of recorded data and data acquisition techniques have steadily been refined. This morning when I was inputting a row into my spreadsheet, I though that this process could be greatly optimized with a good iPhone/iPod Touch app. Turns out this has been done. There are a bunch of apps available that help you record your fuel consumption: Gas Cubby, GasHog, greenMeter, and AccuFuel just to name a few. GasHog and AccuFuel are the most basic of the lot, and too basic for my needs. greenMeter is by far the most innovative (see fuelclinic, NYTimes), however I don’t want more flashing lights–or in this case, real-time feedback on my fuel consumption–to distract me while driving. Gas Cubby appears to be the most mature of the fuel consumption apps, with support for lots of data parameters (tire size/pressure, fuel octane, etc.) and great features like online syncing (for more information, see the Gas Cubby manual). At $4.99 Gas Cubby seems like the app for me, let’s see if it works out.

When I heard about the new MacBook Pro a few Tuesdays ago, with dual GPUs, I was pretty pumped. A fancy new discrete graphics chip running along side an integrated graphics clip, married with hybrid SLI. It’s pretty impressive for a notebook computer. But it turns out it’s not so much of a marriage, but rather a messy divorce: little Billy has to a decide who he’s going to spend the weekend with, Mommy or Daddy, but not both. In the end, you save on power consumption, but it isn’t the nuclear family it first appeared to be.

Working computer in a multitasking, time restricted setting offen means to you need to be very aware of when it’s time to switch tasks. Maybe you need to catch the bus in fifteen minutes, or got to a meeting in an hour. Keeping close tabs on the time can often be very distracting from the task at hand, but at the same time you can’t afford to miss the bus or that meeting. A very simple tool which can really help in these situations, are timers. While there are a bunch of fancy (and complex) timers out there, I often find that the best timer for a I-need-to-catch-the-bus-in-fifteen-minutes situation is the simpliest one. After trying out a few, the best timer that I could find is Minutes. It’s elegantly simple and just the thing to remind you about catching that bus. Check it.

Changing you MAC address isn’t something you’ll be doing everyday (well maybe it is…), but from time to time it can be useful. Say, for example your machines gets blacklisted from some network. This being a erroneous blacklisting, of course. Often blacklisting is done via a machine’s MAC address, so by simply changing this address, the machine can again gain access to this proscribed network. Here’s how.

sudo ifconfig <interface> lladdr <new MAC address>

For example:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 4a:74:00:b5:f8:3c:17

The folks at Griffin Technology have put out a (much needed) driver update for those the sleek blue-LED knob knows as a PowerMate. The new driver supports is widely configurable and is really what driver version 1.0 should have been.

ATI’s X1600 which is found on the MacBook Pro offers support for OpenGL 2.0, but the Architectural Review Board extension ARB_texture_non_power_of_two is not supported by this particular GPU. This has been noted elsewhere [ iDevGames ].

Developers using the X1600 can use ARB_texture_rectangle which allows non-power of two textures to be used, however with some limitations:

However, non-power-of-two sized textures have limitations that do not apply to power-of-two sized textures. NPOTS textures may not use mipmap filtering; POTS textures support both mipmapped and non-mipmapped filtering. NPOTS textures support only the GL_CLAMP, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE, and GL_CLAMP_TO_BORDER wrap modes; POTS textures support GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE, GL_REPEAT, GL_CLAMP, GL_MIRRORED_REPEAT, and GL_CLAMP_TO_BORDER (and GL_MIRROR_CLAMP_ATI and GL_MIRROR_CLAMP_TO_EDGE_ATI if ATI_texture_mirror_once is supported) . NPOTS textures do not support an optional 1-texel border; POTS textures do support an optional 1-texel border.

NPOTS textures are accessed by dimension-dependent (aka non-normalized) texture coordinates. So instead of thinking of the texture image lying in a [0..1]x[0..1] range, the NPOTS texture image lies in a [0..w]x[0..h] range.

When using ARB_texture_rectangle with GLSL, textures are accessed in fragment shaders using the texture2DRect() function which returns a sampler2DRect data type.

If you’ve written shaders in Xcode, you’ll probably noticed that the .vert and .frag files don’t have syntax high lighting by default. Sure you can use the C syntax colouring for your shader files, but what about something more in tune with the syntax of GLSL or Cg?

If your in this situation, a PhD. student by the name of Alexander Taliesin Streit has just the thing: Cg & GLSL Shaders Syntax Highlighting in Xcode.

Last week I was surfing through the Apple site, and I came across this page about the Apple Developer Connection Student Membership (ADC) Student Membership., referred from the WWDC Student Scholarship Program. The ADC membership costs $99 USD and you get the latest version of OS X, an ADC hardware discount, monthly Apple snail mail, and access to the student scholarship program. Now I don’t know when OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is coming out, nor how much it’s going to cost, but if it’s less that $99, I’ll get Leopard via ADC.

Update: OS X usually runs for $129 MSRP.