caffeine

Caffeinate Mountain Lion to prevent it from sleeping

While setting your Mac to automatically sleep after a period of inactivity has its energy-saving benefits, you may find that the system will go to sleep even when it is churning through data (e.g., applying a lengthy filter routine to groups of images).

This issue happens because Apple has implemented some changes to the latest versions of OS X that result in different requirements for the system to determine if it can go to sleep, and one of these is a new dependence on applications to invoke a "power assertion" to keep the system from going to … Read more

Keep Mac awake

Caffeine for Mac is a great utility for preventing the computer from starting its screensaver, going to sleep, or automatically dimming its screen after a period of inactivity. It's like serving your computer a cup of coffee, so that it remains awake, just like the user does while watching a movie or reading a document. Caffeine is very simple to activate: just click on the coffee icon on the Menu bar to enable it and then click again to disable it.

Before this virtual caffeine for Mac computers was invented, users needed to access System Preferences and go to … Read more

How to prevent sleep in OS X

System sleep in OS X systems is convenient to have for saving power without interrupting your workflow, especially for laptop systems. This is easy enough to set up in the OS X system preferences; however, there may be times when despite having sleep enabled you might have an important task running and wish to prevent the system from going to sleep.

In past versions of OS X, the system would not enter sleep if applications were running and writing files to disk or running lengthy computational tasks, but this has changed in the latest releases of OS X, where programs must invoke a power assertion … Read more

Most expensive Starbucks drink in the world?

Do you gripe about the high prices at Starbucks? Some people try to avoid paying a large sum of money for a drink at the popular coffee shop, but Logan Warren went a different route.

"Armed with my Starbucks Rewards card, I decided to take the opportunity to find out just how much money I could pour into a Trenta--Starbucks' whopping 31-ounce cup," Warren says on his blog. … Read more

New app gauges ideal time for coffee break

If you're wondering whether you're too many cups or too many hours into the day for yet another jolt of caffeine, a free app developed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University aims to help.

In building the Caffeine Zone app, professors representing several disciplines relied on peer-reviewed studies to devise a simple formula: those with between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in their bloodstream are in the optimal mental alertness zone, while anyone above 100 milligrams has entered the good-luck-sleeping-anytime-soon zone.

"Many people don't understand how caffeine levels in their bloodstream go up and how … Read more

AeroShot: Ditch the coffee, huff your caffeine

You willingly succumb to the seductive siren call of coffee, but all that bean shopping, grinding, and espresso machine twiddling is getting tiresome.

Never fear. Your morning pick-me-up is about to get a lot more portable when the caffeine-packing AeroShot hits the market in a few months.

Each AeroShot is about the size of a tube of lipstick and contains 100 milligrams of caffeine in the form of a fine powder. You can get between six and eight lime-flavored puffs from each cartridge. It's a little bit of molecular gastronomy in your pocket.

David Edwards, a professor at Harvard … Read more

Worried about skin cancer? Try coffee

Full disclosure: I just finished a cup of black coffee, and it was damn fine. (And yes, I make Twin Peaks references wherever possible.)

So it is with vigorous jumping up-and-down motions, aided surely by the caffeine, that I write about a team's findings from the University of Washington and Rutgers University that caffeine can help lower one's chances of UV-associated skin cancer by inhibiting a DNA repair pathway, essentially helping cells die after exposure to sunlight.

The team reports on this "protective effect of caffeinated beverage intake" in the August 15 issue of the Proceedings … Read more

Starbucks' winning combo: Caffeine and Web

NEW YORK--Grabbing a little pick-me-up for those late-night code-writing sessions or World of Warcraft marathons might be about to get a little easier.

The ubiquitous coffee house chain Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi on Thursday, so I went to go check out the new service. A few people here, at the Starbucks located at the intersection of East 96th Street and Madison Avenue, were trying to log on to the Web with mixed results.

When Web access was actually up and running, pages sometimes took minutes to download. And it's not as if the network appeared overwhelmed. This is … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1245: AOL is people! (podcast)

AOL says it's hiring hundreds of journalists, which they seem to do all the time, and then they're never heard from again ... hmm. In other news today, Pulse seems to have a pulse again, while the New York Times is on life support and doesn't even know it, and we're putting together a little hit list of doomed Twitter-related apps. Oh, and if you pirated the "Hurt Locker" movie, we totally know your IP address.

Google's new search index Caffeine goes live

Google has finally released the awaited update to its search indexing technology, providing a jolt of Caffeine to the search industry.

The company announced the release of its Caffeine indexing technology--which it has been testing for almost a year--in a blog post late Tuesday evening. "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible … Read more