Today’s adventure in working from home: my machine has been overheating because of running Zoom, a browser full of tabs, Arduino, VS Code, and a few other things. I got the overheat notice on my mac several times, and finally a message I’d never seen, that the mac had to shut down because of the heat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not just Zoom’s fault, it’s also the fact that my desk is in the sun for a couple hours at midday. But still, after opening the lid (I use an external monitor) and fanning it as I worked, I finally found a solution out of desperation: I put a gel-filled icepack under the laptop. It kept the laptop cool enough to finish the last meetings, and to make a couple videos. Not bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the process, I also learned a new macOS command line tool: powermetrics. You have to run it using sudo:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$ sudo powermetrics<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe results are useful, especially this part:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
**** SMC sensors ****<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CPU Thermal level: 0
IO Thermal level: 0
CPU die temperature: 53.55 C
CPU Plimit: 0.00
GPU Plimit: 0.00
Number of prochots: 0
<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today’s adventure in working from home: my machine has been overheating because of running Zoom, a browser full of tabs, Arduino, VS Code, and a few other things. I got the overheat notice on my mac several times, and finally a message I’d never seen, that the mac had to shut down because of the … <\/p>\n