R4 Gold Pro Revolution for 3DS

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This post contains Amazon Associate links. If you purchase something through them I may get a small commission, which helps cover the hosting costs for this blog.

Well, I’m thinking that I might have lucked out by being able to purchase this item from Amazon. I was actually surprised that it was available to order as it is usually difficult to purchase mod chips and related hardware from commercial retailers in the U.S. Yet, I did actually receive an R4 Gold Pro Revolution.

The cartridge enables a 3DS (and other systems such as the DSi) to run homebrew software. It’s easy to use, though it requires a micro SD card in order to function and some software that must be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website. The cartridge gets around the typical mod restrictions by simply presenting itself as a valid game to the system.

On the DSi I was able to run some Nintendo Entertainment Emulators (NES). The 3DS is capable of running several others including a Super NES emulator.

Overall, I think this is a very cool upgrade for the 3DS.

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Improving Battery Life With A New MacBook Pro (15″, MacBookPro8,2)

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The Short Version: Using gfxCardStatus to manage the graphics mode made a notable difference. Uninstalling McAfee Security made the most difference.

This week I started using a new 15″ MacBook Pro (MacBookPro8,2) with OS X 10.7 (Lion). It wasn’t long before I noticed a dramatic difference between the battery life of the new MacBook Pro and that of my previous 17″ MacBook Pro, which was about two years old.

In the System Preferences I had noticed that I couldn’t configure the system to only use the integrated, low-power graphics card. Rather, I had to choose to enable “Automatic graphics switching” (in “Energy Saver”) or disable it. If it’s disabled then the computer automatically uses the high-performance, battery-draining graphics card.

Last night I began to suspect that the system wasn’t properly switching to the low-powered card. It turns out that I was almost correct.

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