system_profiler SPPowerDataType
seems to provide the most relevant information. On laptops it reports voltage and amperage which can give you the power consumption (mVolts × mAmperes × 10^-6 = Watts). It also reports Wattage, but that's actually a piece of metadata reported by Apple's power adapter, third-party power adapters can show blanks here. Since desktops do not have rechargeable batteries, there's no way to calculate power consumption by measuring charging and discharging of battery.
But wait, there's still hope! Apple publishes a lot of source code, and googling for Wattage or Power+mV hints that certain kernel extensions can be queried about power consumption. Unfortunately, I cannot come up with a working script right now, but it seems possible.
Your wife has excellent taste in input devices. I use the same trackball daily, and if I can't also find a solid Lion solution, I'll be heartbroken (not to mention much less productive).
History:
Kensington shipped four models of this type. The Expert and Turbo versions had slightly different coloring, and each came in wired and wireless versions.
- K64213 Expert Mouse Pro
- K64214 Turbo Mouse Pro
- K64245 Expert Mouse Pro Wireless
- K64240 Turbo Mouse Pro Wireless
The good news:
According to Kensington's drivers page, TrackballWorks™ 1.1 for Mac was released on Oct 19, 2011.
[Note: yes, that's TrackballWorks, not MouseWorks—the latter was last updated in 2009.]
The Installation/Notes file says:
Requirements:
Apple OSX 10.5.6 Leopard
Apple OSX 10.6.x Snow Leopard
Apple OSX 10.7.x Lion
Description: Enables trackball customization: button functions, pointer speed and acceleration, and scrolling speed and direction.
Languages: English
Installation:
Save the DMG file to your desktop and double-click on it.
Click on the installer package icon when it appears.
Follow the on-screen instructions to install the software.
The bad news:
I haven't been able to get it to work, and I'm not the only one.
Kensington support says:
TrackballWorks - Supported Kensington Devices
Which Kensington trackball models are compatible with the software application TrackballWorks?
Kensington TrackballWorks is compatible with SlimBlade TrackBall model K72327, Expert Mouse model K64325, Orbit Trackball w/Scroll Ring model 72337, and Orbit Optical Trackball K64327.
Note that all the supported models have numbers greater than K642nn.
Workarounds?
- There are some reports of success with TrackballWorks, so it's worth a try.
There are third-party mouse drivers. Some people have switched over to using USB Overdrive. I'm currently trying out SteerMouse, which makes the trackball work, but only has limited button support.
Neither focuses on supporting Kensington devices, or trackballs in general, which makes things problematic.
Best Answer
smcFanControl
You mention in your comments having smcFanControl installed; this open source project includes the command line tool
smc
. You can usesmc
to get fan speed information via Terminal.app:See the smc manual page for more options.
Since Mac OS X 10.5, you need to use a third party piece of software to access the fan speed information. It appears no tool, installed by default on OS X, exposes this information through the terminal.
The open source project Fan Control includes a command line tool that provides fan speed information. This article, OS X: Current CPU temperature on command line, talks about the project and how to extract the fan speed:
Avoid spindump
spindump
requires administrator privileges and when run manually, spindump samples user and kernel stacks for every process in the system. This is a computationally expensive process, even when run for one second.Alternatives
Other tools and applications exist, including Temperature Monitor. See Can I get the CPU temperature and fan speed from the command line in OS X?
Pre-Mac OS X 10.5
This article, get sensor information, shows how to use
ioreg
to extract the fan speed information with:The above article and the script it contains was designed for Mac OS X 10.4.3.
See also: