Learn to Clean Up the Gunk Inside Your Computer

Damn was the last month Pediatric Anesthesia posting tiring. Blogging and studying were pushed to the wayside, and free time was focused more on lifting along with the typical "work brought home" stuff.

After learning and bought the needed equipment to open up the difficult to repair Apple products (specifically my Airport Extreme), I decided to do something that I've not done in a while: clean up the insides of my MacBook Pro. There was good reason to do so: the laptop's fan never seemed to slow down and even ran when trying to put the computer to sleep, some keyboard combo's weren't working well, and there were sometimes random shutdowns/screwed up screen displays (I guess the VRAM got corrupted by heat). And my laptops tended to have only a 5 year lifespan on average, mostly by ruining the logic board (motherboard in the Apple realm), which is not great for the wallet.

The 2012 Unibody Retina MacBook Pro has 2 rear fans, and this picture focuses on the left-sided one. This was after 5 minutes of dusting with dry tissue paper. I followed up by using a pick to pullout the gunk stuck at the gills of the rear vent (where air flows out from the fans). Then I used a dry air duster to just blow out the whole area that wasn't grossly dusted off by dusting with tissue.

Now the fans turn on really fast only when it needs to (I use iStat Menus to manually change the settings to go full blast with the fans whenever any component goes beyond 60 degrees Celcius). Some video work that could take 6 hours now only takes 4 (as the CPU/GPU is less throttled), sleep/wake works as intended, and my Spotlight keyboard shortcut now works normally. 

Just as you service your car, I guess you also need to service your "fanned" electronic machines once in a while.

Try out Backblaze for free and protect your precious files.

ACCRAC Podcast: Pediatric Cardiothoracic Anesthesia

There's pediatric anesthesia (they're not small adults). There's cardiothoracic anesthesia (the complex cases are very complex). 

Then there's pediatric cardiothoracic anesthesia. Mind blown. Such a fascinating extremely specialized field.

The Concept of CPR+ECMO+Cardiac Cath for Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest

Medical advancements are amazing; it's just that we in the not so rich world may never get to implement these "miracles" in advancing human survival from the brink of death. The concept that having someone collapse with a heart attack outside in public, be resuscitated with CPR machines and have the circulation be taken over later by machines completely and then have their heart fixed in the cath lab while having your life prolonged by advanced machinery and knowledge is just amazing (but let's not forget the human investments, expenditure in money and the ethical implications of deciding who and who not to have their lives potentially prolonged).

All this while people are going against vaccination (which is much much much cheaper and simpler) as they are the works of the Jews and devils.

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