Computer Troubles
Computers always break eventually, but it sure is frustrating. For a few weeks the right built-in speaker of my MBP has been cutting in and out, but today both speakers have quit working. Oddly enough, the UI gives a definite, if curious indication of this: When the OS doesn't find any sound output device it clamps the system volume to maximum, and disallows changes. This leads to the baffling experience of seeing the volume sliders, both in the menubar sound control and in the system sound preferences pane, grayed out.
The above is an obvious and likely simple hardware glitch. For more annoyingly, yesterday I had to deal with an odd problem that I've only seen a few times before: every few seconds the system would hang entirely, with steadily increasing frequency and duration. It never quite reaches the point of total failure, such total lack of usability. I have noticed from closely watching my iStat Menus processor menu extra, each time that the system hangs, it seems to utterly max out one processor core, with 'system' priority work, which appears to be the kernel_task. This last is a little hard to determine, since all processes such as iStat Menus, Activity Monitor, and top, are utterly frozen during these periods, and so are only able to record the beginning and end of the effect. The most recent time that this occurred, I did notice the interesting detail that while all other detectable activity stopped, iTunes continued to play in the background without interruption. Eventually the problem got so bad that I just had to force restart the computer. It's most maddening because I haven't the faintest notion what the problem is or if there's anything I can do about it.