There’s just one problem. Half the stuff doesn’t work for Intel Macs, for a few reasons. Simplest one, the good developer doesn’t have an Intel Mac to develop on. More complicated answer, it’s hard to get the stats on the Intel Macs, the platform is different and a lot of the stuff is managed by hardware, not by the Mac OS, as it has been in the past.

So, my solution? Patch together your own way, of course! I didn’t do anything revolutionary here, but it took me a few hours to come up with a working solution, so I figured I’d share.

The only thing we’re going to be working on at this point is getting yourself a temperature for your CPU. If you use any programs that are available out there today, the only thing you’re going to get is the temperature of your hard rive. That’s not very interesting, you want to know if you can boil water with your new Macbook, right?

You need to download and install something called “Speedit” by the cool guys over at InCrew software. They’ve developed a very important piece of software (a kernel extension) that allows some of these programs to tap in and see just how hot you’re CPU is running. So, the website is here. However, at the time of writing this, the site is down. So, you can download it here, from our very own server!

Now, you’ll download this lovely disk image and Safari should open it up for you. Next you need to place your “speedit.kext” someplace where you want it to stay. I recommend placing it in your “/System/Library/Extensions” folder, as that seems like a good place to put extensions, no? I’m sure they all like to be in a folder together, holding hands…all happy!

Now that you’ve copied over your extension to the right directory, it’s time to download a piece of software to use it. I highly recommend the free and useful Temperature Monitor and Temperature Monitor Lite. This handy little piece of software will let you configure your sensors (these work on PPC Macs as well, so get them!), even displaying it in your Menubar, out of the way, or having a small icon in your dock that displays the temperature.

Drag those two applications out of that disk image and throw them wherever you want. Before you can use these two great apps, we have to configure your kernel extension and get that working first. To do this, fire up the terminal. (I plan on creating an Applescript or shell script for this, but I don’t have the time to learn how to do that at the moment).

Now that you have terminal open, navigate to the folder where you placed your extension. You might use the following command if you placed it where I mentioned earlier.

Now you are in the right directory, we need to do the damage.

sudo chown -R root:wheel speedit.kext

You only have to do the above command once, when you first set this all up. The following command, however, you have to do everytime you restart your Mac (see why a shell script would be nice?)

sudo kextload -v speedit.kext