Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Planning for the Future

Published on March 19, 2009 in life. 3 Comments Tags: career, college, facebook, life, mentalmasturbation, newsroom, twitter, work.

Yesterday I posed the question “Is there a name for the concept of spending a lot of time planning for something that is not likely to happen?” and received a lot of responses. Here they are:

Via twitter:

30THREADS : @kitch Yeah, it’s called working in a newsroom.

nugo : @kitch It’s called Mental Masturbation

kurtschlatzer : @kitch – they call it a career

RoninVision : @kitch: I think they call that “college”.

Via Facebook:
Don: Working for the State?
Chris: Oh! College!

It looks like the winner is college. Not that exciting overall but I definitely got a kick out of it. It’s by far the most response I’ve ever seen out of a tweet. For the record the scenario that prompted this tweet from me definitely falls into the Mental Masturbation category.

Everyday Mac Netbook

Published on March 16, 2009 in Tech and mac. 17 Comments Tags: dell, desk, external display, flipclock, hackintosh, ikea, iphone, lenovo, lenovo s10, mac, netbook, osx, s10.

This is my workstation at home now. It’s my Lenovo S10 running Mac OSX 10.5.6 hooked up to my 20″ Dell display and wired keyboard and mouse. Also includes the iPhone dock and a 250gig WD drive hidden away for storage and Time Machine. It’s definitely not the fastest system in the universe but it’s been responsive enough overall. With 2gigs of RAM I can run downloaded TV shows on the S10 screen and switch on the main screen between Safari, Adium, and Lightroom. I’ve easily gotten used to the workflow speed on this setup. Here I just have it running Windows XP in a VirtualBox VM because it’s kinda meta.

I’m really shocked that I’m able to use a 350 dollar system (plus 20 dollar RAM upgrade) as my only personal system. So far the only thing it really can’t cope with is “HD” flash video streams. Even non-HD flash video gives it a serious run for it’s money. If flash would stop sucking so much it would be far less of an issue. Another good test has been playback of Apple’s Quicktime movie trailers. 480p is handled with ease. However 720p is too much to handle. It’s close, but it’s dropping a few frames making it choppy. Still, none to shabby.

Extra bonus, when the next gen of these little buggers comes around in a year or so I won’t feel to bad about making the upgrade, as long as I can still run OSX. If not I may have to bite the Apple bullet. I’m getting kinda hooked on OSX all over again.

Netbook Security Scare

Published on March 5, 2009 in Tech. 6 Comments Tags: linux, lowend, mac, netbook, osx, security, users, windows.

In this recent Yahoo! article they are stating that netbooks are inherintley insecure because they are cheap.

Such a bullshit article. It does have some facts right about the whole thing. But the generalization that they are insecure by virtue of being cheap is ridiculous. The only thing that makes a system secure is the software that runs on it. So if you have a firewall and anti-virus or something then its just as secure as my 4000 dollar workstation here at work.

They also miss the point that a lot of them run linux which is much more secure than Windows right out of the box! Some intrepid user, like me, are running OSX, which is also a more secure OS out of the box than Windows as well. Please do not flame, I’m not a mac fanboy. It’s just fact.

Certainly there is some validity to the statement regarding “low-end” users. This is true simply because the most dangerous thing to a computer is it’s user. Unknowingly clicking links and popups and opening emails and attachments is still the real danger.

Way to go mainstream scare tactics.

Mac OSX on Lenovo S10 and Dell Mini 9

Published on March 3, 2009 in Tech. 125 Comments Tags: dell, dell mini 9, dell mini9, dellefi, hackintosh, lenovo, lenovo s10, lenovos10, mac, mac osx, mini, mini 9, mini9, mydellmini, netbook, osx, s10, s10lenovo, voodoo.

Notice! I have updated this with a new report on my latest attempt with OS X on my Lenovo S10. It’s easier than ever. It does require that you have a running OS X Leopard machine, but it is dead simple. See this post.

I’ve spent the better part of this past weekend working on getting Mac OS X running on a Dell Mini 9 and my Lenovo S10. I’ve spent some time in the past Hackintoshing on various systems but it’s been quite some time since I had done it. Abby’s recent Mini 9 purchase and the sale of my own iMac spurred this whole thing on. This along with the step by step guide made famous by Gizmodo sparked all this insanity.

The whole thing is made possible by information gathered from:

The S10 (or a dell mini with an upgraded internal drive) makes a truly amazing Mini Mac. Performance is VERY snappy. Think of it as running a first gen single core Intel Mac Mini. It’s nearly identical. I’ve even got Virtualbox running the included XP Home in a virtual machine and it is trucking away happily. The small screens do have some limitations but for the most part I have been happy with the real estate provided. More than adequate. The Mini9 is going to live on as an XP system, but the S10 shall forever more remain a Mac. I love it!

Now the technical crap

First thing you’ll need to do is get some install media ready. I don’t own an external DVD drive so I decided to use the “single key” USB drive install method outlined at mydellmini. For this you will need one PC, one Mac, one 8gig USB drive, one retail OSX 10.5.6 DVD.

Use this AMAZING guide for step by step directions on how to do the install:

http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/how-to-mac-os-x-dellefi-installation-t3925.html

This worked perfectly on the Dell Mini 9. You are DONE. Note that I did my install to an external USB HD (need to use GUID partition table in Disk Utility) and it’s working fine. Although sleep does not work. Result of the USB drive or the 8gig SSD internal which has known sleep problems.

Some slight tweaks for the Lenovo S10.

1) I used the latest DellEFI beta from http://code.google.com/p/mydellmini/downloads/list

I used the DellEFI1.1b2.zip I removed the RealtekR1000.kext from DellEFI/Contents/Resources/Extensions/ in this package though since LAN doesn’t work on our S10s. It’s possible this could have been left alone, haven’t tried it yet with it in place. I also removed IOSDHCIBlockDevice.kext since it’s for the sd card reader on the mini 9 which we also don’t need.

2) When installing the DellEFI package I did advanced and did not do the system specific dsdt file since I suspect this might do bad things on the lenovo, more experiments to come later. YOU MUST INSTALL THE DSDT file option. Without it the system will not power off, restart, or have properly working audio!!!!

There are a few more steps for the S10 as well.

For Audio install Audieee by following the directions exactly as they appear on the site.

For sleep and speedstep download:

Voodoopower from VoodooPower Kext

VoodooUSBEHCI from VoodooUSBEHCI

GenericCPUPowerManagement Application

Install the two kexts using kext helper from http://cheetha.net/

After rebooting then follow these steps:

To enable sleep you have to edit the Info.plist in

/System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBEHCI.kext/Contents/

You need to add these lines

<key>OSBundleCompatibleVersion</key>

<string>1.0</string>

under

<key>CFBundleVersion</key>

<string>3.1.5</string>

Then you will need to refresh your kexts by using the advanced section of the kext helper utility and running the kext permissions and tag cache rebuild options and rebooting.

UPDATE:

Fixed fan issues by following the information on this thread. More specifically I grabbed the 10.5.6 AppleACPIPlateform.kext from this post. Once you have gotten that you can use the kext updater again to replace it on your system and reboot. Fans work great now!

That’s everything you need to have a well oiled Mac Netbook! Some of this is a bit vaugue so please feel free to ask questions. It can be a little challenging to piece all this crud together from the various sites out there so if there is something that needs clarification please let me know.

Much thanks to Abby for the photo and loaning me her Dell Mini 9 for this experiment! Also note, the mini9 is just running xp above, but yes, it’s also running Mac OS