Archive for the 'Tech' Category

V-Moda Vibe Duos and the iPhone 3GS

Published on July 30, 2009 in Tech and music. 5 Comments Tags: 3gs, audio, duo, headphones, iphone, iphone 3gs, v-moda, v-moda vibe duo, vibe, voice control, volume.

So I have a set of v-moda vibe duos (I have an older version than in the link) that I have used for a long time with my 1st gen iPhone. I love them for music when sitting around or traveling. The audio quality and depth of the bass is just amazing.

I recently upgraded to a 3gs and sadly they have lots of odd issues with this phone. The volume randomly jumps around and it will also start voice control at random.

I sent a message off to v-moda support and received this response:

Jake,

We apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced. The newest iPhone has updated hardware that might not support all of the functionality on the Vibe Duos. We will have a compatible model coming out soon with an upgrade/exchange option available. If you have any other questions, please let us know.

Rock on,

So I guess I’ll wait a bit and see when something comes available. I think it’s awesome that they are planning an upgrade\exchange program. Hope it is reasonable.

UPDATE: They have stated these new models should be available some time this summer.

“Un-write-protecting” an SDHC Card

Published on May 22, 2009 in Tech. 2 Comments Tags: card, flash, memory, sd card, sdhc, shdc card, storage, write protect.

SDHC

SDHC cards are cheap, REALLY cheap. For this I am very grateful. It’s awesome that you can get 16gig cards for 30 bucks. Massive storage for all! They are also VERY small and there isn’t a whole lot to these little cards. The cases are flimsy and don’t have a whole lot to them. I have a handful of cards and one of mine had it’s tiny little $0.01 write protection tab fall out.

I thought I was screwed because no matter how I tried to use this card it would not let me write to it. The card was cheap, but I didn’t want to waste the gas and\or shipping costs of getting a new card. I thought back to my analog days of 3.5″ floppies and cassette tapes. I remember that these items when write protected were easily overriden with a piece of tape (or drilling a hole in the case of the cheap floppies). I tried the same with my SDHC card and voila! I was writting away. It turns out that the write-protectedness of the card is determined by the reader just like in the old days. AWESOME!

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

Mission Accomplished: Tweetup

Published on January 30, 2009 in Tech. 2 Comments Tags: coworking, edgeoffice, Raleigh, tobaccoroad, TR, triangle, triangletweetup, tweetup, twitter.

Made it out to the first triangletweetup of 2009 last night. So many faces I haven’t seen in such a long time!

Started out with a few “pre-game” beers over at the fabulous new Tobacco Road, aka TR. Made it over to edge office just in time for @DiMambro‘s pitch about getting a real coworking space set up in Downtown Raleigh. All the best to him on this venture, I think it would be awesome. I’d totally be down for getting some space one day a week in order to get out of the office once in a while. Make it happen!

The list of tweeple I haven’t seen face to face in a while was staggering. Great to see you @therab @mattrmiller @wiggitywack @dgtlpapercuts @ryanirelan @southpaw20 @ladyishmael @ginnyskal @waynesutton @dimambro @dtraleigh @abbyladybug @ayeshamus @jefftippet @roninvision @prachig @eronel @nematome @jreesnc @hughlh @ocell. I know I ran into others and met some new people as well. If you read this and I met you for the first time please let me know and I’ll add ya!

Also enjoyed the after party back over at TR with everyone that made it out.

Finally, I feel pretty good about the fact that I’m blogging and I don’t even have a photo! Freedom! I do have a ton of pics from the evening, just haven’t gotten them off the camera yet. I’ll be sure to post a few soon.

Housekeeping

Published on January 29, 2009 in Tech and photography. 3 Comments Tags: "New York", album, blog, flickr, lightbox, newyork, nyc, photography, tweak, updates.

Since I finally got around to looking at this place again I decided to do a little housekeeping of the ‘ol blog. Mainly I just tweaked the CSS a bit and tossed up a new header image. It’s a shot of the Manhattan bridge I recently took while visiting my sister in NYC. You can see more of my photos from New York in this set. Still many more shots to post from the trip.

My other exciting addition is a new sidebar widget for displaying my recent flickr shots. It’s a hacked together combination of Lightbox 2 and Flickr Photo Album. Very excited about this little bugger. Took a while to get it to properly link back to the flickr photo pages and all that, but totally worth it! Check it out to the right. Click on an image and enjoy the lovely browsing. Yes, I am totally geeking out on that.

I Love You Amazon MP3

Published on June 17, 2008 in Tech. 3 Comments Tags: amazon, coldplay, mp3, steals.

Just had to share this one. I am in LOVE with the Amazon MP3 music downloads. Pricing is awesome. Tons of great special deals. 256k MP3 no DRM Audio. It’s pretty much perfect in every way. Short of being completely free of course. I’m sure I’ll find another post to rave about the service again. But for today just know this. Coldplay X&Y for $1.99.

Update: Today you can get A Rush of Blood to the Head for $1.99! Word from Amazon is that they will have one Coldplay album a day at this price.

More Sleepless Zombie’s in Triangle

Published on June 5, 2008 in Raleigh and Tech. 2 Comments Tags: developer, gaming, insomniac.

Caught wind of a little news via Joystiq via GameDaily that we will soon have another video game developer joining the ranks in the Raleigh area. Insomniac Games is planning to open a new 30 person studio in the area for development of new PS3 titles. Insomiac are well known for their fun and graphically impressive PS3 titles of Resistance as well as Rachet and Clank. Other developers in the area include the well known Epic Games who bring us the Unreal Engine and games like Gears of War. Also Red Storm Entertainment who focus on military based first-person shooters under the Tom Clancy name.

I wouldn’t say that I am a dedicated video gamer anymore, but I still fire up the 360 from time to time to play a little GTA4 or Forza2. I once was addicted to World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike before that. Also being a software developer I can’t say I haven’t thought about making the jump from enterprise software development at my current position over to game development. I’m not sure that I have the chops for the development side of things when it comes to gaming. My native development skills are not the sharpest these days and my math could use a serious sharpening I would guess. Maybe project management? Did I just say that? Yikes.