zach.blog » Apple

Building a Hackintoshed Netbook

Zach — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:18:07 +0000

Last weekend, my Thinkpad was having some trouble. Its battery was shot, the DVD drive was beginning to sound like a jet engine, and my hard drive was getting Disk I/O errors. In the weeks before that, I had started doing some Mac development with PyObjC, and I was wanting to get a machine in order to do some testing.

I looked into getting a netbook and installing OS X on it. The Dell Mini 10v, in particular, was known to work very well with OS X, at least with Leopard (Snow Leopard has since been known to work as well). I also looked into grabbing a Mini 9 (now known as the Vostro A90) and upgrading it to a 32GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. It would have come up to around $500. I decided to sleep on it and make the decision in the morning.

I wound up going out and walking around the Marina later. Guess what neighborhood it turns out has an Apple Store?

I wandered in and started to play with a 13″ Macbook Pro. Two hours later…

Oops.

That's an expensive Kitty

Zach — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:09:32 +0000

Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about the differences between the Nvidia Geforce and Quadro lines of video cards. In reality, there’s very little difference, aside from the drivers. For example, my Quadro 570M is almost hardware-identical to a Geforce 8600M GT. Likewise, my friend’s Geforce 8800GT contains the same core and specifications as a Quadro FX 3700. Such similar hardware, however, had a large price gap. The FX 3700 is an $800 video card, around four times the price of the 8800GT, meaning you’re essentially paying $600 for the Quadro drivers. This got me thinking about another piece of software whose real price is often discussed, OS X. I decided to do a little price up.

I looked at two notebooks, the Apple Macbook Pro and Dell XPS M1530. Both laptops shared the following specs:

15″ WXGA+ LED Backlit Display
Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
2GB DDR2-667
256MB Geforce 8600M GT
250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
Slot-loading DVD Burner
802.11n and Bluetooth

The only real difference was that the Macbook came with OS X and the XPS was configured with Vista Ultimate. The final total was $1644 for the Dell and $2049 for the Apple, making the MBP $405 more expensive. While the Macbook Pro is often touted as being extremely well engineered and using only the best hardware available, $400 is a bit of a premium, especially when you consider that the price of Vista is included in the Dell.

More Frustrations

Zach — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:52:23 +0000

Trying again to deal with XPe only lead to more frustrations today. I managed to get the virtual disk marked as bootable, and the virtual machine did start up, but then I was faced with another problem. As is, the image would complain that it couldn’t find System32driverspci.sys, so, I rebuilt the image and included the PCI subsystem that contained the needed file. After rebuilding the image and again booting to it, the image bluescreened as soon as it started loading. Removing pci.sys fixed the bluescreen, but reverted to the other problem. I still have some tinkering to do, but I don’t know how successful it will be.

During some of my sporadic downtime when Windows was crashed, loading, or rebooting, I took a look at the iPhone SDK and emulator. Some of the webapps for the iPhone are really impressive, notably Facebook and Meebo. I even found a plugin/theme for WordPress to make a site more iPhone friendly and set it up for Collegegeek.org. I haven’t started coding anything yet, but the first step will be to start learning some Objective C.

DO WANT

Zach — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:58:10 +0000

When the iPhone first came out, I had absolutely no interest in it. It was expensive, locked in to a single network, and worst of all, did not allow for the development of third party apps.

Today, however, I’m having trouble resisting the lure of Apple’s new 3G iPhone, set to release on July 11. While it’s still technically tied to a single carrier (AT&T), it has become much more affordable. At just $199 for the 8GB model, it’s pricing is close to that of most other smartphones. Secondly, Apple has since released the iPhone SDK, which allows for the creation of third party applications, meaning the device becomes much more hackable. The new model also includes 3G networking support (duh) and GPS.

While I wanted to hold out for a Google Android phone, this will be available sooner, and will probably be more polished, as this is Apple’s 2.0 release while Google is still working on their 1.0.

The Fall of Apple

Zach — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:13:39 +0000

First off, to clarify: I don’t think Apple is going downhill as a company. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. However, they’ve certainly fallen from their place as a “Do No Evil” company. I was all in favour of Apple’s iTunes Plus store, which offered DRM-free downloads. And their iPods have been superior to every other player I’ve ever had a chance to use.

However, recently Apple has made what can at best be described as questionable decisions. First was the new encryption on the new line of iPods. This was placed in order to prevent users from loading their iPod with music except via iTunes. While iTunes is a great media management program, there is no Linux version available. However, many popular Linux programs, such as GTKPod, Rhythmbox, and Banshee, all offered the ability to add music to an iPod device.

Secondly is the new iPod’s supposed lock-out of alternative firmwares. I’ve been running Rockbox on my iPod Photo for a while now, and I really like it. However, from what I’ve heard, this won’t be possible with the new generation of iPods, as only Apple-approved firmware will be able to run on the device. This means no iPodLinux, either.

After Apple announced that the iPhone would run on AT&T’s network only, some enterprising hackers created a utility that would unlock the iPhone and allow it to run on other networks as well. Now, limiting your customer base by only supporting one network is stupid to begin with, but it’s nothing compared to what they did next. A few days ago, Apple mentioned that a new firmware update would brick any unlocked iPhones. So, after shelling out $600 for a new gadget, several customers are going to be screwed out of their phones just because they don’t want to use AT&T.

Apple used to be a great company, creating hardware and software that just worked, and was pretty darn stable on top of that. However, after some of their actions lately, I just can’t support them any more. I would have loved to buy a new iPod once my current one dies, but not any more: I’ll be going off-brand. Apple seems poised to become the next Microsoft, interested in only making money, and forgetting their customers.

The iPod that wouldn't die

Zach — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:19:16 +0000

It seems again that I’ve declared my iPod dead prematurely. It just decided to boot up again for the first time since my last post. As you can imagine, I’m very happy to have my little music player back, as … Continue reading →

RIP iPod: 2005-2007

Zach — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:36:43 +0000

Well, my iPod has kicked the bucket, and this time, I think it’s beyond my repair. I had loaded Rockbox on it, and it wasn’t charging. After it ran all the way down and powered off, it still wouldn’t charge, and now I can’t get it to turn back on. I don’t know if the issue is related to Rockbox, or if the battery just went bad. I suspect the battery, as I’ve used Rockbox before, and iPod batteries are known to sometimes give out after a few years. At first, I was thinking about buying one of the new iPods, but as Apple is going even more out of their way to prevent Linux users from using their players, and also to prevent third-party firmwares, I probably won’t bother giving them any more of my money. Instead, I’m looking for a good drag and drop media player that I can simply put media files on by mounting it as a removable disk. Shame, because the iPod touch looked really nice.

iPod Near-Disaster

Zach — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:33:32 +0000

Today, for the second time since I’ve had it, my iPod died. Trying to boot it first yielded a “sad face” iPod icon, and then didn’t do anything at all. It also wouldn’t mount on a computer, not even under Linux. I thought that it was dead for good this time; last time, Apple refused to fix it.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I took a screwdriver to the thing and cracked the sucker open.

Finally, through a series of beatings and button presses, I got the iPod to display a low battery error screen. Then, after ensuring that everything was firmly connected, I put the iPod back together. So far, it seems to be working.

I realize that, at some point, my iPod is going to quit for good, but thankfully, I’ve been able to put that day off a little longer.

Bypass the iTunes â€œ5 connections per dayâ€ limit: Share your music with Firefly

Zach — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:22:58 +0000

On college campuses, sharing music using iTunes is becoming extremely popular. Ever since the 4.0 release of their iTunes music player, Apple has allowed its users to share music over a local network so that other users could listen to, but not download, other people’s music. This has become immensely popular on college campuses, as several people on the same network ultimately means there will be more music to listen to at any time. Unfortunately, Apple has also chosen to impose a limit on the number of daily connections that can be made to any particular share. Whenever someone tries to access a share, they are often greeted with a notification that the host has exceeded their daily limit on connections. Fortunately, this limitation is built into iTunes itself, and not the protocol. This is where DAAP comes in.

First off, what is DAAP? DAAP stands for Digital Audio Access Protocol, and was created by Apple. Although they have not officially released the specifications, software developers have since reverse engineered the protocol enough to make use of it. Several ways of sharing music over DAAP are possible, the first of which is of course, iTunes. However, iTunes enforces the “5 connections per day” limit, so we move on to look for other ways of hosting a share. The second most popular DAAP server, although many of it’s users don’t realize they are using it: Limewire. Limewire shares all downloaded music over DAAP, but it doesn’t make sense to have it running all the time, so it’s out as well.

Linux users have by far the most options for sharing music, as many of the common audio players support DAAP, but as few people use Linux as their primary operating system, I won’t go into great detail about them. Currently, I use my Mac Mini for running my DAAP share, and did so using a program called mt-daapd (Multi-Threaded Digital Audio Access Protocol Daemon) which ran in the background of my system everytime it started up. The mt-daapd installation procedure was far from simple, and required a good understanding of the UNIX command line. Also, it only ran on POSIX systems such as Linux, BSD, or OS X: Still no windows.

Just in the last hour or so, I discovered another program, known as Firefly. Firefly is based on mt-daapd, but unlike mt-daapd it offers a Windows version, meaning any operating system should be capable of running it. Also, Firefly features a much simpler installation procedure, and offers a simple GUI for setting up and administering the share.

In order to install Firefly, first navigate to their webpage, http://www.fireflymediaserver.org, then download the nightly build that corresponds to your system. For most users, this will be the Windows version. After downloading, follow any instructions during the installation process, and you should be good to go. I don’t even have a Windows PC at the moment, so I can’t comment on how well the Windows version is, but the Mac OS X version is rock-solid. After successfully setting up a share using Firefly, be sure to disable iTunes built in sharing. You will still use iTunes to listen to your music, and to music shares, but Firefly will handle the hosting itself. Another added advantage is that Firefly will not disconnect your music share every time you close iTunes. So, give it a try and see if it works for you. If it does, tell me, as I’m curious how mature this program is on the Windows platform.

Edit: I have been informed that to run Firefly on Windows, you must install Apple’s Bonjour for Windows, which is can be downloaded here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/.

Been a while…

Zach — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 07:43:40 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post, so while I’ve got some time to burn at 3am, I thought I’d type up a few of my reactions to some of the technology news as of late.

The AMD/ATI merger

This one really freaked me out. AMD, one of my most beloved computer companies, was merging with ATI, a company I often refer to as the spawn of Satan, at least when I’m feeling polite. However, it didn’t turn out as bad as I thought, as rumor has it that AMD will be open-sourcing some of the ATI video driver. If this is true, then hopefully linux will be able to finally get decent suppport for ATI hardware.

WWDC 2006

Technically, this is still going on, but most of the fun announcements have been made already. (Or have they?) First off was Mac OS X 10.5, which was expected, but cool nonetheless. Next up was the Mac Pro, the successor to the PowerMac G5. Featuring four 64 bit CPU cores at up to 3.0GHz, 16GB of RAM, and 2TB of hard disk space, this thing is insane. The Mac Pro is the last Apple computer to transition to Intel processors, and is also the first to feature Intel’s “Core 2″ line. I’ll probably pick up a 15″ MacBook Pro once their notebook line follows suit.

Carputer Linux

Yeah, I haven’t done anything on it. So shoot me. I finally got a CD player for my car, and now that I can listen to music while driving, I just sort of forgot about Carputer altogether, but it’s still on the backburner in case I ever get bored in the future.

gTorrent

This is one I feel bad about. After making a fair bit of progress, and generating interest on ubuntuforums.org, I haven’t really done any work on gTorrent in recent weeks. Short as it is, I was hoping that my Summer Break would give me time to work on this project.

World of Warcraft

Some of my so-called friends were kind enough to introduce me to World of Warcrack. Maybe someday I’ll forgive them. If you want to see it’s effect on my productivity, see above. It also caused me to install Windows XP on my laptop, something I would usually consider unforgivable. But I can quit whenever I want to… really, I can…

School

School starts up again in just over a week. Looking forward to going back, seeing some old friends, and most importantly, getting my GPA back up. (Summer semester was not kind to me.)

So, that’s that, at least until I’m bored enough to bang out another post.