Apple on

3D Printed Hard Drive mount for 27" iMac

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:54:10 +0000

One of my delightful neuroses is collecting abandoned non-functioning macs and fixing them. Last week I managed to pick up a completely dead 2010 one for $174, all parts included, just totally dead. Today I got the carcus of another for $51 (no screen, no memory, no motherboard, no glass). The carcus’ power supply happens to work and the $174 unit’s problem was exactly that - a dead PSU.

Rules of Acquisition

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 13:53:18 +0000

After getting an Apple Watch I decided to author an app for it. I was also re-watching Star Trek DS9 for the 50th time which means I kept hearing Quark (etc) recite the hilarious and disgusting Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. So I made it an app.

The process required that I also make an iOS app to deliver the Watch app with, so I made that too. It’s served as an education project and I just released my second version (4th revision overall). The exercise would have been stunted had I made it free, as paid apps require the developer to suffer through various tax and legal fuckery, which I have.

Dear Diary: Installing OSX 10.9 on Late 2007 MacBook

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 11:26:52 +0000

Here’s my notes on how I approached installing�OSX 10.9 on my Late 2007 MacBook (MacBook3,1).

Note I did most of this on a current Mac running 10.9.

Also, this kind of worked. I got the install to run but it wouldn’t boot after install. I’m probably quite close to it working. I’ll update this post with notes if I work on this further.

Steps

\t- Create USB Flash OSX 10.9 installer

Notes on creating a i7 based Hackintosh

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:13:45 +0000

Recently I decided to try shuffling around my hardware and try a hackintosh setup on my recently acquired i7 box. I last dabbled in this stuff many years back with a P4 box. Suffice to say, my beloved 2008 era Mac Pro is starting to show some age and while I could upgrade it, Apple’s dragged ass in updating the Mac Pro line. So, here are my notes.

Read on to see what steps should work for you, should you use similar hardware.

Thank you Steve

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:08:12 +0000

Thanks for all your profound, inspiring and helpful inventions Steve. You’ve made an admirable mark on the world.

AirPlay Through pfsense Bridge

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:27:48 +0000

Howdy all, geek-mode enabled.

So I’ve been fighting somewhat to get my AirPlay enabled device (Apple TV) to function perfectly. I use pfsense to run my router and in so doing I’ve got a Wireless and Wired network that are bridged together. I found with the AppleTV that only devices on the same physical media could stream to it, though all devices could “see” it.

After submitting a feature request to Apple over this, I decided I wanted it solved for me anyway and I felt close to the solution. Since I had no logs to go by, I decided to bust out Wireshark to sniff all the involved network traffic. Suffice to say, I was rather entertained to find that when using AirPlay the payloads are flying around in IPv6, not IPv4. Just look at the caption in this post. All those teal packets is iTunes streaming audio to my AppleTV via AirPlay. It’s UDP over IPv6. Neato.

iPad FTW?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:10:27 +0000

iPad Promo Images

Yesterday Apple introduced their massively anticipated iPad tablet device. For those who haven’t yet heard about it, it’s basically a hudge iPhone (that doesn’t make phone calls). The iPad is meant to unlock a “new” market segment for small computing devices that is somehow not already met by the iPhone and netbooks.

What does it do, anything new?

The iPad doesn’t bring new functionality to the computing world, but it does consolidate and simplify use particularly of eBooks. There have long since been many very cool eBook readers out there built around providing simple means for people to read electronic books.

Snow Leopard Upgrade on a Triple Booting Macbook

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:41:13 +0000

Howdy World, so last friday was release day for Snow Leopard, woot! I went out and grabbed a copy and rushed home to upgrade my macbook… Here’s the tale of a bit of resistance I met and how I resolved it.

Yellow Triangle of Rejection

So the problem I quickly encountered was that my “Macintosh HD” partition had an ugly little yellow symbol over it rejecting me from updating my OS X install. I forget (unfortunately), the particular error message. Nevertheless the short version was that regardless of how I launched the installer or a number of other things I tried, it wouldn’t let me run the upgrade.

iPhone Endowed Life Begins

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:12:39 +0000

I’ve finally pitched my brilliantly ancient Blackberry (deserves an award for surviving this long). I decided the only way for me to go was to get an iPhone. It’s now been nearly a week and I must say this platform is a must have for any computery geeky types out there. It makes me antiquated Pocket PC cower in submissive fear and continues to impress and delight me a every turn.

Using a Clone PC Video card in a Mac Pro

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:47:06 +0000

Howdy World, I seek your input. I want to run a clone PC video card in my 2008 Mac Pro machine. In particular, I was thinking I’d get something as close to the $280.00 Apple provided NVIDIA 8800 GT card as possible. My current first choice is the $180 eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT.

I expect the potential major problem to be that a clone video card may be unaware of the boot process of a mac machine. I’m speaking with particular respect to EFI. That said, I’m also aware that clone PCs are intended to be able to use EFI instead of BIOS - so I’d expect decent newer video cards to support this.