OSX on

Make an old Mac OS X install DVD from macOS Catalina

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 22:35:51 +0000

This brief post is just my notes specifically on how to make a Mac OSX Lion install DVD from within macOS Catalina. This isn’t really meant to help anyone other than my future self. But I hope it helps the odd other person too.

Step 0. Optionally order a copy from Apple, do a search online and you can find Lion and Snow Leopard disks still available for order directly from Apple, as of late 2019.

Introducing ml1610-blaster - how you get a Samsung ML-1610 to work on macOS 10.13

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 14:32:43 +0000

The highly retro monochrome laser printer, Samsung ML-1610, continues to work just fine on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. However, getting driver support took me a long time to figure out a while ago. I got something worked out for macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and posted about it here.

To my great surprise, my old post on getting this going has become the most popular, heavily visited post on dawning.ca. So… I’ve revised things and spun this in to what I’m calling “ml1610-blaster”. There’s a github repo hosting it, here: ml1610-blaster.git

Trash Talker for macOS

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 18:37:20 +0000

I’ve released my first application for the macOS App Store. It’s a rebrand of a remake I did years back. I added some small new features based on requests I’ve had from users of the earlier version.

A little over 8 years ago I posted Shit Talker Phoenix for Mac OS X here on dawning.ca for download. I eventually also made a Windows build. STP was an attempt to give myself a bit of a functional Hello World project and to resurrect the classic Shit Talker by Jaundice which had become so old it was no longer functional in most cases. After posting my remake here on my blog, I found it actually has something of a user base.

Dear Diary: USB 3.0 on my MacBook

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 21:45:28 +0000

Here’s the tale of getting USB 3.0 working in a tolerable regard on my 17" MacBook Pro.

In short, it cost me about $10 and I had to install a custom, but generic kext to enable USB 3.0. Thankfully, all the heavy lifting was done for me by people with far more free time (lucky freaks).

Here’s a visual of my final result:

So come along with me on my tale of computery enhancement.

OSX Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 21:16:18 +0000

Home, End, Pg Up and Pg Down, keys I use like a crazy-person. And yet, for reasons probably designed to break my mind and will, Apple opted for a fairly different and totally varying use for these keys. I wager it’s some sort of nod to super old-school Unix practices. Nevertheless, I’ve ripped out some hair over this and had many brief returns to Linux for my desktop platform over it.

Getting Synergy (or whatever) to run automatically in Snow Leopard

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:26:06 +0000

Here you see the

If you’re geeky like me, then you may be a lover of Synergy..

Well, many of us have long since used some of the old funky tricks for getting Synergy to start up automatically (like the ol LoginWindow trick). But that seems to not be so helpful (for me anyway), as of upgrading to Apple’s Mac OSX Snow Leopard (10.5).

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.

STP Replugged - Who would you call?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:19:52 +0000

I think it’s time again that I re-plug my free little “Shit Talker Phoenix” program I’ve written for OSX.

As you can see from the screenshot, it’s a window saturated with a mess of buttons. Each of these buttons are linked in to a speech synthesis engine, so when you press a button, the computer speaks whatever’s on the button.

I based this entirely off of the old Shit Talker by Jaundice, a well known, ancient but hilarious little program for making “prank” phone calls. I used this program back in the days of Windows 98 and if you try to run it now you’ll be met with general instability and ugliness (though you could run it inside a virtual machine). I was motivated to re-write it for OSX simply because that’s what I was using at the time and I wanted something I could run natively to do the same thing.