Jason: I don’t ah, mean anything by this, but is there any particular reason why it’s black?
Roscoe: Sure, I wanted it to be perfect.

There is a scent on the wind, a crisp sweetness that can only be new Apples. Refreshed MacBook Pros most likely but with Apple you never quite know. I used to find their secrecy frustrating but lately I find it refreshing. In these days of massive and constant information leakage its nice to have a respite and ponder the possibilities of what will be unveiled.

What would be the perfect MacBook? It’s personal and slightly different for everyone. That is one of the beauties of the age we live in. More choice, customization and options than any of our ancestors. It’s a powerfully overwhelming aphrodisiac of possibilities and one I think is easy to take for granted.

That being said, I think my perfect MacBook would have the following deviations from the current model.

• Black (because I want it to be perfect like Roscoe’s robot in Ice Pirates)
• 2 Hard Drives (1 SSD, 1 regular)
• No Internal Optical Drive
• HDMI Port

Will the refresh have any of the above… hmm, I hear there might be a hybrid drive that keeps the OS in solid-state storage, that certainly sounds juicy. Other items, doubtful. Still, it’s nice to imagine perfection even if isn’t easy to obtain.

If you imagine yourself wining the lottery you can further imagine affording a juicy dip into the wells of Colorware but alas, that is two fantasies glancing at each other across the bar of the mind.

It is far better to flirt with most dreams so you may marshal your abilities to bring life to the few that can become more than mere fantasy.

I’ve had a Remington Shortcut for quite some time now but lately its been running out of juice after only a few minutes. The blades are in great shape so I thought maybe I could just replace the batteries. In the worst case I’d have fun taking it apart and in the best case I’d have a working shaver again.

One of the original batteries looked a bit corroded around a connector and in hindsight I think this was the main problem. I ended up replacing the generic cells with my favorite Eneloops anyway. Rechargeable and hardly any discharge even over a year of storage. Lovely lovely batteries.

I haven’t soldered in years (and it shows) but I had a lot of fun fixing the shaver. It works great now too. Actually, better. The recharging indicator is once again working and my small tweak to disable the edge clipper mechanism means less resistance on the motor.

Taking apart things to learn how they work is great fun. Sometimes you can even put them back together again.

For me, the iPhone was the gateway to all things Apple. So much so that I became interested in programming for it and that meant procuring a Macintosh. Doing so would mean parting with 17 Benjamin Franklins though. So, while my mild mannered wallet hid, my mentat mind went to work on a solution.

I already owned a very capable Asus G1-S laptop so buying a new Macbook Pro was out of the question. I could however consider it expendable and try to hack it…

With a bit of luck I’d make a hackintosh although a fried machine, temporarily upset wife and new Macbook wouldn’t be so bad either.

The Journey

I was unsure of how to even proceed until the kindly @jeffreed guided me to light side of hackintoshing . This entailed using real retail discs which maintains software update functionality unlike some pirate flavoured distros. A big relief to me too since I’ve worked hard to leave my pirate skills where they belong, in the 1990s.

After intial course guidance came hours of research and painstaking trial and error. Incremental progress was very slow at first but persistance payed off eventually and I reinstalled (only crom knows how many times) my way to success.

I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without oodles of helpful guides and the fine forum folks of InsanelyMac.

Instructions

• Remove any existing partitions on your hard disk by using GParted.
• Flash your motherboard using the modded ASUS G1S BIOS for better Mac OS X support.
• Load BIOS manufacturer defaults and then customize to your liking.
• Boot up with the GRUB-DFE.iso disc.
  • This disc combines a GNU GRUB boot loader with a Boot-132 method to allow installation of  non-hacked, retail copies of Mac OS X.
• At the Darwin/x86 command prompt press enter.
• Switch your GRUB-DFE disc with a Mac OS X 10.5 Retail DVD.
• Wait for the drive indicator light on your DVD drive to stop flashing and then press enter to choose the default boot device.
  • In my case, default was the hexadecimal code [ef] also known as the dvd drive.
• Plug in a USB mouse.
• Install Mac OS X.
  • If your only see a blank screen or the system becomes unresponsive for several minutes, reboot with the GRUB-DFE disc and try again. In my experience it always seemed to work the second time.
• Reboot with the GRUB-DFE disc and choose hex code 80 to boot to first HD.
• Press enter at the next Darwin prompt to boot to the hard disk.
• Plug in a USB keyboard.
• Plug in an ethernet cable for internet access.
• Finish the Mac OS X install.
• Download Chameleon DFE for HD.
• Open the grub-dfe.iso disc and copy the Extensions folder under /boot/initrd.img/Library/Application Support/DarwinBoot/Extra/ to the “Extra Contents” folder within the mounted Chameleon DFE for HD.
• Run Chameleon DFE for HD.
• Reboot without any helper discs.
• Install the Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update.
• Reboot.
• Download and uncompress the NVinjectGo 0.2.0 video driver.
• Run OSX86 Tools 1.0.150 and use the “Install Kexts” feature to install the NVinjectGo.kext video driver.
• Reboot.
• Download and run PS2FixKeyboard (mirror) to enable the built-in keyboard and trackpad.
• Reboot.
• Download and uncompress Apple HDA Patcher 1.20 (mirror).
• Download ALC660.txt (mirror) and drag it on top of the Apple HDA Patcher.
• Download the ALC660_660VD.mpkg.zip (mirror) audio drivers, uncompress and run.
• Choose the second driver option and install.
• Reboot.
• Go to Apple > System Preferences > Sound > Output and choose “Internal Speakers”.
• Bask in the warm glow of success.

Limitations

Everything seems to works except eSata, the memory card reader and wireless. Of these I only miss the wireless but I’m sure a compatible USB device could remedy that.

Epilogue

While many of my previous computer endeavors were based simply on the joy of discovery, I find that I’m now drawn to challenges that require tenacity. A migration from simple pleasures to the greater rewards of delayed gratification perhaps?

Either way… confidence gained is a wonderful currency for future ventures.

Cheers!

It crashes daily, drops calls and is as sluggish as Pizza the Hut is delicious.

I upgraded my particular phone from Windows Mobile 5 to 6 mostly to enable fuzzy positioning in Google Maps.

Overall, each OS had a similar issues so you can choose either faster performance in version 5 or prettier interfaces in 6.

Living with my aging phone was becoming a hassle but I wanted to keep using it for maximum monetary efficiency. I thought the best way to do this would be to customize the phone and make it more pleasurable to use. Adding various sound effects and backgrounds was easy but I needed something a bit more custom. I needed something that I could be amused by while restarting for the umpteenth time. I needed a startup animation… with sound!

The device already had an AT&T animation with a swooshy sound effect so it seemed I would just need to track down the file format and replace. Easy yes?

Actually… no. It turns out that the animation is obfuscated within a file called “OemAnimationDll.dll”. The sound effects are at least in the open as “start.wav” and “stop.wav”. They are each 4 seconds long and easy to replace if you are using Windows XP with Active Sync 4.5. Vista is a bit more complicated.

Using Vista means you will have to deal with the  Windows Mobile Device Center. A shiny product which mostly complicates accessing dialogs which are much easier to find in Active Sync. It also means you won’t be able to overwrite protected files in your smartphone\windows directory. To get around this issue we can edit the registry to change the pointers to both the animation and sound effects to files with new unique names.

Moding the Startup

Make a copy of  smartphone\windows\OemAnimationDll.dll and then open the cloned file with Resource Hacker. Each folder is a frame of animation, 40 total, stored in PNG format. The first 20 images are for starting up and the last 20 are for shutting down.

Select the first of the PNG items (titled 1033 within any folder) and then choose Action > Save Resource as Binary File. Name it 1.png then open up the image to see the first frame of animation that your phone uses. The dimensions of these files are 320 by 240.

To replace an animation frame simply right click the image in question, choose “Replace Resource…” select the new PNG you want then enter anything in the Resource Type and Name fields. Press “Replace”.

If you try to copy the updated OemAnimationDll.dll to your phone now you may get an error like this.

Unfortunately many system files on your Windows Mobile device are protected in this manner. To get around this issue we’ll have to edit the registry on your phone.

To make sure registry changes persist, download and run SDA Application Unlock. This will also grant also your device the ability to run unsigned code and supposedly overwrite system files although that part didn’t work for me.

Next, install and run MobileRegistryEditor 1.2.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Startup\1 and then change the value of Dll to “CustomAnimationDll.dll” or whatever you named your file to.

Yes, I admit it… *cries* …I am the proud owner of an iPod Video.

Won conveniently at this years 2007 Employee Recognition event hosted by Mercy Hospital. Quite the nice reward even considering all the hours I put into creating two DVD presentations for the show. Both of which seemed to work very well on the crowd if I do say so myself.

So yes, I am now a dirty unwashed apple loving hippie. Please feel free to mock me in the coming.

Oh and its black too!

Determined to get home I started exploring the parking lot looking for assistance. I kept passing “emergency assistance” buttons near the elevators but those seemed to dire to push. Eventually I passed another sign that said, “Need help finding your car? Use the emergency assistance button. Oh really? Well then I think I’ll use it too.

One quick reply and about three minutes later a very helpful airport guy showed up with a portable jumping unit. The car started on the first try and I profusely thanked the gentleman. I kinda hinted at a tip not knowing what to do in the situation but he said it was a free service.

In the RPG of life I award Miami International Airport bonus reputation points for this good deed.

I arrived home shortly thereafter and tried to restart the car again. Click, whir, VROOM. Alright. Maybe the battery just couldn’t go a whole week without charging. I should probably replace it soon anyway.

That very next day Parr and I got dressed up to go out shopping. Click, whiiiiir…. *sigh*. The battery didn’t even make it through that rainy night. Sniff sniff. Time for action… but I’ve never changed a car battery…. GULP!

As previously mentioned in an early musing I tend to get nervous about problems with my car. Mostly due to my inexperience in maintaining them. In fact I find that like other things, electronics, computers I actually enjoy it once I have a basic comfort level with them. So with a streak of fresh purpose I decided to… *dramatic timpani solo* … read the car manual!

Pretty good manual too. It explained everything in detailed with good diagrams and procedures to re-enable the power windows, radio and alarm system once a battery was disconnected.

Next up was some internet research on battery specifications and technology, a car loan from Parr’s sister and a quick trip to the local Advance Auto Parts store. They were really helpful there and pointed out the battery that would work in my car. I doubled checked the specs of course and everything looked good. The new battery was a bit smaller than the old one but nothing too weird. So with a *cha ching* of the ever present credit card and a after a small detour to pickup the EyeToy I brought home our new lead laced, friendly square energy box o’ love.

Next I popped in the new battery and she started up perfectly! Woohoo!

Odn gains +1 mechanical repair skill.

Only one thing remained for the mission to be a complete success. The new battery was a bit shorter than the old one and could slide around during hard cornering. Hmm, maybe I could…

*A-Team music plays*

…shove this altoids tin on top of this plastic bit and…

*Macgyver music plays*

…hold it all together with six hair ties!

I love it when a plan comes together.

Ever since I’ve owned my first 486 SX 33 I’ve usually upgraded my computer on a yearly basis. Generally, I would wait till processor speeds doubled and then plunk down a bit of cash for a new CPU, motherboard and RAM. Sometimes I could reuse the RAM but usually there was something faster and I couldn’t resist that extra imaginary 1 pico second of time that it would theoretically save me.

Now, fast forward a bit into the future and we have my current setup. An AMD 1.3 GHz Althon with 512 MB of RAM on top an Abit KT7A-RAID Motherboard. Speed demon it is not, but back in the early 2001 days it was hot. Unfortunately like most computer parts it has not aged well and its more comparable to um… hot dog water. Sure it’s food and yes it will keep you alive but you’re not going to enjoy it.

Considering my previous past, my tendency to be on the computer all day/night and my lust for all things technology related; How could I have lived with this machine for so long? Well, the answer lies ahead…

The Story

You see around the 1 GHz days I started to think that I really didn’t need to upgrade so often. The longer I waited the better stuff got. This simple concept started innocently enough and it went on for quite some time.

Many months had passed now and I still clung to my aging computer. I was starting to get more anxious like a junky needing a fix but I kept holding on. Then it happened in early 2003. Half-Life² info started to become available.

At first the info came in tiny morsels, nothing to get too excited about, that is until E3 that year. Valve release what I think is one of the most amazing video game teasers ever made. Words fail to describe it, I had to watch it over and over again to believe it. Heck I even posted a lot of screen shots with mandatory silly commentary that very same evening. That’s how much I was in love with it.

I remember showing it everyone and anyone I could get my hands on. Like I was a messenger for the digital messiah or something.

So, armed with this new inspiration, my path was now clear. I would need some very serious hardware to run the new Half-Life so I decided to… wait… some… more…. Zzz….

Little did I know what a trying time the next year would be.

Realization

As you probably already know the release date for Half-Life² kept slipping and slipping and then their source code got stolen then they said, “well actually we are not ready to ship anyway” and then… AIIIEEE!

You get the picture.

My upgrade fever was getting worse. Video editing projects were getting backlogged because I could only run them at night. Games no longer looked as shiny, rubies lost their luster and all that was left was a fathers love for his daughter… Ops Conan flashback! Sorry.

I finally came to realize how foolish it was to base my life around a video game release (cough WoW cough). It was time to upgrade and this one would be significant.

AMD 64bit chips were here, new video cards from NVidia and ATI were blazingly fast and DDR ram was flowing like like vomit from a Vahzilok. Oops CoH flashback! Sorry.

Mmm, tempting...

Like any smart shopper I lurked around Techbargains, Pricewatch and Newegg for a few weeks before I struck…

The Plan

My first idea was to upgrade my aging video card with a new ATI Radeon X800 Pro. It’s about double as fast as the best card from previous generations (who knows how many times faster than my card) and only about double the price. Hmm, four hundred was quite a bit of money though, still the performance jump was 2x so I say it’s worth it!

With wallet in hand and decided to order one from Dell, mainly because I found two stackable discounts which brought the price down some. Dell said they had it in stock too and that it would ship within a week or so. Of course that week ended and I got a automated message from Dell that said the new ship date would be in September. Zoinks!

I quickly canceled my order and started searching for anyone else who had the card in stock. Drat, any place with it in stock was charging over $400. No way I’m paying more than retail and I’m not going to get it from a local store and be hit with tax either. Hmm what to do?

Hmm, 13 blades. I wonder if it...

...oh yeah! That's a good shave.

AMD recently released their new socket 939 pin chips. Unfortunately the new chips were starting in the $500 price range so I decided to go with a socket 754 solution. Benchmarks were very similar so I knew I wasn’t buying something outdated plus the new NForce 3 250Gb was getting great reviews so I knew I had a good combo.

A tiny bit more patience and I stumbled upon a Farcry Giveaway with qualified AMD Processor and Motherboard combinations at Newegg. Woo free game, I’m there! Only one problem though, no motherboards listed (that I liked) were using the chipset I wanted. I decided to check out ZipZoomFly (formerly GoogleGear) for a price comparison and viola they were running the same promotion! Ah and they had the CPU and Motherboard I wanted too. A bit more ram research and one credit card transaction later I was a happy consumer excited waiting the delivery of my new stuff.

Upgrade This!

By far this is the machine I have owned the longest and it’s been very good to me. I did add certain parts like the DVD and Hard Drive over time but its core has remained the same.

AMD Althon 1.3 GHz (Socket A)
512 MB of Corsair PC 133 SDRAM, CAS 2
Abit KT7A-RAID
NVidia GeForce 2 GTS 32 MB
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy
Maxtor 40 GB, 7200 RPM
Western Digital 200 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache
Sony DVD RW DRU-510A
3Com EtherLink XL 10/100 PCI Network Card

Of course, no computer would be any good without software which consisted of the following.

Windows XP Pro SP1a
NVidia ForceWare 56.72
VIA Hyperion 4in1 4.51v
DirectX 9.0b

New hardware is as follows.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 1MB Cache, Socket 754 (2 GHz)
512 MB of PC3200 (CMX512-3200LL) 400MHz DDR, 184 Dimm
MSI K8N Neo Platinum (nForce3 250Gb, Gigabit Lan, Firewire, 4 Sata Raid, USB 2, Dual Bios and more)

Not many changes on the software front except for the chipset drivers.

Windows XP Pro SP1a
NVidia ForceWare 56.72
NVidia nForce3 4.08 Drivers
DirectX 9.0b

I tried to keep the setup as similar as possible between the old and new systems for benchmarking.

Speaking of benchmarking… I’m not a hardcore benchmarker at heart. If you really want some serious info you should head on over to Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech and the ever amusing Dans Data. All of them are frequently updated with a plethora of hardware reviews and other assorted knowledge and are highly recommended.

Ports Ahoy Captain!

That being said, I tried to pick benchmarks that either show a specific performance category and/or are things that I use on a daily basis.

If all I did was encode video all day I might have went with an Intel chip. On the other hand if all I did was play video games all day (guilty!) then I would definitely go with an AMD chip. Either one is a fine choice right now. You just have to make sure its a match for your use and your budget.

iSoftware Sandra Standard 2004.SP1
Comes with a bunch of utilities, can be used for free and has some quirky interface issues. Oops!

Did I mention it was free?

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Dhrystone ALU

Old

4941 MIPS

New

8720 MIPS

Whetstone FPU

dull	2025 MFLOPS

shiny

3174 MFLOPS

Whetstone SSE2

Not Supported

ooh yeah

4133 MFLOPS

CPU Multi-Media Benchmark

Integer MMX/SSE

luke warm

12259 it/s

hott (with two T’s!)

19153 it/s

3DNow!

exlax

13671 it/s

all you can eat tacos

20594 it/s

Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Int Buffered

loaf

894 MB/s

meat loaf

3091 MB/s

Float Buffered

H2o

882 MB/s

root beer

3090 MB/s

Bandwidth Efficiency

Combined

angry bear

84%

fozzy bear

96%

Cache & Memory Benchmark

Combined Index

barbie

1706 MB/s

transformers

6030 MB/s

Futuremark 3DMark03
Due to my ancient GeForce 2 GTS, 3DMark would only run a few of it’s tests which helped lead to these abysmally low scores.

3D Marks

diet coke

150

*sniff* coke *snif*

230

Farcry
Why did I choose such a demanding and bleeding edge game to demo my system? Well, because I got it for free and I had to install it anyway!

First Save Point

kiss

48 fps

snog

85 fps

These number were not static of course. The old pc tended to drop to high 20s in tough locations while the new box dropped to the mid 30s.

City of Heroes
My current video game addiction that I spend way too much time in. Very nice particle effects and a large variety of textures.

Independence Port Mission Entrance

lamb chop

42 fps

the muppets

85 fps

Winamp 5.03a + GEISS 4.24 Plugin
I love it, use it constantly and can’t live without it. Heck I even use it while I’m playing City of Heroes. Options were set to classic skin, no other windows and no song scrolling. GEISS was set to 800×600 32-bit and 100% screen size. Music used was the very hypnotic My Army of Lovers by Army of Lovers. Ooh la la, I never get tired of listening to it.

Mode 08

aol

34 fps

two cans and a string

70 fps

Virtual Dub 1.5.10, Keopi’s XVid 1.0 and LAME 3.95.1
I decided to re-encode the Mr. B Natural (~100 MB) educational film from Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I never get tired of their commentary, the original film and the fact that it was made at my old high school! Virtual Dub settings used were a 2:1 reduction filter, XVid video compression (single pass, 700kbps, defaults) and LAME mp3 audio compression (128kbps, cbr, stereo).

Total Time (lower is better)

internet exploder

14:25 min

firefox

5:13 min

OGG Vorbis Encoding
I ripped the very excellent Logos – Live at the Dominion by Tangerine Dream to wav using EAC 0.95 prebeta 5 followed by the command line Oggenc2.3 to see how long it would take to encode song number two.

Total Time (lower is better)

cheese in a can

41 seconds

cheese

23 seconds

Happy Ending

Well the benchmarks speak for themselves. Most things are twice as fast and video encoding is almost three times faster than the old system.

MSI K8N Neo is part of this complete breakfast.

I think I’m in love.

Of course, just like a real loving relationship, there is always something you want to change about the other… oh wait… um… bad analogy.

No candy raver, not even you may approach my AMD 64bit CPU.

Like any bodybuilder, there is always a part your want to work on (and if you’re using roids you know which part). So the next upgrade is definitely going to be a better video card.

Will I wait patiently for the next best thing to come out? Heck no! I learned my lesson! I’ve already ordered a ATI Radeon X800 XT 256 MB and I’m not stopping there.

Yeah you hear me! I’m gonna order lots of stuff. No one can stop me now! Ahahahahahaha!

Upgrade fever returns!

Odn stands with his legs apart proudly making a V sign with his right hand toward the camera shouting VICTORY!

I don’t know how long or how many sleepless nights I’ve devoted to video conversion, editing and the holy grail of saving perfect digital copies from our PVR but I’ve finally done it and it feels great! It’s kinda like an RPG I kept dying right before gaining a level with various problems but now I’m level 2 in video conversion! Woohoo.

I didn’t even plan on doing this today it just kinda happened.

So how do you do it? Well I think I’ll write a tutorial one of these days (nothing too technical) to help others. Lets just say for now that TMPGEnc rocks!

After that fun and unexpected discovery I decided to look for a good DVD player since Parr’s mom has been wanting one. We’ll I want one too but it’s easier to justify when it’s for someone else. I started out my search looking for players that could handle the DIVX format. I figured I could save/reuse all my existing video on the computer without having to transcode anything.

We’ll a few hours later I had come to the horrible conclusion that yes, there are DVD players that can handle DIVX, OGG and even had hard drives and ethernet in them. The bad news? All of them currently act like a windows machine. Crashing, lock ups, finicky about media and worse. Bleah!

You know, I love computers. I really do. More that most people realize I think. I do not however want a big complex overkill of a machine for every task.

I do not want to troubleshoot my toasters micro operating system because it doesn’t like bagels. I don’t want my cars steering system freezing up on me and I certainly don’t want my automatic star trek doors to not open because I lost too much weight.

Some things are best done specialized. Like when you call a plumber, he may not be a good music teacher but he sure can stop that leak.

Specialization is a good thing.

Think I’ll go buy a regular DVD player tomorrow. Maybe with that nice Gift Certificate Dj Clawz gave me for the wedding.

Gotta love how one computer upgrade leads to another. Speaking of which I’m still awaiting the holy grail of computer games, Half-Life². Once that comes out it’s going to computer upgrading city. I’m thinking Amd 64 (the 512kb cache one), Ati Radeon 9600 XT, Liquid Cooling and maybe some other accessories. Of course by the time the game comes out there can be more exotic/affordable hardware available. Patience in the computer upgrading world can be quite profitable and I must say I’ve become a very patient man.

Ah well, a fresh new year and hopefully after my wedding I’ll be feeling a bit fresher myself. Right now I’m in “intelligent decision making, slightly easy to upset, too many little things wedding mode”. I think I’ll feel a lot better when this is all over.

Of course this is normal behavior for me and has been since… I oh dunno.. good lord, 1996? Maybe 1997 not sure. Back then it wasn’t called Maximum PC though, no it was called BOOT and it was jam packed with righteous attitude. Not the fake kind either, I’m talking about the bitter raw emotions that entrenched pc addicts usually develop. If something sucked they would say, “this gadget sucks”. If something kicked ass they would say, “this kicks ass”. Of course you occasionally get the well A is good for blank and B is good for blank wishy washy reviews but most of the time it was very concrete. If something deserved a 1 score, it got it, plain and simple.

Plain and simple, by the way, is something that is very important in a computer mag. I don’t mean, “NVidia chips use math to draw things” kind of simple but more of a writing style. The best place to see this of course is to pickup a not so great computer magazine (cough PC Mag cough) and read a review of some hardware product. Smells like a press release doesn’t it? Now read the a hardware review in Maximum PC. *Waits for dramatic effect* WOW, I feel like I freaking know everything I need to know about this item. The discombobulators reflux is really not so much as a feature than a overclockers hindrance. Well not in those exact words but you get the idea.

I’ve been with this same magazine for almost as long as Parr and I have to say, Maximum PC, you rock. You’ve been with me through the good times and the bad and although we are both constantly changing our love for pc computing remains strong.

Oh and I love you too Parr. Hehe. I can’t really read you like a magazine but you are filled with gobs and gobs of interesting things.

I highly suggest you check out a copy of Maximum PC for yourself at better booksellers everywhere.