Bloggenspiel

I’ve now spent about a week using my new OS X setup. Everything continues to work except for the “about this mac” screen, even through software updates. I have a suspicion that my motherboard’s ethernet ports are only partially supported, which is what’s causing the about this mac to crash, but I’m still hunting that one down. I’ve installed Transmission (bittorrent client), Quakelive and World of Warcraft.

I started off by putting only 2 gigabytes of ram in the machine. I eventually upped it to four because the swapping behavior when I was close to using all the ram was really nasty. With four gigs of ram, everything is happy.

So far, my favorite things about it are Spotlight and how software is installed. Spotlight is the search/run application. I hit the hotkey for it (Windows key (meta) + spacebar on my machine) and a box pops up. I type in part of the name of the app I want to run, and it starts showing me a list of matches. I can select the program I want out of the list. Very handy. Software installation is also quite nice. Software seems to come packed in two different ways: disk images or directories.

Simpler software seems to come as a directory that I just copy or move into my Applications folder. Voila, installation is complete. More complex software seems to come in .dmg files, which are disk images (although I can’t help but think of them as “damage” files). When I download them, the system mounts them and they generally have a script that runs to install the software that they contain. Basically the same as how a software CD normally works when you stick it in your drive.

Last thing for this post: I gave it the IP for our printer and the operating system detected the type and everything worked correctly. Very cool. It’s a Samsung 4828 laserprinter/scanner/fax, for what it’s worth.

I’m sure I have lots to learn still, but my initial impression is positive. I have the iPhone SDK and xcode downloaded now. I’ll probably install it tonight and start going through tutorials to see if I can get some code running on my iPhone.

February 15th, 2010 | Tags: hackintosh, OS X | Category: computers | Leave a comment

At this forum page I learned to put these lines:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.trackpad.scaling -1

into the terminal on OS X to kill mouse acceleration. I wish it was an option to set this up graphically, but at least it’s an easy fix.

February 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Once in the past I built a so-called Hackintosh, OS X running on PC hardware. I’ve started doing that again, only this time using vanilla Snow Leopard. I had to get a new motherboard in order to pull this off. I’m using a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P (rev. 1.6). It’s a very well supported motherboard, mostly because it uses the intel P45 chipset, but also because of the network and sound chips it uses. Here’s a link to the board.

And here’s a link to the page that had instructions for installing using an un-modified Snow Leopard disc.

Everything works: sound, network, sleeping… I haven’t had any crashes yet. The only part that doesn’t work (yet) is the “about this mac” window, which normally has system hardware stats.

February 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

While Mel was shopping at Borders last night, I sat and read a book. I was moderately interested in it based on the back cover. It was a sci-fi with nano-tech enhanced humanity (for a price) and zombies, apparently.

Anyway, the author was _terrible_. He suffered from being unable to describe anything with few than three adjectives or adjective phrases. Everything was superlative. In prologue, the hero kills a three aliens of a race previously supposed to be extinct. By their very existence, they had killed entire colony *planets*. Yet our hero kills them bare-handed.

After his successful kills, he heads to a bar. Inevitably, a female of unparralelled attractiveness walks in. The author describes the effect that this woman has on the main character as “literally poleaxing him”. Except that there are no poleaxes involved, so I’m fairly certain the author just doesn’t know what the word “literally” means. The next two sentences cement in this fact: “My jaw dropped. It actually dropped.”. Our unfortunate author could have used “literally” to good effect in that sentence.

Anyway, avoid “BioHell” unless you’re looking for a laugh at the author’s expense. (:

December 27th, 2009 | Tags: book review, sci-fi, terrible | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My webhost had a raid array fail (long story: drive fails, they replace drive, try to rebuild array, array fails). It took out all my websites. They had the server back up after 4-5 days, but took almost two weeks to get the files restored from tape.

Now, I have to work get get things moved back to where they belong. It’s a bit of a pain, since I was using slightly more than half of my webspace prior to the backup.

I think I’m going to petition for a larger space allotment in the name of customer retention.

December 27th, 2009 | Tags: 1and1.com, hosting, outage | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been wearing a pair of shoes with really thin soles. They’re probably somewhere between 1/4″ and 3/8″ thick. They’re fun to walk in because they’re so quiet, I don’t make any noise when I’m walking. Interestingly, I find myself standing up straighter when I had them on. Do the soles of one’s shoes really affect posture that much?

November 19th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Last night at ultimate I caught a disc that was apparently thrown hard enough to bruise my palm. It’s not overly painful but I’m definitely aware of the injury.

November 13th, 2009 | Tags: hand, injury | Category: general | Leave a comment

First heavy frost hit the house yesterday. It’s hard to see it in the landscape picture, but the ground was quite white. It should be easier to see on the picture of the jeep.

November 13th, 2009 | Tags: frost, weather | Category: general | Leave a comment

Two of my coworkers made masks out of my face. They surprised me with them. I wasn’t expecting myself to be so scary!

October 30th, 2009 | Tags: halloween, masks | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment