The rather dark grey legality and tenuous maintainability of netbook hacktintoshes aren't things I want to blog about incessantly, but enough has happened in the two weeks since the last post to call for a sequel. For good measure, there are also some further impressions regarding the hackintoshed Dell 10v. And for reference, here's the original Mac netbook post from November 4. For further information, many of the websites linked to in this and the previous post are excellent resources.
Category Archive
Posts in Apple
How desperate are you for a Mac netbook?
Ever since the surprise success of the Asus EEE netbooks, Mac users and fans have been hoping and wishing that Apple will ship an ultra-small laptop form factor of their own.
This "MacBook Nano", for example. By Mickphoto
Apple hasn't. So motivated hackers have been busily wedging Mac OS X into other company's laptops as well as they could. This is not as easy as it might sound; options are limited to those computers with technical specifications closest to what Apple supports in its own products, patching the system to accommodate, compensate for, or ignore the remaining differences.
Enough progress has been made that even people who have no clue how to diagnose BIOS or edit kext files can do a passable job of putting Mac OS X on computers not made by Apple. Some do it purely out of being able to, some do it under the illusion that this will be an easy way to have a Macintosh for a fraction of the price of a real one. (Edit, Nov 4: An addendum about how the Apple taketh away and the Apple giveth back at the end of this post.) (Edit, Nov 17: There is now a second post with more news about Apple vs. hackintoshing, updates, and further impressions.)
Am I 3G Yet?
If you're in the States, and you want an iPhone 3G, and you're curious whether you'll be paying 50% more per month for an unavailable service, here's some help. Note that what AT&T says you're getting and what you think you're getting are not necessarily the same.
AT&T's interactive map of cellular coverage. Tick the 'Show 3G Coverage' button to see whether the big blue smear of high-speed data covers your house, workplace, and coffeeshop.
Cities Supporting AT&T 3G/Mobile Broadband. This doesn't necessarily agree with the map — for example, my city's covered on the map, but not named on the list. Click on your nearest city and see what the map indicates.
As of this posting the site's getting hammered.
Versions for versions of Subversion
A GUI console for version control: Versions.
The content and timelines of version control systems should be ripe pickings for a graphic metaphor, but I haven't seen any good examples of it yet. Versions treats them primarily as hierarchical lists to be clicked through. I'll have to test before deciding whether this works in practice, but it makes sense in the telling.
Requires XCode Tools for filemerge and diff display, so this might not be the thing for casual web developers. The beta is free, while version 1 is marked as payware with no price set yet.
Our long nightmare of floating help windows is finally over
Mac OS X Hints today published a simple one-liner to prevent Help Viewer windows from floating above everything else on the screen. Open a Terminal window and paste the following line:
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -bool true
This undoes one of the worst design decisions Apple made in the latest version of OS X: To force the Help windows float over everything else on the screen. Reverting to the unloved default behavior is as simple as changing the 'true' to 'false' and executing the line again.
Floating windows are not inherently bad: Applications use 'em to contain tools or display things you may use in more than one window, so that, for example, your Photoshop brushes stay in the same place on your monitor no matter which image you're editing. What makes the floating Help Viewer window bad is that it attempts to overlay everything in every app, ubiquitously. Unless you have screen real estate to burn, the Help Viewer actively prevents you from both doing a task and reading how.
Help Viewer doesn't remember where you were and it doesn't allow bookmarks. Closing the Help window means re-navigating to where you left off, a lot more work than simply putting it in the background and foregrounding it again a moment later. So thanks, Mac OS X Hints.
links
September 3rd, 2010
Get Automator working again in iTunes 10
Macs have a wonderful system-wide scripting tool with a GUI interface called Automator. Many people use Automator to take care of repetitive tasks involving iTunes.
iTunes 10, the latest version, breaks Automator for a trivial reason: Automator checks to make sure that iTunes is new enough to be compatible. So it looks for version 4.6 or later. iTunes is at version 10. Even though the number 10 is larger than the number 4.6, some part of Automator is treating "10″ and "4.6″ as text. Since when treated as text, "10″ comes before "4.6″ for the same reason "ant" is before "bee"; the leftmost characters are compared; if they are equivalent, then the second-leftmost are compared, and so on; "1″ is before "4″, so the comparison algorithm halts there. Automator considers the latest version of iTunes too old.
Anyway, the title links to an article about how to fix the problem. It involves hacking some XML files. If you're not comfortable with that, you should probably wait for Apple to issue a system update. And you should probably notice that this indicates how few people within Apple can be arsed to use Automator unless required to.
There is a Horse in the Apple Store
Around these parts, there are always ponies in Apple Stores. I don't know about where you live. Sure, I'm jaded but every so often I snap out of it and, hey, yeah. Wow.
August 7th, 2010
Jailbreak Responsibly
A neatly concise, even-handed summary about jailbreaking an iPhone, covering both the advantages and disadvantages, free of axegrinding. This would be the tl;dr version of anything I could say on the matter, if I were to jailbreak my iPhone, which I probably won't. [via Tom Boutell]
February 11th, 2010
IPhone frenzy in the mini-sausages…
The iPhone's touch screen works by conducting a small electronic charge through your fingertip; most gloves that are effective insulators from the cold are also pretty good at electrical isolation, so you have to take your glove off and your hand gets cold.
South Koreans have solved the cold-weather iPhone problem: Buy a particular brand of mini sausage that's approximately the same shape and conductivity of a human finger.
Clusterflock has a concise summary of the iPhone sausage finger. The Google-translated article leaves us with this thought: "Maekseubong tagitcheung and this just fits the iPhone user base, while the poisonous celebrity, Max is on the stick."
January 11th, 2010
iPhone headphone mic works with [late 2008 Mac] laptops
This evening I wondered whether the four-conductor iPhone headsets (headphone plus microphone) could be used as conventional headphones on my computer, nevermind the mic. As it turns out, they not only work on Apple's laptops, the mic does as well, as does the play/pause clicker. Now you can use Skype without taking off your earphones. (They're also compatible with almost all of Apple's iPods.)
Apple's own documentation is sparse bordering on nonexistent. Product descriptions for their iPhone headsets only mention iPods. The most Apple has written about this is on page 25 of a PDF of the MacBook Pro user's guide: "Audio out port: Connect external speakers, headphones (including iPhone), or digital audio equipment."
If you haven't got a compatible laptop, you can make an adaptor that splits into Mic In and Stereo Out plugs, or buy one.
November 10th, 2009
MyDellMini: OS X 10.6.2
Following last week's epic post about running Mac OS X on a Dell netbook, this link is obligatory now that the news has dropped. Rumors of problems with 10.6.2 were widespread while it was in beta but there no useful confirmation of the problem was possible until last night, when the public release shipped.
In a nutshell, Apple's latest update to Mac OS X (10.6.2) disables support for the Atom CPU common in most netbooks, including the Dell Mini 10v used in my review. Whether it was a side effect in fixing an unrelated issue or because Apple is now actively trying to inhibit hackintoshing, the result is the same as far as the Mac hacking community is concerned: From here on out, every Apple OS update is going to have to be reviewed and possibly modified by the hackintosh community before it can be safe for installation on non-Apple hardware. For my thoughts on the matter, see the late addition to the long Mac netbook post.