(Mis)Adventures of an leet haxor

As I stated in the last post, I would put up the pictures of my experiment with OSX Leopard on my Toshiba M50 laptop. The picture on the right are those pictures, artfully scrambled with Picasa. I've determined that I need a new camera as the quality of the photos taken with the Crackberry are basically shite. I was looking at a pic I took of Martin Brodeur with my old Samsung cellphone and the quality is head and shoulders above what the Blackberry will do at it's highest quality settings which is sad considering the fact that it is 3 years newer (and 5 times the price) of ol' reliable.

I also realized that I did not document some of the most useful screens while I was snapping away. Most obviously missing are shots of the customize screen that shows the additional packages that I selected at the intial install. I've come to the conclusion that I am not a documentary writer of any description. If I feel so inclined, I may reinstall the whole schebang just to see if I can pull off some sort of installation guide that might actually help someone understand the process, or not. At the end of the day I'm just too fucking lazy and more interested in my next project to go backward and undo what I've already done (unless there is some way to do it better, make it run faster, etc). So until I discover how to make this little Frankenbook into the 6 Million Dollar Computer, don't hold your breath that I'll post anything but drivel.

IT'S ALIVE!

I'm posting this from my shiny new Hackintosh laptop (or Hackbook as I like to call it).  I have this running on an old Toshiba M50 that I rescued from a bad fire.  More shocking that it even works is how well OSX runs on the meager hardware this thing has.

Those of you that have come to know and loathe me understand that I love to tinker, especially with computers.  I had a previous go-round with OSX (10.4) Tiger and I have to say things have come a long way since then.  Installing the whole thing only took me a few hours and I have the majority of components working.  Back when I was mucking about with Tiger I had to get under the hood and get my hands dirty messing around with the command line and installing kexts, some completely by trial and error and downloading new ones at a feverish pace to try and make the entire contraption bear a semblance of a computer.  I had great fun (and a great deal of frustration) with that little experiment and unfortunately I never really got it to a point that I considered it usable.  It would do a few things but there were still major issues when I set it aside to get back to music making.

This time there are a great deal more options, the installers and bootloaders are really rather slick and some of the utilities are excellent.  While I remembered a great deal from my Tiger expedition, it's almost simple enough that anyone with a bit of time, patience and reading ability (and knowing how to use Google) can make this work on their own hardware.  I must admit that the knowledge I gained from 10.4 did make troubleshooting this unit a great deal easier as I had some inkling of exactly what the problems were and what files to track down to fix them.

I'll post pictures of it in action when I get around to downloading them from my Blackberry (a hateful little piece of tech that one is).  In the meantime I'm off to tinker some more and track down the remaining bits that need to be repaired.  Leave me a message if you want details of what I did to make this frankenstein come to life).

I doff my hat to the iPC distro and all of the assorted people that made it possible (too many to list, Google it if you're interested)

The graphic is borrowed from Deviant Art which is a fabulous site.  The artist's name is Jonzy and you can get to it here.

Gidgets & Gadgets

Sitting on my couch watching The Matrix streaming from my server to the X-box 360 while blogging from my shiny new iPod Touch, I've come to the realization that I am addicted to tech. While nearly everything is connected wirelessly, and I can geek out on my nerd box anywhere in the house, all of this has come at a great monetary cost.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone