Goodbye, Steve Jobs.
The world has lost a visionary. The founder, and artist extraordinaire, Steve Jobs breathed his last this evening at ~ 7:30PM EST. He died peacefully, surrounded by family, leaving behind millions of fans, shell-shocked and grieving. He embodied Apple, and transformed it from the failure it was back in ’97, to the most valuable company in the world. He dared to think different, he dared to reinvent and re-imagine the world, and by being a round peg in a square hole, he redefined how we think about technology, business, human interfaces, and workflow. He gave us the iPod, the iPhone, and my beloved iPad and iMacs. His vision, and undulating support for emphasizing form and aesthetics over norms and dogma, resonated with the world, and projected his persona to larger than life proportions. He led technology to avenues others had not deemed profitable, or downright impossible, and he made these ventures into unmitigated successes.
As I look around, surrounded by devices, from the iPad, to my iMac, and everything in between, I am struck by how one mans vision, and drive made these possible. How one mans ambition, coaxed the creation of these devices, making the leap from what was science fiction, not five years ago, to products and devices we can’t dream of living without.
Steve Jobs will be sorely missed. Not for his contributions alone, but what this extraordinary man could’ve gone on to innovate. Of the current ilk, I fear none have the drive, passion, or the ability to think or push the bounds of possibilities. As the pithy goes, “whither do we go from here, and what shall be our endeavors?”. Time alone will tell. Today however, we turn inwards, and pay tribute to the most brilliant visionary of our times. Requiescat in pace Steve Jobs. Thank you for everything.
OS X Lion on Gigabyte P55A-UD4P
Greetings all. OS X 10.7 or Lion is out and available on the Mac App Store (MAS). Like it, love it, or loathe it, it is an evolutionary step in the progression of OSX. While the direction Apple is going in, with the new UI can be debated for hours, there is no denying the fact that millions will switch, and this includes some of us with our Hackintoshes as well. Snow leopard was notoriously difficult to get up and running on our Hackies for a long while. Worry not though, here’s a quick and painless way to get Lion up and running on your beige box. The steps below outline the route I took for my Gigabyte P55A-UD4P (F14). YMMV.
What you will need:-
- Lion installation DMG or the App from Mac Apple Store (MAS)
- Chimera or Chameleon RC5
- A spare USB drive or a partition on your HDD to serve as the installation disc (>6GB)
- Existing installation of Snow Leopard (how else would you get the Lion DMG or App?) (>10.6.5)
Step 1: (SL) Extract the InstallESD.dmg from the Lion.app.
I assume you got your copy from the MAS, and not from the “usual sources”. If you did get ti from the usual sources, mount the DMG you “found” and, go to step 2. For all others, within your installation of Snow Leopard, do the following:
- Show Package Contents on Install Mac OS X Lion.app by right clicking on the Lion icon
- In Contents -> Shared Support find InstallESD.dmg
- Mount InstallESD.dmg
Step 2: (SL) Restore the DMG to an installation disk
This step will restore the DMG image on to the USB drive or a partition on your HDD. Be warned, it won’t make this drive or disc bootable, but will copy over all the data required.
- Find BaseSystem.dmg amongst the hidden files in the InstallESD.dmg. I usually use Pathfinder to view Hidden files.
- Mount the BaseSystem.dmg image. (Illustrated below)
- Open Disk Utility and on the left pane, right click the USB drive or the partition you want to designate as the installation drive.
- Click Restore, and as the source, drag the Mac OS X Base System, and in the destination, drag the USB drive or the partition from the left pane. (Illustrated below)
- The process takes ~ 2 minutes.
- Unmount the mounted image from 2. Unmount the Mac OS X Base System with the white drive icon.
- Open Mac OS X Base System that was just created in 5, and navigate to System -> Installation folder.
- Delete the file called Packages.
- From Mac OS X Install ESD copy the folder called Packages to the System -> Installation folder from 7.
- Copy these five files from Mac OS X Install ESD to Mac OS X Base System:- mach_kernel, .disk_label, boot.efi, kernelcache and MacOSX_Media_Background.png (Illustrated below)
Steps 2.1, 2.2
After Step 2.2
Step 2.4
Step 2.10
Step 3: (SL) Make the Installation Disk bootable.
Now that the BaseSystem.dmg has been restored to the USB drive or the partition you designated (hereafter referred to, as the installation drive), we need to prep it to boot.
- Install Chameleon RC5 or Chimera (choose your poison) to the newly created Mac OS X Base System partition.
- This will create a new folder called /Extra.
- In /Extra, paste in Extensions folder, com.apple.Boot.plist, DSDT.aml, Extensions.mkext and smbios.plist. You should have these if you are using Snow Leopard on your beige box. If not, you may utilize what I have in mine. Here’s a link.
- Pay special attention to smbios.plist. Make sure you have a serial number in there.
Step 4: (L) Lion Installation
Reboot your box, and press F12 or whichever key combination to bring up the motherboard HDD select screen. Choose to boot from the installation drive. If you’ve done it right, Lion installer should start. Continue on to install Lion by either erasing your Snow Leopard installation, and installing it on that partition, OR install it to a separate partition. If you really don’t care, you can also choose to install it over Snow Leopard. In any case, the installation should go flawlessly.
Step 5: (L) Post installation
On reboot, choose to boot from the installation drive again, but when the Drive selection comes up, choose your new Lion install partition, and boot into Lion.
- Once you’ve logged in, install Chameleon or Chimera on the Lion partition.
- Copy back the Extra folder contents from the Mac OS X Base System installation drive to your Lion Drive Extra folder.
- As an alternative to 2, if you ever did use Multibeast, you can run the installer for Multibeast, much as you would’ve on Snow Leopard.
- Reboot, and profit.
I chose to keep the Mac OS X Base System partition intact, and not delete it, in case I ever need to reinstall Lion from scratch. However, if you are hurting for space, feel free to delete the installation drive from Disk Utility.
The process is very straightforward, and to be honest, I don’t recall it ever being so easy to install the latest OSX version so close to the actual launch of the OS. Whether or not you’d want to, is a completely different question.
Logitech Quickcam Microphone not working – a solution
Logitech’s Quickcam HD Cameras (particularly Pro 9000 HD) are good choices for the Hackintosh inclined. However, the Mics on these cameras are rather fickle in their relationship with OSX. There are numerous support requests in the Logitech forums from users who bought the non-mac variation of these cams and are using them with their Mac Minis, or Mac Pros. The common complaint is that the Mic simply refuses to work in OSX no matter how many times one unplugs and re-plugs the USB cord. Simply no sound is detected. For many users, a reboot fixes the issue temporarily, while others have reported no luck with the same. I came upon a solution, which although inelegant, works great – and without a reboot
Open Audio Midi Setup from
/Applications/Utilities/
- Select the Unknown USB Audio Device by clicking on it in the left pane. This is the Logitech HD Quickcam Mic, as recognized by OSX.
- Click on Input on the Right Pane
- In the format dropdown, select a different format from what is already selected.
- Now in the Volume Tab right under the format dropdown, fiddle with the volume bar, decreasing it all the way and then increasing it to the max.
And hey presto, the microphone works again. Confirmed to work in 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
TRIM on OSX 10.6.7 is a-go for Corsair F120
I recently upgraded my main OSX HDD to a Corsair F120GB2 SSD. Boasting a Sandforce controller, which in absence of TRIM (or in addition to), performs aggressive Garbage Collection (GC) on the SSD, this particular SSD caught my interest because of the best transfer rates in its class. The Sandforce controller made it a viable choice for OSX as well. When I saw it on sale at Newegg, with a huge Mail In Rebate (MIR) I jumped on the bandwagon.
However, one does have to tread carefully in the absence of TRIM. All the whitepapers and reviews I read seemed to point unequivocally at 20% provisioning for a non-TRIM GC Sandforce drive. For a 120GB capacity it translates into nearly 24GB. In other words, the drive must never be over 80% of its capacity, lest the slowdowns begin. TRIM, is a MAJOR requirement.
Back again after a brief outage
Back last month, a sudden spike in the number of visitors to this site caused the shared hosting server I use (Hostgator) to spiral out of control. This, inevitably caused the provider to block my site. It was, succinctly put, a headache to get the blog back up and running again. But, after installing a number of caching mechanisms, etc, I am back in business. It has left me rather soured in terms of how I regard my host. Needless to say, come November, I will be looking elsewhere.
