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MacHeist 4!
It’s coming, with its usual mix of junk-no-one-cares-about and awesome applications you had no idea you needed and at-this-price-it’s-a-steal!
Not to mention the join of scoring the mission-related apps, regardless of how — usually — good they are.
Avid MacHeist fans alonzo and imfrog2002 have even created two countdown widgets to the official launch:
or
Note: Do not forget to backup your MacHeist 3 Loot! Soon, it should disappear from the website.
Edit: Hmmm I just did so myself and it took me quite a while. Turns out, the balance mediocre apps vs awesome apps is largely in favour of the latter!
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Mount a recalcitrant .dmg file
I have no idea why but sometimes a .dmg file will just-not-mount.
For instance I just downloaded the latest PostBox from http://postbox-inc.com/ and the silly little image will *not* cooperate.
My amazingly quick’nt dirty workaround? Convert it to another format file (using the command-line)!
hdiutil convert postbox-1.0b12-mac.dmg -format UDTO -o postbox_iso |
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Sunday Hacking: Cue:Cat, Delicious Library
Sunday Hacking is going to be this new and irregular feature, where I blather about how I made my week-end a bit geekier by doing such or such hardware hack. I do not guarantee originality, nor much software-related content. If you’re not into that kind of thing, I promise that it shouldn’t feel much worse than a flu shot.
I like hacking on Sundays; that’s how I ended up with a stack of Wiimotes even though I did not own a Wii.
Anyway, I was in the process of sorting my various cables when I found her. And by “her” I mean my USB Cue:Cat.
This gave me an idea: my friend Tom and I both swear by Delicious Library. Now, there are two things you really need to know about Tom:
- He does not hesitate to spend money when he needs a good quality product
- He is insanely competitive
Regarding #1: he bought a nice barcode reader because it works better than an iSight.
Regarding #2: if I can come up with a cheaper barcode reader, it will totally feel like victory!
So, I googled “cuecat” and “delicious” and, of course, it’s easy to use the feline with Delicious Library.
Step #1: If you do not already have a Cue:Cat, you need to get one. It’s very easy: more than 2 million Raminagrobis were distributed before Digital Designs’ predictable demise (it’s one of those times when it’s not just hindsight, that should have been 20/20) — Make sure you get a USB model.
Step #2: Now, to “fix” it! By default, the device was dedicated to Digital Designs applications and this was achieved through the use of a very simple protocol (originally described by Steven Satchell)
Obviously, this is going to be confusing for programs that expect standard barcode information.
Hmmm...bad kitty!
All you need if a wife who’s a med or a vet student and — voila! — you have a very convenient scalpel that you can use to remove pin #5 of the 8-bit chip labeled ‘HMS91C7316′
The circle shows where you need to remove pin #5. The arrow shows which way to go when counting pins (counter-clockwise)
And that’s it! Your malkin will now deliver compatible messages:
Amusingly, it is seen by your Mac as some kind of keyboard (not doubt through USB-HID); therefore, each scan operation will be an opportunity for your computer to play the bongos.
You can check what’s happening by scanning a barcode while in TextEdit rather than Delicious Library.
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April 09 Easy Hackintosh Components Shopping List
For the second time this year, my iMac HD died. OK, to be fair this time it’s an external drive.
Anyway, I really like and have always like Apple’s software but their hardware seems to be…well, let’s just say that it doesn’t strike me as sturdy.
So, I wandered by the local Fry’s store yesterday and took a few notes. Yes, I know the spreadsheet below is missing keyboard, mouse, audio…that’s because these things are negligible, price-wise.
The components I selected to build this spreadsheet are well known for working easily with Leopard. In fact, if you use these components you should be able to load a vanilla kernel and accept all Apple updates.
Four columns: absolute cheapest, quite expensive, and two reasonable configurations. Note that you can lower these total prices quite a lot if you already have a monitor.
Disclaimer: Not that I would encourage you to build your own Hackintosh. It would make baby Apple cry.
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A very geeky Holidays break
Was your break as geeky as mine? Come on, admit it: you’ve done at least one incredibly unsexy thing in the last couple weeks. I know I have. Well, in fact, I had to take a four weeks-long break and it shows in the number of silly things I’ve played with.
In no particular order:
- I improved this blog’s look — well, I like to think that I have:
- I finally created a personalized Twitter page:
- I also created a Twitter page for Twitterified:
- I created an icon set call “More Blaqua“:
- I added a drawer to the Twitterified client – you will see why sometime in January, hopefully!
(Oh, and I finally mastered transparency in Flex, too! Yay)
- I started separating nextBBS v2’s components so that the framework can be used on its own and the message board part is now a module.
It is the first MVC PHP framework that seamlessly support plug-ins.
- I added to nextBBS v2 a limited amount of compatibility with Wordpress plug-ins.
I re-read Getting Things Done by David Allen and made a new year resolution to stick with the program, this time.
So far my Inbox is empty and my tasks list still is a manageable size…
I have installed Medialink on my iMac and use it to stream Divx movies to my PS3. Works flawlessly.
I have also installed PlayOn! in Parallels to stream Netflix. I wish there was an equivalent program for OS X. Well, I “kind of” wish because Netflix’s streaming choice is not that exciting. Not to mention that Netflix innovates by being, to my knowledge, the first company to proudly blog about letting go 50 employees.
- I setup an old P4 with Nexentra. The project bills itself as “The land of free and open source distribution combining OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland.”
In fact I installed it because I wanted to create a ZFS array. Unfortunately the clunky old PC is way too noisy. Fortunately I realized that a read-write implementation of ZFS for Leopard is available at Mac OS Forge.
- I cancelled XM Radio. They had been annoying me for quite a while, inserting their stupid advertisements in talk radio channels, and now that they merged with Sirius they got rid of some channels I happened to like so, good riddance XM, welcome free radios on my iPhone! — and ironically but quite logically I have better reception in tunnels.
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A driver for your Darwin-based keyboard woes
I built this driver in 2007, to support Leopard Darwin on my wife’s laptop (hmmm where’s the “wink wink nudge nudge” smiley when you need it?)
I am offering a full driver for download, but it’s only so that you could use my keyboard fix if you do not currently have an ApplePS2Controller.kext that support plug-ins.
The point of this driver really is to provide keyboard support for laptops that see their built-in keyboard as PS2 — ie the vast majority. Therefore the piece that is really interesting to you is ApplePS2Keyboard.kext (in ApplePS2Controller.kext/Contents/PlugIns/)
There are other drivers that do just that, out there, but unfortunately many of them fail to properly detect the keyboard.
So, here goes. If you have a laptop running Leopard Darwin but your built-in keyboard is not working, give this driver a try.
ps: Come to think of it, you may find this kext useful if you are using a desktop with a recalcitrant PS2 keyboard as well.
pps: Miracle! After a year of having misplaced the source code, I found it on a USB stick. It’s now available at Github.
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