Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Have a wonderful and joyous holiday.

http://www.hybridworks.jp/

Windy and Snowy

Last year during Thanksgiving I bought a MSI Wind netbook knowing that I would make it a Hackintosh. A Hackintosh is installing the Apple Mac operating system on a PC not made by Apple. I wanted something very light and mobile using Mac OS X Leopard and not Windows. I got the idea from msiwind.net, which has gone to cyberspace heaven. The site had a forum where other people had success in putting Leopard on their MSI Wind. One had to be very technical for this to happen because one played with bootloaders, kexts, knowing ones Terminal commands, and other such items. It was a very involved process and sometimes things didn't work out such as the wrong screen resolution and non-working wifi. I had replaced the stock wifi card and put in an apple card that I had gotten from e-bay for use in a project that I was planning and fell through.

After a successful vanilla install, one that uses the original operating system discs, and successful software updates, I left the Wind at Leopard 10.5.6 which was stable to use. For the past year I've been using the Wind without any problems. It's been my little light netbook that I take here and there. Since then, Snow Leopard has been released and msiwind.net went away. In it's rebirth came insanelywind.net which I haven't really kept up to date with. As I was trolling through the forums, Snow Leopard had been successfully installed in the Wind as well and this time it's fairly easy. It's as simple as 1-2-3. This piqued a renewed interest because I had read that installing SL was a little troublesome and would not run too well on the Wind.














Well after reading the forums and downloading the necessary files, I've successfully installed SL on the Wind. All it took was a 8GB USB flash drive, the original SL OS disc, and a couple of installer programs. I was up and running in an hour or so and loaded the latest updates. Everything seems to be running fine and fast. Of course since the Wind has the Atom processor, I'm only using it for light tasks and such. E-mail, web browsing, and word processing won't task the Wind too much. Watching .avi and .mpg files are fine as well. I haven't tried HD files but I'd figure it'd choke on those.

All in all I'm very happy with the final results. Now I'll be helping a friend build his Lifehacker Hackintosh. I was tempted as well but thought better of it. We shall see.

Energize…

Of course when Star Trek came out on DVD I had to pick it up. I got the Target Exclusive that had the saucer section as the DVD case. It's the top one in the picture. The smaller Enterprise is the one that Hot Wheels released which I have been waiting forever for.

Yosemite

From Noetic Expressions

I was on vacation and went to Yosemite for a couple of days. The drive in was very scenic and you could see the change of fall colors. We stayed in a heated cabin in Curry Village. There was a bathroom and electricity. No television or telephone although there were cell signals available, but just barely. We got there late afternoon and once settled we took a walk around but once it gets dark, it's very dark. Almost pitch black.

From Noetic Expressions

From Noetic Expressions

The next day we took a strenuous hike to Vernal Falls in the rain. It was suppose to rain only in the morning but as it turns out, it rained all day. The hike started out okay but got harder as we ascended the rock stairs. I think we went up 3200 feet in a mile and a half. Yowsa! I was very careful coming down.

From Noetic Expressions

We then headed back to the cabin and dried out. After cleaning ourselves we lunched at The Awahnee. The food was very delicious. Since it was the off season there were very little people around. It was nice. It was like having the park all to ourselves. No long lines. No long waits. Finding a place to eat was limited. Some of the places were closed for the season.
I always wanted to go to Yosemite in the winter when there was snow. The next morning it was cold and there was ice on the cars and on the peaks were a dusting of white. Very beautiful and crisp. We then packed up and started the ride home but we finished up some more sites of interest.

From Noetic Expressions

"Big Bag Of Hurt!"

So I found a notebook blu-ray burning for cheap and put it in an enclosure to test. I wanted to see how easy it was to make a back-up copy of a blu-ray disk for backup purposes. I'm on a Mac so there is only one choice at the moment. Makemkv. To make a long story short and to quote Steve Jobs, "It's a big bag of hurt!" It takes a long time to rip it to the HD, probably because it's a notebook drive. And it takes hours to process the video file into something that's manageable to use.















From what I've read, the windows side is a little more easy but the processing time is the killer. Even with my Mac Pro, which is very heavy duty, the wait time is long and arduous. I think I'll pass on blu-ray for now. The picture quality is excellent mind you but backing them up is a pain and the DRM sucks.

Time is flying…

Man, it's almost the end of October already! Time is flying by real quick this year. Next thing you know Christmas hits and a New Year is beginning. Turkey day first.

So, I've been playing Halo 3: ODST for the last couple of weeks. I haven't finished it because I'm taking my time and want to enjoy the experience. I also get frustrated at times and just wonder aimlessly. I like the new silencer and the heavy pistol is back. I've haven't tried the pistol yet though. I have to be like my friend Trent and pick up every available weapon and check where the the life packs are. Overall, I'm enjoying the game and that's what counts.


















I have a dilemma as well. I just ordered an Intel 80 GB SSD. I don't know where to install it. Should it be in my MacPro or a new MacBook or MacBook Pro? I guess I'll stick in the MacPro and test it out first to see how I like it and then go from there. The speed is gonna be incredible. It'll be almost instant on.

It's Snowing In September

It's hot here today but why is it snowing? I've installed Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6 on my Mac Pro (Early 2008). I backed up my important data and did the upgrade install. No problems whatsoever. It took like 30 to 45 minutes and went pretty smoothly. After a couple of reboots, I was off and running. Everything seems to be working fine.

Toast 9.0.4 didn't seem to work so I just made a copy of Toast 10.0.2 so that I can do my dual burning. Boot up is a bit faster. The finder is much quicker and when I have a folder full of jpgs, the previews of them come up pretty quick and not every other like before. Shiretoko (Firefox optimized for Intel macs) seems a bit faster as well as Safari.

I haven't tested other programs but as they come up, I don't think they should give me too much trouble. I just look forward to a third party program that's written to take advantage of the 64 bit architecture, OpenCL, and Grand Central Dispatch. That would be real sweet.