Archive for the 'computers' Category

That Apple Presser in Full

Published
by
blogmywiki
on July 16, 2010
in Apple, MacOS X, computers, fiction and iPhone
. 0 Comments

Today Steve Jobs shocked the world by making some unexpected apologies at a press conference in Cupertino, CA.

He announced to a stunned press pack, “I am sorry. We lost our way.”

As reporters dropped their iPhones in shock, he continued, “We made too much money and became too complacent and arrogant. Too many of our employees behaved like Comic Shop Guy out of The Simpsons. Too many of our products contained design flaws which we denied until the bitter end. This will change.”

“For too long I pursued a petty feud against Adobe, forgetting that without Adobe, the Macintosh would never have been a success even in its niche design markets. Today we are allowing Flash on iOS. We are launching low-spec, low-cost versions of the MacMini and MacBook, and we are cutting the cost of the iPad. We’d like to apologise to everyone whose iTunes accounts were compromised. And we promise to answer the phone when you ring us up.”

“One more thing,” he added after a pause.

“We will allow any track on an iPhone to be used as a ring tone or SMS message alert.”

Ok, ok, I made this all up. That last one is utterly ridiculous.

.

OS X parental controls on a netbook

Published
by
blogmywiki
on June 1, 2010
in MacOS X, computers and lowendmac
. 5 Comments

My kids want to use my Hackintosh netbook - a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 running Snow Leopard. One of the great things about OS X is its excellent built-in parental controls, but on a netbook with a small 600 pixel-high screen, the buttons for setting them up are off the screen.

I tried using an external monitor - with amusingly mad and useless results… then I found this trick. Open up a Terminal window and type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8

This makes the next window you open small enough to see the required buttons. Set up the parental controls, type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1
in the Terminal command line.

Sweet!

Suppertime! on your mobile

Published
by
blogmywiki
on April 7, 2010
in food and iPhone
. 0 Comments

Suppertime! is now iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry and Android-friendly… so you can browse recipes on your phone in the kitchen, on the train or where ever you may find yourself.

http://www.suppertime.co.uk/pages/

It’s all done with the WPTouch Wordpress plugin.

Best free iPhone apps

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 10, 2010
in Apple, TV, internet and literature
. 3 Comments

   Captain Haddock

The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

Simple dual-boot OSX and WindowsXP on Lenovo IdeaPad

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 21, 2010
in MacOS X, Windows and computers
. 5 Comments

DSC_7339

If you want OS X running on your Lenovo S10 then a retail copy of Snow Leopard and the Snow Leopard Enabler are clearly the way to go. So far pretty much everything seems to work except sleep and ethernet (though I’ve not tried the latter) on my S10-2. Crucially, sound does work. The web cam even works in PhotoBooth if you crank up iChat first and tick the menu option to show video effects first.

I previously had a triple-boot thing with OS X, Windows XP Home Edition and Ubuntu Netbook Remix going on, but I realised there wasn’t much I wanted to do in Linux that I couldn’t do in OS X or Windows - so I decided to simplify it a bit and make the machine a bit more elegant. Instead of a text menu I would have a machine that would boot into OS X without delay unless I told it I wanted to go into Windows - as I will be using OS X almost all the time.

An easy, elegant way to switch between Windows and OS X is to use Apple’s Darwin bootloader - but when I wiped the disk and reinstalled both operating systems I found that the OS X bootloader couldn’t see Windows, only OS X. Configuring the Darwin bootloader seems to be a dark art, and there’s not much info on the web. But I discovered that the order you install them in seems to matter. Here’s how I got it working.

1) Wipe the whole hard drive clean. Do this by booting off your OS X install USB stick, use Disk Utility to partition the disk in 2 parts. I have a 250GB hard drive in my IdeaPad. I made the 1st partition 160GB OS X, HFS+ MacOS Journalled, using Master Boot Record. I left the rest of the disk blank and I did not install OS X at this point.

2) I booted off a WindowsXP Home Edition install CD and made a 15GB NTFS partition in the free space and installed Windows on it. (I found that making FAT32 partitions in Apple Disk Utility seemed to give me disk errors when it came to installing Windows, even if I made it NTFS later, so it’s best to get the Windows installer to make the Windows partition.)

3) I then booted off the OS X install USB stick again and installed OS X on the OS X / Mac-formatted 160GB partition.

4) When you reboot the machine will go into OS X unless you press F8 on startup - just after the Lenovo splash screen and just before the Apple logo.

choose os x

And you get two logos - cursor left or right to choose the OS you want to boot from.

choose windows

Next I plan to use some of the spare space to make a FAT32 disk I can use to swap data between OS X and Windows. And maybe leave a sliver free for Linux in the future…

It’s no MagicSlate

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 27, 2010
in Apple, MacOS X and computers
. 3 Comments

iPad display

I have long dreamed of a neat, small computer which I called the MagicSlate and I was interested to read that this was one of the names Apple registered for their slate device. I even wrote a story about its developers. But that’s another, er, story.

But the iPad - it sounds like a sanitary towel for the late 20th Century, by the way - is no MagicSlate. It’s just a big iPhone. Without the phone. And not even a USB port as far as I can tell.

Steve Jobs has also dissed netbook users by saying they are “just cheap laptops”. Almost everyone I know has a netbook or has bought one for someone. And sometimes you need a cheap laptop and Apple laptops are not cheap. Apple could not make a netbook because there’s not enough profit in the hardware at those prices. According to BBC News his Steveness said:

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything - they’re slow and have low quality displays.”

Well my £245 netbook (running OS X, incidentally) has an LED-backlit display. Er, a bit like the iPad. And so much is on the web (and in ‘the cloud’) now that processing power just doesn’t count for that much any more.

One thing seems certain though - if the iPad is running on Apple’s own CPU, it won’t easily get hacked and ported to another make of device any time soon, if ever. But then why would you want to?

OSX on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 - again

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 22, 2010
in Linux, MacOS X, music and operating systems
. 7 Comments

triple boot on a par five hole

(behold my - working! - boot-up options, using the old-skool classic GRUB bootloader)

I’ve given up trying to get the audio to work on OS X on my IdeaPad’s msiWindOSX install. Could not get Audieee to work. A 10.5.5 update trashed the OS. I re-installed msiWindOSX and the fricking Terminal app wouldn’t run! I think a retail copy of Snow Leopard might be the way to go.

A colleague and I last night both reminisced on how much time we had spent getting out Bondi Blue iMacs to sync with out Palm Pilots by infra red. We reckoned about 2 weeks’ work. Some things are just not worth the effort. Besides, the current versions of Spotify and WINE play nice, so I can use my free Spotify account in Ubuntu!

Anyway, here’s a list of what I’ve tested and does work in msiWindOSX on a Lenovo S10-2:

  • Screen, including brightness function keys.
  • Wifi - with a little patch
  • iTunes to manage my Mac-formatted iPod - but there’s no audio though, and I had to download new versions of QuickTime and iTunes to work with my iPod Nano
  • Adobe Illustrator CS
  • Webcam in iChat - but not in PhotoBooth
  • The SD card reader slot works a treat - OS X can natively handle Nikon RAW NEF files, so OS X could be a useful tool for photography.
  • FlickrUploadr
  • Trackpad - but no gestures or 2-finger strolling
  • Networking with other Macs over wifi (ethernet is not supposed to work but I’ve not tested it)
  • USB devices such as memory sticks and Microsoft optical mouse
  • TillyPaint!

Not yet tested:

  • Bluetooth
  • Ethernet (not expecting this to work)
  • External VGA monitor

Triple-boot OS X, WindowsXP and Linux on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 5, 2010
in Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi, Windows, computers and operating systems
. 3 Comments

The aim: to get my Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook to allow me to boot into Mac OS X, Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Remix as and when I need each OS - and to get a nice clean Windows install at the time, free of all the crud that comes with a factory-installed OS.

Ingredients

The easy way to do this would be with a USB DVD writer. I couldn’t get one (not one that worked, any way) but I did have an old DVD ROM drive and a USB IDE caddy/enclosure gizmo. I also used:

  • 2 blank DVDs
  • 2 blank CD ROMs
  • A G4 PowerBook to burn the discs on - any computer with a DVD burner will do
  • A 4GB memory stick
  • an ethernet cable
  • A copy of MSIWindOSX
  • A few files you’ll find mentioned on this web page - stick them on a USB stick
  • A nice, cheap, large new 3.5″ SATA drive (optional - if you want to keep the original WindowsXP drive). I got a 250gb one off Amazon for around 30 quid.

First up - you need to prepare about 4 discs you’ll need. Do this with your working normal XP machine.

Download MSIWindOSX.iso off the interweb - of course I didn’t do this as this would be very naughty. Do (or rather don’t) burn it onto a DVD. It’s just under 4GB (which is why I needed a 4GB USB stick).

Then copy all the drivers in the DRIVERS folder on your IdeaPad’s D: drive onto another DVD-ROM. They don’t quite fit on a CD-ROM.

Next make a live CD of your Linux of choice - I chose Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Last, but not least, you need to make a WindowsXP Home Edition install disc. This is fun. Well, okay, it’s not fun. It takes ages and will have you screaming at Lenovo for not supplying a Windows disc with the IdeaPad. Basically I followed this method:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-S-series-Netbooks/Guide-Create-Recovery-Media-for-an-Ideapad-S10/
and this method (bearing in mind you need to include Service Pack 3 as well):
http://www.howtohaven.com/system/createwindowssetupdisk.shtml

But that’s not enough. If you make a disc this way, it should boot but it won’t find the hard drive as it’ll be missing the drivers needed to see a SATA hard drive. There are two ways round this: you can fiddle with the BIOS settings and change the SATA controller to compatibility mode and change it back again when you’ve got the right drivers installed. I didn’t fancy this so I used a bit of free software called nLite to tweak the XP installer I made to include SATA drivers. There should be some info here. I think this is totally legal as I have paid for a WindowsXP licence, the licence sticker is on the machine I’m installing it on - it’s just that Lenovo are too cheap to supply a disc so you have to make your own.

As I didn’t have a USB DVD writer, rather than burning the disc on the IdeaPad, I made an ISO image which I put on a USB memory stick and burnt the image using Disk Utility on my PowerBook G4.

Okay. Survived that? Now back up everything you want to keep off your IdeaPad. Go to bed, wake up the next day and do it again because you will have missed something.

Method

I tested my discs in my USB DVD reader to check they booted - press F12 at startup when you see the Lenovo splash screen and choose the USB disc as the boot device. If they boot - good news. Don’t install anything. At this point I replaced the 160GB hard drive with a cheap 250GB from Amazon - it was marketed as being for a Playstation3 I think and was only about 30 quid.

replacing the hard drive on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2

Unscrew the large panel underneath, remove the single screw holding the hard drive in, and pull to the left using the plastic flap. Unscrew the drive from its caddy, replace and re-insert.

Phew! Time for a cup of tea.

Mac OS X

Then I put (or rather I didn’t) the MSIWindOSX boot disc in the USB DVD-ROM drive, plugged it in, turned the IdeaPad on and pressed F12 at the Lenovo splash screen and chose the USB disc drive from the boot menu.

DSC_7068

I more-or-less followed these instructions:
http://www.netbooktech.com/2008/10/13/guide-to-installing-os-x-on-lenovo-ideapad-s10/
but some things were different…

First of all before installing OS X I used Disk Utility on the install disc to make a 40GB MacOS Journalled partition on the drive. I left the rest blank - the plan is later to make a roughly 150GB NTFS partition for WindowsXP and a 40ish GB partition for Linux. The idea is to make the NTFS partition the largest one as I plan to use this as a data volume, hoping that both OS X and Linux will be able to mount it. I also used the Advanced option in DiskUtility to choose a Windows style bootloader. Not sure if this was required, it just seemed like a good idea.

Bienvenue a OS X

I didn’t have the problem mentioned on NetbookTech about getting stuck in a loop - I said I didn’t have a Mac to transfer information from and it all went ok. I followed the instructions on getting WiFi working and that worked ok. I tried to do a system update but rather than updating from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 I was offered a 10.5.8 combo update. This KILLED the OS X install and I had to start again - so don’t update to 10.5.8!

There’s no audio, but there is a workaround for this, though it does need Developer Tools installing which you’ll need to get off an install disc or download.

When I’m cleaning Windows…

making Windows partition

To get Windows installed, I repeated the process, booting off the Windows CD I’d made. I used the installer to make a 150GB NTFS partition to put XP on, and left the rest blank. When installed, I copied all those files that were in the DRIVERS folder on your original D: drive back onto the C: drive and installed them to get the WiFi, graphics card, sound card etc working properly.

Now that's what I call a clean Windows install!

There’s a nice clean Windows install! Next - time to get some Linux cooking.

Ubuntu: brown is the colour!

Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Last of all I booted from my Ubuntu Netbook Remix CD and installed this flavour of Linux on the remaining unformatted drive space. As mentioned before, you need to use the ethernet cable to connect to the internet to get the restricted Broadcom driver in order to get WiFi to work.

Here’s what I ended up with, the choice of WindowsXP, Ubuntu or OS X at startup:

choices, so many choices

UPDATE: After installing Ubuntu, OS X doesn’t want to boot. Lots of scrolling text then stuck on a pale blue screen of death. Ho hum. Will try to re-install OS X!

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Yay! I got it working again. Re-installing OS X didn’t work, so I replaced the GRUB2 bootloader that comes with Ubuntu 9.10 with legacy old-skool GRUB. There’s a guide here. Legacy GRUB is much simpler to manually configure and get OS X booting OK.

During the process of retro-grading GRUB I made a note of what my partitons were numbered (yours will probably be different):
disk = /dev/sda
sda1 = HFS+ (Mac OS X)
sda2 = NTFS (WindowsXP)
sda5 = Linux
sda6 = Linux swap

Then when legacy GRUB was working I added these lines to menu.lst in /boot/grub. Note that your root settings will probably be different depending on your partition scheme and also I had to reduce the partition numbers by 1 - the WindowsXP partition hd0,1 is actually sda2 and the OS X partition hd0,0 is actually sda1 - confused me when it all went wrong the first time!

title WindowsXP
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1


title Mac OS X
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

I left the automagic kernals stuff to look after booting into Ubuntu, and didn’t add a line for that. (Well I did actually - it didn’t work, so I took it out. I found it easier to configure GRUB for OS X than for Linux!)

The other thing I would have done differently in hindsight is to create a 4th common data partition for music, photos and videos in FAT32 format - I think this would be more easily accessed for reading and writing by all 3 operating systems. OS X doesn’t want to write to the NTFS WindowsXP partition - it can read it just fine, though. Ubuntu doesn’t have many qualms about writing to NTFS disks but then I have had problems with this when I was using WUBI, so maybe OS X’s caution is wise.

Next I’ll try and get audio working using Audieee. And annoyingly, I noticed the Ideapad’s built-in web cam works in iChat but not in PhotoBooth (I’d rather it were the other way round).

Having installed OS X I am slightly left wondering why I did it. Like climbing a mountain and saying “well the view’s quite nice but was it really worth the bother…?” It was an interesting challenge and quite exciting to see the OS X Finder on my IdeaPad but I am struggling a bit to think of a Mac-only application that makes it worthwhile. Most of the software I use is already free and cross-platform. Possibly iPhoto (which I don’t have!) - but then Cheese in Ubuntu is fine and it has the benefit of actually seeing my webcam. Would an iPhone development kit work on it? OS X also makes networking my Lenovo Ideapad with my other Macs much easier. But that’s about it…

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Lenovo S10-2 IdeaPad

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 12, 2009
in Linux, Ubuntu and operating systems
. 4 Comments

say cheese

Having played with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) OS on a USB stick, I was keen to get it installed on my Lenovo IdeaPad to give myself a break from WindowsXP. However, I was very keen to keep Windows as I’ve paid for it, and as we know the big drawback with the Lenovo IdeaPad is that they don’t ship a Windows system restore disc - so not trashing my Windows partition would be desirable.

So here’s how I did it:

I downloaded WUBI - this lets you install Ubuntu from within Windows. It doesn’t repartition your drive, keeps Windows safe and makes it easy to remove Ubuntu. This now gives you the Netbook Remix as an option. I installed version 9.10

Having installed that, I rebooted, gulped a bit as it said it was making partitions - but it didn’t harm WindowsXP at all. You just get an option to boot into Windows or Ubuntu when you switch on. WindowsXP works just fine as before.

Then I found that in Ubuntu the wireless networking didn’t work, which was pretty much a deal-breaker. Manually updating to the commercial Broadcom driver didn’t work after a reboot - the old drivers reloaded and it wouldn’t let me blacklist them as suggested on the Broadcom instructions. I got round this by connecting to the internet via old fashioned ethernet and going to the Synaptic Package Manager under ‘System’ and installing the Broadcom driver listed under ‘restricted’. This seems to have done the trick and my wifi is now working.

getting wifi to work

So far so good… audio playback seems to work ok. Trackpad ok, and scrolling works ok. The SD card reader works a treat; it even recognised my Macintosh (HFS+) formatted iPod Nano 4th Gen when I plugged it in - it was mounted read-only, but I could play music off it and frankly I wasn’t expecting anything at all. Not tested its power modes yet to see if sleep works - I think that might be a no-no in WUBU. Firefox seems to be wasting some precious screen real estate where the Favourites were - I had to turn the bookmarks toolbar off. This is odd, as the UNR is supposed to be tuned for small screens and the default web browser doesn’t seem to be that well set up in this regard. Looks like there’s no Flash support in Firefox by default either, but that’s a simple fix with installing a plugin within Firefox; pity it didn’t have Flash support out of the box, though. I found it was a good idea to get the ‘panel’ at the top of the screen to auto-hide, to save some more precious screen space. The panel is the thing like the OS X menu bar or the toolbar at the bottom of the screen in Windows.

One other odd thing in WUBI is where to find the partition you installed it on. I put it on the C: drive as this was the largest partition, but it doesn’t show up as a drive in the file manager. Annoying as all my photos and Windows software are on the C: drive. Well, it is there but you have to hunt for it - it’s under File System > host.

where to find your Windows C: drive

I’m going to play with UNR on the Lenovo IdeaPad for a few days and see if I miss Windows at all. I was suprisingly happy with Windows - after all I was mainly using free software which is cross-platform. But I was nervous about Windows viruses and Windows seems to have a very heavy overhead in terms of virus-scanning and the like, which slows it down awfully.

Update: got Spotify working - yay! I think that deserves a ‘yay’. Used the Ubuntu software installer to get WINE installed, then had to follow the specific WINE audio settings given on the Spotify web site: http://www.spotify.com/en/help/faq/wine/

Update to the Update: adverts don’t work on Spotify running under WINE. This might sound like a good thing, but if you have a free Spotify account, as soon as it tries to play an advert it grinds to a halt. Bother. Restarting it doesn’t fool it either, Little Boots remains in limbo, waiting for the Lexus advert that never comes. Back to WindowsXP for Spotify then :-(

Why is Windows WiFi so slow?

Published
by
blogmywiki
on October 19, 2009
in Linux, MacOS X, Ubuntu, WiFi and Windows
. 0 Comments

A friend of mine has just bought a netbook - a Samsung… I tell everyone I love my Lenovo and they buy Samsungs anyway - and he noticed how slow its wireless networking was compared to his MacBook.

I fired up my Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 and my ancient G4 PowerBook and I found the same thing too.
I used broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk and did each test twice. My friend and I both have 02 broadband and I’m guessing we have the same router.

Lenovo Windows Netbook - 1.66GHz Atom - via 802.11g wifi running WindowsXP
5872 kbps download
788 kbps upload

Old Powerbook G4 - OS X - 1.66GHz PowerPC - via 802.11g wifi
11144 down
793 up

Lenovo Netbook - WinXP via ethernet
13936 down
772 up

But here is the really interesting thing…

Lenovo Netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix off a USB stick:
Download speed 11950 Kbps
Upload speed 927 Kbps

So with the same hardware, the Lenovo netbook’s wireless networking appears to be twice as fast under Linux - and Linux running off a USB stick to boot. I tried fiddling with the Broadcom settings in WinXP but it didn’t make any difference to the reported speeds. Very, very odd. Maybe a virus checker or firewall is slowing WinXP down?