Channel 4 used to show stuff like this – Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD – even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.
Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.
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.
And you get two logos – cursor left or right to choose the OS you want to boot from.
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…
The other day after 2 hours helping to keep a radio show on air, I stepped out for a breath of air and some shopping.
In Tesco’s a man was struggling with the coffee vending machine whilst barking into his mobile phone: “Yeah, right, the thing was Barry, I had a f***ing cluster bomb, right, yeah a CLUSTER BOMB, all ready and you’ll never guess what this c*** did…”
Then I walked along Strutton Ground. This post may seem like a gratuitous attempt to mention Gabby Logan, but it’s not. It’s a gratuitous attempt to mention Strutton Ground. I like saying ‘Strutton Ground’. Try it yourself.
Anyway, I was walking along the street and a gust of wind caught a market stall with lots of glassware hanging up. It fell over. Smash. Smithereens. Shards a plenty. (There’s another word I’m using gratuitously – ‘shard’). Then a man in his 60s walked past barking about God and Satan and the other market stall holders (the ones not mourning glassware) parodied his gutteral voice and barked back that he should effing well be quiet.
There’s a street near Strutton Ground with an even better name. More on that soon. Continue reading
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?
(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:
Not yet tested:
