Apple is charging way too much for Desktop computers

The image speaks for itself.

How to use an SSD in Windows properly

This HowTo is to provide the common tweaks used to optimize your new SSD for Windows 7. I would recommend checking the performance of your SSD before and after these tweaks to see how they impact your performance. I recommend using AS SSD Benchmark to check your performance.

Download streaming/flash videos from JW player

Have you ever come across that dreadful JW player that you can't find a way to download streamed videos?

I know one can dig enough in this area but I will try to enlighten some of that here.

First of all, download rtmdump and Chrome as your browser. let's hope you are using Chrome as your browser. Right click anywhere in the page, select "Inspect element" and a new pop-up window will appear that lets you look at the code. Find the part (Chrome puts a blue-ish canvas when you select a part) and open all the nodes ( click on the arrows) to find exactly the part where the video is located in your page. You must reach up to a point where the last node of your video will look like this:

Why pandas are black and white...

After move, eat, learn i want to share this with you.

Move, eat, learn

Recently I watched these 3 shorts... I liked them, so here's showing them to the world.

AR5BXB112 in Windows (Wifi @n)

--
Edit
Check here for the latest drivers. These one, finallly, have the speed when you are connected to a network (Mbps).
Edit--


Well, if you wonder how you could use your AR5BXB112 in Windows (it works out of the box in OSX) then you should download the latest drivers from here.


Remember that our chipset is called AR9388. So any 938x should do.

Ultrabooks' fighting hour has come

I currently own a very classy Macbook Air (mid 2009), but I think that my next laptop won't be as expensive as the one I bought two years ago. That is mainly due to the fact that ultrabooks start emerging in the PC area as well, bringing the prices down.

What I currently envy is Lenovo's U300. I think it is sexier than Macbook Air and still incorporates many attributes that only Apple had back in the day that I bought mine. The competition is rather strong and Toshiba's also has joined the bandwagon announcing Portegé z830. Finally you can see Acer's attempt to this area, called S3....

The pricetag? Well, below 1000$ which means no further than 800€. And I had spent on my Macbook Air more than 1750€. Times are a changing...

Steve Jobs passes away...

From Apple's site: Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

Flash videos in Lion...

I updated my OSX a while ago and ran into some problems.

One of them is that whenever I go to any video site to watch videos (youtube, vimeo etc.), flash always renders a few frames and then loops endlessly the rest. This is due to a change in hardware acceleration in OSX. So, until Adobe updates its flash player, just right click in the video and disable hardware acceleration.

Delta Goodrem - Lost Without You (US version)

I know it is not Unix stuff but I had to share with something that a friend shared a while ago... One of my favorites. Never knew she had done a different version for the US...


Original Video

Avisynth to select parts

Well this should do the magic when you want to see if what you are encoding has the right lines...

Trim(1000,168438)
SelectRangeEvery(4000,250)

Trim: The first value of Trim should be the starting Frame of the movie. I mean after showing the starting credits. Then second value is before the End Credits start. You can get these frame numbers by opening your script using AVsP and using the Bar to move your video from starting to end. Alternatively you can select a particular scene by using the starting and ending Frame number of that scene.

SelectRangeEvery: In this example, 250 frames will be encoded every 4000 frames. So frame 0-250, 4000-4250, 8000-8250, etc., would be encoded. You can adjust those values as you please to encode a larger or smaller portion of the video. Just change the two values so that you end up with a 5 minute sample. Change the numbers and use the bar to see how much video time have you selected.

Create a bootable usb flash drive to install fresh Mountain Lion 10.8

LAST UPDATED: January 3, 2013


If you're interested in running Mac OS X, but you don't want to pay ridiculous prices for a normal Mac, then a Hackintosh just might be for you. Right now, the newest iteration of OS X is 10.8, known as Mountain Lion. Installing Mountain Lion on a PC is pretty much the exact same as installing Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). This guide is based off tonymacx86's method for installing Mountain Lion, except that we cover it with more detail (and pictures!).

Google +motorola Mobility

Read here about el Goog's fresh acquisition

Rooooaaaaar (or else OSX Lion on my PC)

Well, time to upgrade to Lion...

1. Download the app from the store.
2. Install it on your hard drive
3. Boot back into your existing Snow Leopard installation.
4. Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility
5. Highlight your Snow Leopard drive in left column.
6. Choose the Partition tab, and Click the + to Add a Partition.
7. Name the secondary partition Installer with a size of 8 GB and click Apply.
8. Click Partition & then close Disk utility
9. Download xMove & mount your Lion InstallESD.dmg (otherwise I got a "failed" notification in xMove)
10. Double-Click xMove, and choose Installer as Destination. (be careful because the default is your hard disk drive that you have your Snow leopard installation)
11. Reboot- at the Chimera boot screen, choose Installer
12. It will boot directly to a familiar Mac OS X Installer complete with Disk Utility.
13. Install OS X Lion over existing Snow Leopard or onto any empty drive or partition.

If you've installed directly over an existing Snow Leopard installation, you're done! You should already have done proper post-installation steps on your existing Snow Leopard drive. Otherwise you must run the Multibeast in order for your installation to work flawlessly... Check here if you are doing this as a fresh install for the Multibeast options needed for my motherboard.

Fix Incorrect Clock Settings in Windows When Dual-Booting with OS X or Linux

In a previous post I had described how to make Ubuntu not change the clock in UTC so as to get the right time in both Windows and Ubuntu. Well, since this is an issue of Windows, as both OSX and Linux have another time setting I must say that this supersedes my previous post. Below lies a "fix" for Windows...

If you dual boot your Windows PC with OS X or Linux, you may have experienced a problem in which your clocks reset themselves incorrectly every time you boot into Windows. Here's a simple registry edit to fix that.

Essentially, the incorrect clock setting happens because OS X and Linux use GMT time while Windows tries to synchronize with your local time zone, getting confused when you reboot between the two. Apple's own Boot Camp drivers for Windows are supposed to fix this problem, though some users have noticed that it still happens even with the drivers installed, and some Linux users are left out in the cold. Furthermore, if you have a Hackintosh, you can't install the Boot Camp drivers, so you'll need to find another way around the problem.

To fix it, just hit Start and type  regedit.exe  in the search box. Hit Enter and navigate to  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Right click anywhere in the right pane and hit New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name it RealTimeIsUniversal, then double click on it and give it a value of 1. The next time you reboot from OS X into Windows, you should notice that your clock actually displays the correct time.


from lifehacker

C media 8738 (Speedlink sl-88) in osx 10.6.8, 10.7, 10.8

Ok, I know that supposedly we had worked the audio thing kinda sorted out, but I wanted to use my audio PCI card because then I could use it to have 5.1 analog sound to my speakers and not having to buy new ones through motherboard's SPDIF.

First of all I disabled the Azalia audio codec in BIOS.
After many kernel panics and restoring my installation, what I did was to download from shagui this file (originally from here), having to install it both in Extra/Extensions and in System/Library/Extensions and then running Kext Utility 2.3.2 so as to recreate caches...

Now everything is working as it should and I get audio from my sound card. Maybe one day we will be able to hear 5.1 in OSX. I have collected what you will need in the following file (you will redirected to google docs, where in top left you will be able to download the original file through File->Save as Original)

-edit
The same applies for 10.7 (else known as Lion)

TQM 2010

NTFS support in OSX 10.6 and later

In Terminal, type diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name, where volume_name is the name of the NTFS volume. From the output, copy the Volume UUID value to the clipboard.
Back up /etc/fstab if you have it; it shouldn't be there in a default install.
Type sudo nano /etc/fstab.
In the editor, type UUID=, then paste the UUID number you copied from the clipboard. Type a Space, then type none ntfs rw. The final line should look like this: UUID=123-456-789 none ntfs rw, where 123-456-789 is the UUID you copied in the first step.
Repeat the above steps for any other NTFS drives/partitions you have.
Save the file and quit nano (Control-X, Y, Enter), then restart your system.

from macworld

-- edit
I removed it because Windows kept asking to check the system every time OSX made a change in its partition...

-- edit 2
Well, well, well... NTFS in OSX is just rubbish. I just lost some files!!!! Damn you OSX with NTFS support.

10.6.8 osx on my PC

Ok, so I was curious to see if my OSX would run properly from my PC and I started fresh.
To sum up, my rig is a GA Z68A-D3H-B3 motherboard, a 6670 Radeon(this really doesn't matter as long as it is one of the compatible GPUs), Intel i Core CPU is necessary), and the rest don't really matter. For checking out whether or not to buy something just check the list of supported hardware straight from Apple. The video cards have something weird (http://netkas.org/?p=757), 6670 is Apple's 6770M for example. You should check it out if you want a complete Custom Build. Check this out as well.

As there are numerous implementations, I preferred the community wide tonymacx86 way.
So this is what I did:

1. booted iBoot 3.1.1
2. installed OSX 10.6 retail (on HD)
3. reboot over iBoot to my new HD
4. Remove the ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin.kext as it will cause a kernel panic when trying to update to 10.6.8. This IOPlatform.kext file is located in /System/Library/Extensions/IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins folder. (Right click on IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext > show contents, then continue following the folder tree)
5. In Terminal, type: sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
6. Run MultiBeast and select System Utilities to rebuild kext cache (yes again). If multibeast fails, install kext utility from multibeast and then run that from your applications.
7. Reboot and update 10.6.8 (still keeping the iboot disk in the drive)
8. Don't restart after 10.6.8 update. Run multibeast again and select easybeast + run and install chimera. Once chimera is done installing reboot your computer after you remove the iboot disk from the cd drive.
9. Once you're back at the desktop. Run multibeast again and select:
   System Utilites, Drivers & bootloaders > kexts and enablers > network > Realtek Gigabit Ethernet (just tickbox the last one),
   then Customizations > system definitions >iMac > iMac 12,2
   then Customizations > Boot options > 64-bit Apple Boot Screen (that is to load a 64bit kernel, check it out with running "uname -a" in Terminal...you should not see a 386 but a x64)
   and last but never least select the appropriate aml from the DSDT database (check which version of BIOS you've got, I've updated mine to v6) to put in the Desktop and select  UserDSDT Install (this is supposedly a must to load the 64bit kernel)

edit- sound solved, just select (with both System Utilities)
Selecting ALC8xxHDA (drivers and bootloaders-Kexts&Enablers-Audio-Realtek ACL8xx)
AppleHDA Rollback (drivers and bootloaders-Kexts&Enablers-Audio-Realtek ACL8xx)
ALC889 (drivers and bootloaders-Kexts&Enablers-Audio-Realtek ACL8xx- Non-DSDT HDAEnabler) outputs the desired sound

So that's it pretty much. Everything is working as it should. Well, I haven't tested sleep but I don't care that much, although the DSDT should enable a proper sleep...

Glad to see this proof of concept become a reality.

Click here to see how to upgrade to Lion.

Plymouth startup with fglrx

This is by no means a fix for supporting your resolution, just a workaround to see a graphical startup rather than lines...


Start with sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
Edit grub line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vga=792"
For vga codes -the essential part- look here
Then, echo FRAMEBUFFER=y | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash

Last but not least sudo update-grub

To choose from alternative plymouth startups
sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth
sudo update-initramfs -u

link

RT2870 wifi issues

Everytime I attempt to connect to a wireless network, the Network-Manager app takes forever to connect but never succeeds.
Apparently, RT2800usb and RT2870sta drivers compete to operate your wireless card resulting in no wireless connectivity.

The solution is to simply add the line

blacklist rt2800usb
in the file "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf"

P.S.: If you want to compile your own to improve data transfer...

Flash in ubuntu... no audio problem solved

Flash defaults in 0 alsa. But 0 could be another card or audio output. That is the only problem that you can get video but no audio in flash in Ubuntu.

Pavucontrol did not see the default card anymore, so I had to check for another solution (I must not have been thinking properly as pulse audio is THE solution for everything... otherwise flash locks the ALSA device)so reverse what we have just said...

First of all uninstall anything that has to do with alsa and leave pulse do all its magic.
Then sudo gedit /etc/asound.conf so as to tell each and every process to output to pulseAudio (all the other programs do so, but flash doesn't!!!)
Insert those stuff

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}




Well if it is not ok continue by issuing in terminal gstreamer-properties and choosing pulse audio as output audio plugin.
Everything should be ok... We simply told that everything that uses audio codecs should pulse. Then do whatever you want with pavucontrol
If still does not work, check with "pulseaudio device chooser" in applications->Sound & Video, and from there select your default sink (I made it start at startup in preferences).

==============================
Old version through ALSA

So, I decided to update my Ubuntu machine. It's been a while that my video card was not supported (HD6850) (old one died unexpectedly)
AMD has released its own drivers, so I decided to go back to my beloved desktop.
I installed kernel 2.6.35 as, let's face it, works with everything; I installed the video drivers; And then I decided to work to support vaapi.
While installing something must have gone wrong as I could no longer hear sound from YouTube.
Flash is in the multiverse (check repositories) in its nswrapper 32bit way. Having installed that, I can say that the next step was to change my default sound card.

Although there must be a way to do it through alsamixer, I preferred the terminal.
So i typed cat /proc/asound/modules
The result was
0 snd_hda_intel
1 snd_cmipci
And the first one was my AMD HDMI audio, which I did not want it to be first.

So I entered in sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and added these lines...

#Keep pci card to default as first sound card
options snd_cmipci index=0
options snd_hda_intel index=1

Now everything works as it should..
Hope I have helped.