The Perfect Hackintosh Mac Pro

When Apple announced the new Retina MacBook Pro I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Thin, light and powerful plus there’s that amazing “Retina” screen. What more could someone ask for at $2,799?

Apple Retina MacBook ProWell in my case, I ask for twice the RAM (16GB) for an additional $200. Then there’s the processor which is fabulous at 2.6GHz but I’d always wonder how much faster my video would render with that extra 100MHz so another $250. The stock hard drive is a hefty 512GB SSD, which was enough for me since once my video/photo is edited, it all goes back onto my Drobo. Since it is 100% non-user repairable, I have to add AppleCare, $350.

The total, after tax, is now $3,911.83. Luckily I have a situation where I can get it for about $700-1,000 less, especially if I drop the CPU to 2.6GHz. That’s still a lot of cash and in the end, is the Retina MacBook Pro the best option? Continue reading

Engadget… Why I Oughta!

My AppleTV has been acting up… I think it might have something to do with the fact it gets two trillion degrees…  There is a fan in there but damn, that thing gets hot.  I opened it up to replace the hard drive, using Engadget’s directions.

First, let’s look inside

Fan vent along the left, fan on the bottom left, audio/video, ethernet, usb, power inputs on the bottom.  Power supply along the right etc etc, nothing special (cough, this thing is fucking crazing).

Sadly, my upgrading of the measly 40gb drive to a 160gb drive didn’t go so well.  Engadget’s directions didn’t quite work.  Hard to mess up terminal commands…

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/Users/justex07/AppleTV.img count=1335 bs=1024k

dd if=/Users/justex07/AppleTV.img count=1335 of=/dev/disk1 bs=1024k

2732016  309849759 

gpt add -b 2732016 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk1

diskutil eraseVolume “Journaled HFS+” Media /dev/disk1s4

gpt add -b 3141672 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk1

Plus a few gpt commands…  Well, no go.  Put the old drive in and it works well enough.  I’m just going to go the lame-oh way and have a kit shipped to be, pre-formatted hard drive.  Thanks Weaknees.com.

The thing is… After you get all of the tools, the Weaknees’s deal is as cheap or cheaper than doing it totally ourself.  Who knew?!

Calibrize Isn’t So Dumbassy

I was a little to hard on the Calibrize people… I admit it.  I guess it’s the moodswings I’m getting these days 😉

The creator of the software was kind enough to make a comment regarding why there are macs on the website when the software doesn’t work on a Mac, unless you run Windows on the Mac using Bootcamp or some similar software.

By Igor on Feb 22, 2008

Hi,
I’m the idiot who came up with that software so I guess I should explain.
The pictures is what we have. We use Macs. However, most of our customers use Windows and are therefor missing out on the built in calibration utility that Apple ships with its computers. We simply made a (more or less) similar utility for Windows to at least get our customers in the right color ballpark.
Obviously, because there is no use for Calibrize on Mac, we never bothered to develop it.

So, anyways, they make a great piece of software that is free for those poor unfortunate souls who are stuck running Windows.

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Aperture 2 Released, Invalid?

Apple sent me a serial for the new Aperture 2 software which was released today.  I was pretty excited about installing it and getting to play around with the new goodies.  iPhoto seems to crap out on me around 20gb.  Right now I’m at about 40gb and, it’s just not panning out so well.  I guess it isn’t really iPhoto’s fault, it just wasn’t made to handle 4mb pictures, especially thousands of them.

So, Aperture fills the gap that iPhoto leaves.  They supposedly integrate but I have never been able to get my iPhoto to talk to the previous version of Aperture.  I was hoping I could use this new version but… Here’s what I get when I copy and past my serial.

Ugh.  Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to pick up a copy in the store instead.

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Awe, that’s Disappointing

So, I found out who sent the first mystery voicemail.  While I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t from some psycho gay boy… it gave me an idea.

I think I’m going to get a voicemail line and put the number all over the place, in random cities, with those stupid “for a good time call”… and just see what happens.  Could be fun huh?

In other news, I pre-ordered Mac OS X Leopard today.  Yay!