The rather dark grey legality and tenuous maintainability of netbook hacktintoshes aren’t things I want to blog about incessantly, but enough has happened in the two weeks since the last post to call for a sequel. For good measure, there are also some further impressions regarding the hackintoshed Dell 10v. And for reference, here’s the original Mac netbook post from November 4. For further information, many of the websites linked to in this and the previous post are excellent resources.
Category Archive
Posts in Apple
How desperate are you for a Mac netbook?
Ever since the surprise success of the Asus EEE netbooks, Mac users and fans have been hoping and wishing that Apple will ship an ultra-small laptop form factor of their own.
This "MacBook Nano", for example. By Mickphoto
Apple hasn’t. So motivated hackers have been busily wedging Mac OS X into other company’s laptops as well as they could. This is not as easy as it might sound; options are limited to those computers with technical specifications closest to what Apple supports in its own products, patching the system to accommodate, compensate for, or ignore the remaining differences.
Enough progress has been made that even people who have no clue how to diagnose BIOS or edit kext files can do a passable job of putting Mac OS X on computers not made by Apple. Some do it purely out of being able to, some do it under the illusion that this will be an easy way to have a Macintosh for a fraction of the price of a real one. (Edit, Nov 4: An addendum about how the Apple taketh away and the Apple giveth back at the end of this post.) (Edit, Nov 17: There is now a second post with more news about Apple vs. hackintoshing, updates, and further impressions.)
Am I 3G Yet?
If you’re in the States, and you want an iPhone 3G, and you’re curious whether you’ll be paying 50% more per month for an unavailable service, here’s some help. Note that what AT&T says you’re getting and what you think you’re getting are not necessarily the same.
AT&T’s interactive map of cellular coverage. Tick the ‘Show 3G Coverage’ button to see whether the big blue smear of high-speed data covers your house, workplace, and coffeeshop.
Cities Supporting AT&T 3G/Mobile Broadband. This doesn’t necessarily agree with the map — for example, my city’s covered on the map, but not named on the list. Click on your nearest city and see what the map indicates.
As of this posting the site’s getting hammered.
Versions for versions of Subversion
A GUI console for version control: Versions.
The content and timelines of version control systems should be ripe pickings for a graphic metaphor, but I haven’t seen any good examples of it yet. Versions treats them primarily as hierarchical lists to be clicked through. I’ll have to test before deciding whether this works in practice, but it makes sense in the telling.
Requires XCode Tools for filemerge and diff display, so this might not be the thing for casual web developers. The beta is free, while version 1 is marked as payware with no price set yet.
Our long nightmare of floating help windows is finally over
Mac OS X Hints today published a simple one-liner to prevent Help Viewer windows from floating above everything else on the screen. Open a Terminal window and paste the following line:
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -bool true
This undoes one of the worst design decisions Apple made in the latest version of OS X: To force the Help windows float over everything else on the screen. Reverting to the unloved default behavior is as simple as changing the ‘true‘ to ‘false‘ and executing the line again.
Floating windows are not inherently bad: Applications use ‘em to contain tools or display things you may use in more than one window, so that, for example, your Photoshop brushes stay in the same place on your monitor no matter which image you’re editing. What makes the floating Help Viewer window bad is that it attempts to overlay everything in every app, ubiquitously. Unless you have screen real estate to burn, the Help Viewer actively prevents you from both doing a task and reading how.
Help Viewer doesn’t remember where you were and it doesn’t allow bookmarks. Closing the Help window means re-navigating to where you left off, a lot more work than simply putting it in the background and foregrounding it again a moment later. So thanks, Mac OS X Hints.
links
November 16th, 2011
American Censorship Day: Nov 16, 2011
“Today, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. [...] The government can order service providers to block websites for infringing links posted by any users. It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook. Thousands of sites that are legal under the DMCA would face new legal threats. People trying to keep the internet more secure wouldn’t be able to rely on the integrity of the DNS system.”
The improbability of persecuting trivial crimes is not the point. The opportunity to provide any mechanism for third parties to summarily censor and sentence others is the definition of vigilante law, and it is bad.
February 9th, 2011
How did WordPress win?
An extended post by a former product manager for Movable Type, comparing the fortunes of Six Apart and WordPress. Some interesting business insights, for example, in how WP made gains in the corporate blogging world, a realm that usually doesn’t seem relevant to the livelihood of blogging software companies. Turns out it is.
Bonus: In a footnote, there’s an interesting bit of gossip about the Huffington Post and Movable Type.
December 7th, 2010
U.S. to Host World Press Freedom Day in 2011
The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.
Except when inconvenient to oneself.
September 3rd, 2010
Get Automator working again in iTunes 10
Macs have a wonderful system-wide scripting tool with a GUI interface called Automator. Many people use Automator to take care of repetitive tasks involving iTunes.
iTunes 10, the latest version, breaks Automator for a trivial reason: Automator checks to make sure that iTunes is new enough to be compatible. So it looks for version 4.6 or later. iTunes is at version 10. Even though the number 10 is larger than the number 4.6, some part of Automator is treating “10″ and “4.6″ as text. Since when treated as text, “10″ comes before “4.6″ for the same reason “ant” is before “bee”; the leftmost characters are compared; if they are equivalent, then the second-leftmost are compared, and so on; “1″ is before “4″, so the comparison algorithm halts there. Automator considers the latest version of iTunes too old.
Anyway, the title links to an article about how to fix the problem. It involves hacking some XML files. If you’re not comfortable with that, you should probably wait for Apple to issue a system update. And you should probably notice that this indicates how few people within Apple can be arsed to use Automator unless required to.
There is a Horse in the Apple Store
Around these parts, there are always ponies in Apple Stores. I don’t know about where you live. Sure, I’m jaded but every so often I snap out of it and, hey, yeah. Wow.
August 7th, 2010
Jailbreak Responsibly
A neatly concise, even-handed summary about jailbreaking an iPhone, covering both the advantages and disadvantages, free of axegrinding. This would be the tl;dr version of anything I could say on the matter, if I were to jailbreak my iPhone, which I probably won’t. [via Tom Boutell]
July 12th, 2010
RIP Harvey Pekar
Pekar was, as the cliche goes, a complex man of contradictions. Famed for his self-portrait as a cranky, anonymous everyman. Widely-respected as a legitimizer of comics and pioneer in autobiographical comics, all of which he made in collaboration with a variety of artists. Pekar was one of the standard-bearers of the blue-collar intelligentsia, which has a long low-key tradition in America and especially in the Rust Belt where he spent his life. Fans of his comics are probably not aware of the many essays and reviews he’d written about music, politics, and literature, while his literary readers probably considered his comics a quirky attention-getting sideline, at best. He’s missed already.
June 2nd, 2010
Smokescreen
Interprets Flash files entirely in Javascript. Not only a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, but also because it’s primarily one person’s work. One of a couple similar projects I’m aware of, but this one seems to have the most traction.
It’s also interesting to speculate why Adobe isn’t attempting anything like this, or why they’re so closed-lipped about it if they are.
February 16th, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Series
Very pretty and pleasing to look at, but why can’t it show me today’s date entirely? Aggressive styling becomes a low-grade irritation when routine information is obfuscated, even where the full message is easy to guess.
(Update: Luke Wroblewski considers this in more detail, via Daring Fireball)