cyberetto's gleanings

Amazon Lights the Android World on Fire

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:36:27 +1100

Funny money: Louis CK earns $1 million in 12 days with $5 video

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:40:35 +1100

Funny money: Louis CK earns $1 million in 12 days with $5 video
Stan Schroeder
December 27, 2011 - 2:36PM
Read later Finding a new way of reaching audiences ... comedian Louis CK.
This post was originally published on Comedian Louis CK has proved a point: People are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for DRM-free content from a performer they love, even though it would be trivial for them to pirate the same content for free. Twelve days ago, Louis CK decided to skip the distribution, DRM, ads and everything else that goes into marketing and sale of a video, and simply offer the video of his latest performance on his website for $US5. It took four days for Louis to earn $US200,000, and another 8 days to earn a whopping $US1 million. Advertisement: Story continues below A screenshot of Louis CK's PayPal account, which he published on his website.
"The experiment was: If I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money can be made by an individual in this manner?" explained Louis in a statement shortly after the video earned its first $US200,000. Obviously, people do respect this approach, as proven by Louis's success and similar experiments by Radiohead and others in the past. In his latest statement Louis promised to give part of the money to various charities and another part to his employees as a bonus, keeping only $US220,000 for himself. All of the buzz surrounding the video didn't come out of nowhere: Louis has promoted it through various social media channels, including Twitter and Reddit. It's hard to say how easy it would be for someone - even Louis himself - to duplicate this success. His experiment proves, however that people are willing to pay for content if you communicate with them openly, shed the DRM and keep the price low Mashable is the largest independent news source covering digital culture, social media and technology.

The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going — Tech News and Analysis

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:54:58 +1100

The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going — Tech News and Analysis:

In 2011…

We spent more time in apps than browsing. For the first time ever, we used mobile apps more than opening up a browser window to access Web-based services. Flurry Analytics found that users had crossed over in mid-2011; we spent 81 minutes a day in apps versus 74 minutes in a browser. A year earlier, the tally had been an average of 64 minutes in a browser versus just 43 minutes in apps.

Piracy Is Fine For Personal Use Says Swiss Government

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:04:46 +1100

Piracy Is Fine For Personal Use Says Swiss Government
Nick Jardine | Dec. 2, 2011, 4:12 PM | 1,296 | A A A inShare
38 Image: Gnews pics
See Also: Welcome To The 20 Best Connected Cities In Europe The New National Defense Authorization Act Is Ridiculously Scary The Media's Blackout Of The National Defense Authorization Act Is Shameful Downloading music and movies without authorization will remain legal in Switzerland after the conclusion of a government study found that the practise doesn't cause enough damage to copyright holders to warrant making it illegal.
TorrentFreak reports that the Swiss study found one in three of the country's citizens over the age of 15 downloaded forms of entertainment illegally. However, it concluded that this demographic is not spending less money on entertainment as a result, so the entertainment industry may not be losing money as a result.
This conclusion means that Swiss piracy law will not be reformed; so long as you're downloading for personal use, you are within the confines of the law.
PC Magazine adds that another conclusion of the study was not that the law had to be changed to deal with unauthorized downloading but that copyright holders should adapt to the new situation.

"You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag… We all know how the rest..."

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:04:07 +1100

“You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag… We all know how the rest goes, because thanks to the Motion Picture Association Of America and their foreign associates, every time you hire a DVD, you have to sit through this ad before you get to the main menu. But in what must be the most delicious slice of irony served this year, it has just been discovered that that the music used to soundtrack this 50-second pain in the ass is actually stolen. Netherlands composer Melchior Rietveldt composed that ominous techno tune for a local film festival after being asked by anti-piracy group BREIN, who are funded by Hollywood. A few years later, he got himself a copy of Harry Potter on DVD and noticed his music was suddenly being used for much wider use than he had originally agreed to in contract. Which essentially means that when they say ‘you wouldn’t steal a television’, that doesn’t quite extend to intellectual property. Legal estimates put the amount of money Rietveldt is owed by pretty much every movie house on Earth at somewhere close to €1 million. Matters got even worse when the chairman of the board of the royalty collection agency in the Netherlands offered to help recoup the funds - but only if he could take a 33% cut. It’s bad timing particularly for the US, where the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is currently a hot topic for its intended transferral of responsibility for pirated from individuals back to small businesses and web hosts. After all, if they can’t even look after their own ads, how can they expect anybody else to abide by the law? Excuse us, we’re just going out to steal a handbag.”

- Anti-Piracy Movie Ads Caught Using Pirated Music - Entertainment News - Pedestrian TV

Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Backup, Streaming, or Torrenting Machine with FreeNAS At its...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:58:47 +1100

Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Backup, Streaming, or Torrenting Machine with FreeNAS

At its most basic, Network attached storage, or NAS, is a great way to share files on your local network. But it’s also a perfect solution for backing up your computers, streaming media across your home network, or even torrenting files to a central server. If you have an aging computer lying around, you can turn it into a NAS for for free with the open-source FreeNAS operating system. Here’s how.

First, we’ll take a closer look at what exactly a NAS is and does, then jump into how to set it up. If you want to skip the first part, you can skip straight to the setup section.

What Is Network Attached Storage?

A Network attached storage box is a computer on your network specifically designed to store files. Any computer on the network can access files on a NAS, which makes them great for bigger households, and they’re also nice for when you don’t want to store a bunch of external drives on your desk. Unlike regular file servers, NAS units are usually built for a specific purpose, like backing up your data or streaming media to other machines. They’re also usually quite low power and low cost, and they don’t require a monitor, mouse or keyboard—once you’ve installed the software, you can configure every aspect of your NAS from a web browser on your other computers.

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You can find pre-made NAS units for as low as one or two hundred dollars, and they usually come with their own software. However, if you have an old computer lying around, you can actually turn it into a NAS for free with the aptly-named FreeNAS software. It doesn’t need much in terms or resources, any old computer will probably do. Alternatively, you can buy or build a very cheap nettop that fits the specifications of what you want to do (and even hide it in some nice-looking box from IKEA) You could even strip down a $50 PogoPlug and install FreeNAS on it. The bottom line is, there’s no need to go out and buy a pre-built NAS when you can make one yourself with great, free, open source software and hardware you already have lying around.Heck, if you’ve got the money, you’re better off spending on it on an extra hard drive than you are an entirely new machine.

Here, we’ll show you how to set up FreeNAS on the computer of your choice, connect it to your other computers as if it were directly attached to them, and show you a few simple examples of how you could use it for backup, iTunes music streaming, or video streaming to a home theater PC. Photo by Andrew Currie.

Note: FreeNAS recently released a new version (version 8.0), but we don’t think it’s quite ready for prime time yet. It’s still missing a lot of the features that make FreeNAS great, so we’re going to use the now-legacy version 7 of FreeNAS.

What You’ll Need

You can install FreeNAS on a ton of different systems using a number of different methods, but here are the things you’ll need for our method:

A PC with a minimum of 192MB RAM to act as your NAS. It will also need an Ethernet connection and a bootable CD drive in it from which we can install FreeNAS onto one of its hard drives.
The FreeNAS live CD, available here (more details on that below).
A network with DHCP reservations or static IP addresses. This isn’t required, but it’s definitely preferred. If you don’t have this, managing your NAS can get pretty annoying, since its IP address will change whenever you reboot it (as will your other computers’).

FreeNAS is actually designed to run on a flash drive or compact flash card rather than one of the drives in your computer, but since many computers (especially older ones, like the one you might recycle into a NAS) don’t support booting from USB, we’re going to install FreeNAS to the hard drive for simplicity. If your computer supports booting from USB, you can actually use the live CD to install FreeNAS to a 2GB flash drive and run FreeNAS from that flash drive instead, keeping it plugged into your NAS at all times.

Installing FreeNAS

To install FreeNAS, you’ll need the FreeNAS live CD. Head to this page and click on the latest stable build of FreeNAS 7. Download the live CD image that applies to you—that is, if your NAS has a 64-bit capable processor in it, grab the amd64 version. If not (or if you aren’t sure), grab the i386 version. Burn it to disc using something like IMGBurn for Windows or Burn for Mac, and stick it into a computer (any computer, it doesn’t matter if its your NAS or not).

Head over to your NAS box and boot up from the live CD. It’ll take awhile to boot up, but once you get to the FreeNAS menu, pick option 9: “Install/Upgrade to hard drive/flash device”. Pick option 2 on the next screen, “Install embedded OS on HDD/Flash/USB + DATA + SWAP partition” (if you’re installing on a flash drive, you can pick option 1 instead). Pick your CD drive and hard drive from the lists it throws at you, and say no to a SWAP partition (unless your computer has less than a few gigs of RAM, in which case it might be a good idea to create a SWAP partition that’s twice the size of the RAM in your machine). It will format your drive for you with the UFS file system, and install FreeNAS to a small partition at the beginning of the drive.

Remove the live CD and boot up your computer. You should boot into your new FreeNAS installation, and come up with the same menu the Live CD gave you. This time, pick option 1, “Assign Interfaces”. Pick your ethernet port from the list (there’s probably only one option), then pick “none, Finish and exit” on the next page. Next, pick option 2, “Set LAN IP Address”. Using DHCP should be fine, unless you’re using static IPs, in which case you can hit “no” and assign it an address yourself.

When you’re done with all the network configuration, it should spit out an IP address for you. This is how you’ll access the web interface to configure everything on your NAS, so make a note of it and head over to your desktop computer. You can now unhook the keyboard and monitor from your NAS; you won’t need them anymore.

Sharing Your FreeNAS Drive with a Desktop Computer

To access the web interface, open your web browser and type in the IP address you copied down at the end of the installation process. When you first open it up, it’ll ask you for a username and password. Type inadmin for the username and freenas for the password to gain access.

The first thing we want to do is change these to something a bit more secure. Click on the “System” menu at the top of the page and hit “General”. Under WebGUI, change the username to whatever you want, and click save. Go to the Password tab and change your password as well.

Next, we’ll add our hard drive(s) to FreeNAS. Hover over the Disks menu at the top of the page and click on Management. Click on the Plus sign to add a new one. On the next page, choose your disk from the “Disk” dropdown menu, type in a description if necessary, and hit Add. The rest of the default settings should be fine for now. Make sure you hit “Apply Settings” back on the Disk Management page when it takes you back there.

If you’re running FreeNAS off a flash drive, head to Disks > Format and pick your disk from the dropdown menu. Choose “UFS (GPT and Soft Updates)” and give it a volume label. Hit Format disk. If FreeNAS is installed to your internal hard drive, you can skip this step since you formatted it when you installed FreeNAS.

Next, we need to give that drive a “mount point” in FreeNAS. Head to Disks > Mount Point from the top menu, and click the plus sign. Pick your disk from the dropdown menu. Give the mount point a name and a description if you like. I also turn off “foreground/background file system consistency check during boot process” here, since that’s caused problems with slowdowns and crashes for me in the past. Click the Add button and once again, hit Apply Settings on the next page.

We’re almost there! The last thing you want to do is share that drive with your other computers on the network. For this example, we’re going to use CIFS, since it’s compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux machines (If you’re in a Mac-only household, I recommend researching AFP instead, since it’ll be a bit easier to set up). Head to Services > CIFS/SMB and hit the Enable checkbox in the right corner. You can change its NetBIOS name, workgroup, and description if you so choose, then scroll down and hit “Save and Restart”.

Click on the Shares tab at the top of the settings page, and click the plus sign. Give it a name, comment if desired, and hit the “…” button to tell it which of your FreeNAS drives you want to share. The default settings should be fine for most people, so go ahead and hit Add.

That’s it! You should be able to access your network-attached drive from any computer. In Windows Explorer, just type \\192.168.0.10 into the navigation bar, using your NAS’ IP address in place of the example I’ve provided. You should see your NAS show up and you can browse it, create folders, add files to it, and so on. For easy access, you can right-click on it and hit Map Network Drive to put it under My Computer. You should be able to do this with every other computer on the network, and easily share files between all of those computers.

Three Cool Ways You Can Use Your NAS

That’s all fine and dandy, but you can do more than just store files on the network. Here are a few cool things you can do with your NAS and how to set them up.

Backing Up Data to Your NAS

Since a NAS can hold many large drives, it’s a popular option for backing up data. FreeNAS recommends Rsync for backup, but I’ve found that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Instead, I like to use previously mentioned Microsoft SyncToy, which does essentially the same thing. In addition, Mac users can use Time Machine with their NAS as long as you’re sharing that drive with AFP instead of CIFS.

Backing Up With SyncToy

To backup a folder or group of folders on Windows, download and install SyncToy and open it up. SyncToy is extremely simple to use: just create a new folder pair, using the “left” folder as the folder from your computer that you want to back up, and the “right” folder as the folder on your NAS to which you’re backing up those files. You have three different types of sync: Synchronize, Echo, and Contribute. Synchronize will keep the two folders in sync at all times, so if you change or delete something on one side, it’ll sync those changes to the other side. Echo will only sync changes you make from the left side (your computer)—if you change or delete anything on the NAS, those changes won’t be synced back. Contribute is my preferred method. It does the same thing as Echo, but won’t sync over deletions. This means if I accidentally delete a file from my hard drive, it’ll still be on my NAS, and I can go grab it and replace it. When you’re done, you can run your first sync and make sure all the files copied over correctly.

SyncToy, unfortunately, only runs when you tell it to, so if we want to automate this process, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Open up your Start Menu and type “task scheduler” into the search box, and start up Microsoft’s Task Scheduler program. Click “Create New Basic Task” in the right sidebar, give it a name, and set it to run daily (I usually choose around 2am, so it runs while I’m asleep). When asked, tell it you want to start a program. At the next screen, browse into C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.1 folder and choose SyncToyCmd.exe. Type -R into the Arguments box, hit next, and finish setup.

This will run SyncToy in command line mode each day. Note that you can open up SyncToy at any time and add more folders to your backup, and your task will run through them all daily, syncing over any new or changed files to your NAS for safe keeping.

Backing Up With Time Machine

If you want to back up with Time Machine, you’ll need one of the drives in your NAS shared through AFP instead of CIFS, as described in the “Sharing Your FreeNAS Drive” section above. If you do, you can head into Services > AFP > Shares on the web interface, edit the settings for that share, and pick “Time Machine” from the “Automatic Disk Discover Mode” dropdown. The next time you open up Time Machine, your NAS drive will be available as a backup disk.

Note that to do this, you’ll want to mount the NAS drive at logon, which you can do by opening up System Preferences on your Mac, going to Accounts > Login Items and dragging the NAS drive from your desktop right into the login items window. That way it will always be connected and Time Machine will be able to access it at all times.

Streaming Media to Other Computers From Your NAS

If you have a home theater PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or other UPnP-enabled device, you can stream media straight from your NAS with just a few tweaks. We’ve talked about UPnP before, so you might already know how easy it is to use—and FreeNAS’ setup is no different.
To get started, head into the web configuration for your NAS and go to Services > UPnP. Click the Enable checkbox on the right hand side and give your UPnP server a name. Under “Database Directory”, click the “…” button and browse to a folder on your NAS where you want the UPnP configuration file stored (it doesn’t really matter where this is). Then, head down to Content and click the “…” button to point FreeNAS to the folders you want to share. In this case, we have a “Media” folder we’ve created in which we’re storing video, so we’ll pick that and hit the “Add” button to add it to the list. You can add multiple folders from all over your NAS, and it can stream them as long as they contain movies or music.

Some devices, like the Playstation 3, may require you to transcode your higher-definition videos, so check the “enable transcoding” box if necessary. Then hit Save. If you head over to your UPnP device and search for servers, you should see that your NAS pops up, and you can browse your media folders and watch those videos on your TV.

Downloading Torrents Using Your NAS

One of the coolest features of FreeNAS is the ability to download torrents without the help of another computer. FreeNAS has a version of Transmission built right in that can watch folders for torrents and download them—you’ll never have to worry about keeping your main computer on, logged in, or avoid rebooting it. Your NAS can download all those torrents for you.

To set up BitTorrent support, open up FreeNAS’ web configuration and go to Services > BitTorrent. Click the Enable checkbox on the right hand side, and specify a Download Directory. This is where your completed torrents will go. Most of the other settings are fine, though I like to require encryption on the people to whom I connect, so you can tweak that setting if you want. If you want to set up a Watch Directory, that’s probably a good idea too—that way, you can drop torrent files right into a specific folder on your NAS and it will immediately start downloading them. Hit Save when you’re done.

When you start downloading a torrent, you can monitor it from a web interface by going to192.168.1.10:9091, replacing my IP address with your NAS’, of course. That way you can keep an eye on how far your torrents are coming along from any computer on your network.

Note: Some people are having issues connecting to the internet with their NAS. For some reason, it only seems to let you if you’re running a static IP address. This is very simple to address: at the main FreeNAS screen (on your NAS itself, not in the web interface), pick option 2 to “Set LAN IP Addresses” and give it the IP address of your choice. Give it the IP of your router when it asks for the Gateway. If you’ve already set up DHCP reservations as recommended, this won’t affect the rest of your network since that IP will be blocked for other machines anyways. Once you’ve got a static IP FreeNAS should let you adjust the DHCP settings again, and you can torrent away.

These are just a few of the many things you can do with FreeNAS, so be sure to check outFreeNAS’ web page for more info (as well as the Legacy Wiki, since the legacy version—the one we used in this tutorial—has even more features). Got a NAS setup in your home that you think is pretty awesome? Tell us about it in the comments.

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.

Hackintosh

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:53:50 +1100

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HOW TO

BY ADAM PASH OCT 25, 2010 9:00 AM

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How to Build a Hackintosh Mac and Install OS X in Eight Easy Steps

Building a Hackintosh from scratch—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware—has never been easier, and the final product has never performed better. Here’s how it works.

Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second). This time, to make things really easy on you, we put together a video walkthrough of the entire process. You can watch the video in its entirety below, but we’ve also broken up the video next to the accompanying text in each step below.

The Full Step by Step in Video Form

Best viewed in 720p. Background music byPex “Mahoney” Tufvession.

What You’ll Need

Before you get started building your Hackintosh, you will, of course, need a few supplies.

The Hardware

There’s no such thing as a definitive Hackintosh build, and you can find plenty of hardware that will run OS X using this or a similar method, but we’re not going to dive into every possible option here. Instead, I’ve put together a list of the hardware I’m using and that I can guarantee runs like a dream (or at least it does for me). Also, the installation process below is tailored to this hardware; you can still build a Hackintosh using other hardware, but this installation process may not work 100%.

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Here’s all the hardware I bought off Newegg for this Hackintosh build:

Antec Sonata III Case with 500W Power Supply
ASUS P7P55D-E Pro ATX Intel Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 01G-P3-N959-TR Video Card
Intel Core i7-860 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory x 2 (for a total of 8GB); the amount of RAM you choose is optional.
OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX120G 3.5” MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD): This SSD isn’t strictly necessary, but in our opinion, SSDs are one of the best upgrades you can make.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 3.5” SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
LITE-ON DVD Writer - Bulk - Black SATA Model iHAS224-06 LightScribe Support

In all, the subtotal on Newegg for all that hardware is $1,123.92; skip the SSD and the second set of RAM, and you’ve still got a solid machine for an even more reasonable $828.92.

Once you’ve got all your hardware, you’ll need to assemble your computer. Putting together the hardware for your Hackintosh is just like building any other computer from scratch. You mount the motherboard to your case, install your CPU, RAM, graphics card, storage and optical drive, and plug in all the necessary cables. It’s always a good idea to read over your motherboard’s instruction manual, but if you want a little more help, hit up our first-timer’s guide to building a computer from scratch.

The only thing you need to know is that you shouldn’t plug your SATA drives into the off-white SATA ports at the bottom of the board. All the rest should work fine.

The Software

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On the software end of the spectrum, you’ll need a few things. Apart from the obvious (the Snow Leopard install DVD), you’ll need to download some files that’ll contain the tools that let you install OS X on your machine. The method I’m using to install OS X on our Hackintosh this time around is anew one by a guy called tonymacx86, and it’s really great. I’ve added direct links to the downloads below, but all credit goes to tonymac for the dead-simple tools.

A Mac OS X 10.6 Install DVD (which you can buy from Apple)
MacOSXUpdateCombo10.6.4 package (free from Apple)
iBoot (from tonymacx86; find the iBoot download link on this post below step two)
MultiBeast (also from tonymacx86; find the MultiBeast download link on this page below step three)
Other post-installation files

I’d suggest downloading everything you need now, and putting MultiBeast, the Mac OS X Combo update, and the post-installation files on a thumb drive.

Install OS X on Your Hackintosh

At this point you should have assembled your PC, and have all the software you’ll need to install OS X on your Hackintosh. Now it’s time for the fun—and easy—part. The process this time around is surprisingly simple, but I’ll still walk you through the process step by step.

Step One: Burn iBoot to a Disc

Above I told you to download iBoot from tonymacx86. If you haven’t already, unzip iBoot.zip and extract iBoot.iso. Now it’s time to burn the file to a CD or DVD. (It’s a small bootloader, so a CD will work just fine.)

In Windows: Insert a blank disc, right-click iBoot.iso, and click Burn disc image. Select your disc burner in the next Windows prompt, and hit Burn.

On OS X: Insert a blank disc, open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app), drag and drop iBoot.iso into the sidebar, and click Burn.

Burning the disc shouldn’t take more than a minute or so, and iBoot should be ready to go.

Step Two: Adjust Your BIOS

Now that you’ve got the iBoot disc ready, it’s time to turn on your soon-to-be-Hackintosh and adjust the BIOS so your computer’s OS X-friendly. So make sure you’ve plugged in a keyboard, monitor, and power, and fire it up.

Note: At the time of this guide, I’m using the latest BIOS for this motherboard: P7P55D-E-PRO-ASUS-1002.ROM.

When you get to the first boot screen, press the Delete key to open up your BIOS. Once inside, you’ll need to make a few adjustments.

On the first BIOS screen, arrow down to the entry labeled Storage Configuration, hit Enter, and change “Configure SATA as” to AHCI. Press Escape once.
Next, arrow over to the Advanced tab, then arrow down to the section labeled Onboard Devices Configuration. Hit Enter, find the Marvell 9123 SATA Controller entry, and set it to AHCI. Press Escape.
Now arrow over to the Power section and set Suspend Mode to S3 only.
Finally, arrow over to the Boot tab, hit Enter on Boot Device Priority, and set your first boot device to boot first from your DVD drive, then set your second boot device as your primary hard drive.

Hit F10 to save your changes and exit the BIOS.

Step Three: Boot from iBoot into the Snow Leopard Install DVD

When your system restarts, put the iBoot disc you burned above into the DVD drive. Assuming you set everything correctly in your BIOS, iBoot should boot into the screen below.

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When you get to this screen, eject your iBoot disc, insert the Snow Leopard install DVD, and press F5 on your keyboard. In few seconds, the iBoot disc in the center should be replaced by a new disc labeled Mac OS X Install DVD. (If it doesn’t right away, wait a few seconds and hit F5 again.) Once it does, hit Enter, and your computer will boot into the Snow Leopard installation wizard.

Step Four: Format Your Disk and Install OS X

After a minute or two of loading up, you should be looking at the Snow Leopard installation wizard. Select your language and continue. Before you get started with the installation, however, you’ll need to format your hard drive so you can install OS X. So, from the file menu at the top of the screen, select Utilities -> Disk Utility.

Once Disk Utility loads, click on your hard drive in the sidebar and select the tab labeled Partition. Set the Volume Scheme drop-down to 1 Partition (unless you have a reason for wanting otherwise), name the volume whatever name you want, and set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Now click the Options button and ensure that GUID Partition Table is selected as the partition scheme.

Now that everything’s set, hit Apply. When you’re prompted for confirmation, click Partition.

In twenty seconds or so, your drive should be formatted and you’ll be ready to install OS X. Quit Disk Utility, and continue with the installer.

The installation is completely straightforward, so just follow along with the default settings. When the installation finishes (the time will vary—it always claims it’ll take 30+ minutes, but is normally done in 10 to 20), you’ll most likely see the Install Failed screen pictured below.

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Don’t panic! This is all part of the process. Just click restart, put iBoot back in the drive, and this time, when your computer restarts, iBoot’s Chameleon bootloader will give you the option to boot into your new installation. Select it and hit Enter.

Step Five: Update but Don’t Restart

The first time OS X loads, you’ll see Snow Leopard’s fancy welcome video. Once that’s done, OS X will walk you through the setup wizard, during which you’ll enter in your username, location, etc. Just follow along.

Once you’re finished with the setup, you’re finally at your new Hackintosh desktop. Since you probably want to use the most up-to-date release, you’ll want to update your Hackintosh before adding the finishing touches.

At the time of this writing, 10.6.4 is the most current release, so if you didn’t already download the update package above (remember, we told you to put it on your thumb drive?), grab theMacOSXUpdateCombo10.6.4 package from Apple, double-click on the DMG, and run the installer.

When the combo update finishes, you’ll be prompted to reboot. Don’t reboot your computer—at least not yet. You’ve got one thing you need to do first.

Step Six: Run the MultiBeast Package

Remember the MultiBeast download fromtonymacx86 that we grabbed earlier and stored on a thumb drive (along with other post installation files)? It’s time to use it.

Make sure you’ve plugged your thumb drive into your Hackintosh (or just re-download the files if you forgot to save them to a thumb drive) and open MultiBeast. This tool will allow you to boot from your hard drive going forward, so you don’t need to use iBoot every time you want to boot up OS X.

On the Install MultiBeast screen, tick the checkboxes next to EasyBeast and System Utilities, then click Continue. When the EasyBeast installation completes, eject the iBoot disc and restart your computer. Once you’ve rebooted, you’ve got one more step to go.

Step Seven: Copy Custom Kexts to Extra Folder, Manually Add Sound and Ethernet Kexts Using Kext Utility

Now it’s time to use those other post-installation files you downloaded earlier. So dive into the folder named Post Install and open the folder namedExtra/Extensions. In a separate Finder window, navigate to the/Extra/Extensions folder at the root of your drive (in Finder, you can just type Cmd+Shift+G, type /Extra/Extensions, and press Enter).

Now drag all the files from your thumb drive’s Extra/Extensions folder into your hard drive’s Extra/Extensions folder. Enter your password when prompted, and let Finder replace any files that already exist.

Finally, navigate back to the Post Install folder on your thumb drive. Inside you’ll see three files: An app named Kext Utility and two kext files named VoodooHDA.kext and RealtekR1000SL.kext. Drag and drop VoodooHDA.kext onto Kext Utility (enter your password when prompted), and you’ll see a window like the one above. Once it says Done, you can quit Kext Utility (click Cancel), and then this time drag and drop Realtek R1000SL.kext onto Kext Utility. (Basically this installs custom audio and Ethernet extensions to your system so they work as you’d expect.)

Step Eight: Restart and Enjoy!

Now that you’ve updated and installed a few extensions customized to your hardware, you’re ready to restart your computer, boot directly from your hard drive, and enjoy your new Hackintosh.

A Note on Performance and Other Loose Ends

I’ve been using this system for a couple weeks now, and in all my testing, everything’s been working like a charm. If you’re interested in benchmarking, here’s how my build fared on Xbench (spoiler: the total score was 303.38).

As I mentioned above, you don’t need to buy a pricey SSD (a regular hard drive will work fine), but the system with the SSD is fast, especially on startup. I’ve added a handful of startup applications to my login items, including apps like Chrome. When my system boots, all of my startup applications are running before my desktop fades in from blue—it feels more like resuming from sleep than rebooting.

Another thing to note: About this Mac identifies the processor as i5, but it’s a superficial issue. You could manually edit the text file that populates those fields, but I won’t go into that here.

Finally, keep your iBoot disc handy. In the event something does go flaky, especially if you end up having any problems booting directly from your hard drive, you’ll likely want that iBoot disc on hand for troubleshooting.

Huge thanks go out to my Hackintosh-helping pals Onetrack, Stellarola, and Davide, totonymacx86 for his great tools and work, to videographer extraordinaire Adam Dachis, and to the Hackintosh community.

Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 07:17:29 +1100

Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?

What’s Really At Stake In ICANN’s Coming New Top-Level Domain System

By: Judy Shapiro Published: October 19, 2011 Judy Shapiro

Tic Toc …

ICANN’s New Generic Top-Level Domain Program is just about to kick off and I bet most of you are wondering what the heck those are anyway (don’t feel bad if you don’t know – neither did I until recently). Then, you are also probably wondering why you should care.

First, the basics. A “generic top-level domain” is the part of the domain name to the right of the dot, e.g. in “http://www.ICANN.org” - the “org” is the top-level domain (TLD). There are 22 generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .COM, .ORG and .NET, and around 250 country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) that are specific to certain countries, like .JP for Japan and .MX for Mexico.

With ICANNs New gTLD Program to commence January 2012, the doors will be thrown wide open and virtually any word can become a gTLD if the company or organization meets certain criteria:

They can pony up the hefty application fee ($185,000)
They can prove they can afford to run a gTLD year after year
They can justify why they should own a particular word as a gTLD – e.g. a travel company is unlikely to be successful at justifying buying “.Apple” as a gTLD but they can justify buying “.adventure”

If a company can meet these criteria - then congratulations – they’ve just become a registry. Amazon can buy “.books” and JetBlue can buy “.fly”. And if two companies want the same word and can’t reach an agreement on their own, an auction commences with the word going to the highest bidder.

The application process itself also has significant impacts because, by default or design, it seems optimized to drive a gTLD land grab within a very short, four month time frame. All applications are closed and not publically disclosed until after the brief application period is over (on April 12, 2012). With no assurances of another application period, many companies will feel compelled to take advantage of this possible 1x only event.

As to the “so what” of all this - well - there’s a long list:

"EU extends music copyright to 70 years Sir Cliff Richard was at the forefront of the campaign to..."

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:30:05 +1000

“EU extends music copyright to 70 years Sir Cliff Richard was at the forefront of the campaign to extend copyright
Musicians are set receive royalties for their songs well into their old age under a new EU ruling. Regulations approved on Monday extended copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years. It means that recordings like Cliff Richard’s Move It, which fell out of copyright in 2009, will now continue to earn money for the musicians involved. The move has been welcomed by the music industry. Presenter Jools Holland called the ruling “fantastic news”. “Artists put their hearts and souls into creating music and it is only fair that they are recompensed in line with the rest of Europe,” said Holland who also performs and records his own music. “It’s important that creators get paid for the work they do and this extra 20 years is much deserved.” Abba star Bjorn Ulvaeus said the extension of copyright would give him control over the use of his songs. “Now I won’t have to see Abba being used in a TV commercial,” he said, “and the thousands of lesser known musicians around Europe who are enriching our life and culture can get the fair reward in return for their work that they deserve.””

- BBC News - EU extends music copyright to 70 years

Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide - NYTimes.com

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:46:02 +1000

Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide - NYTimes.com

Smith threatens to out rich who don't help others

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 09:33:26 +1000

Smith threatens to out rich who don't help others

Copyright: Forever Less One Day « Grey's Blog

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 07:02:46 +1000

Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:29:23 +1000

Apple Now Has More Cash Than The U.S. Government

Android’s Dirty Secret: Shipping Numbers Are Strong But Returns Are 30-40% | TechCrunch

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:16:17 +1000

Android’s Dirty Secret: Shipping Numbers Are Strong But Returns Are 30-40% | TechCrunch

On Air Highlights:Phone tapping in Australia the highest in the world

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:04:39 +1000

On Air Highlights:Phone tapping in Australia the highest in the world

Opendedup

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:20:25 +1000

Opendedup

The Top 10 Things Leaders Should Hear From Their Teammates | TerryStarbucker.com

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 08:48:10 +1000

The Top 10 Things Leaders Should Hear From Their Teammates | TerryStarbucker.com

Gartner: 141 Million Consumers Will Spend $86.1 Billion Using Mobile Payments In 2011 | TechCrunch

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:00:56 +1000

Gartner: 141 Million Consumers Will Spend $86.1 Billion Using Mobile Payments In 2011 | TechCrunch

Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy? - Geek Feminism Wiki

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:09:51 +1000

Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy? - Geek Feminism Wiki

The Key Subtle Notes From Apple’s Earnings Call | TechCrunch

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:04:38 +1000

The Key Subtle Notes From Apple’s Earnings Call | TechCrunch

cyberetto's gleanings

Amazon Lights the Android World on Fire

Funny money: Louis CK earns $1 million in 12 days with $5 video

The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going — Tech News and Analysis

In 2011…

Piracy Is Fine For Personal Use Says Swiss Government

"You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag… We all know how the rest..."

Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Backup, Streaming, or Torrenting Machine with FreeNAS At its...

Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Backup, Streaming, or Torrenting Machine with FreeNAS

What Is Network Attached Storage?

What You’ll Need

Installing FreeNAS

Sharing Your FreeNAS Drive with a Desktop Computer

Three Cool Ways You Can Use Your NAS

Backing Up Data to Your NAS

Backing Up With SyncToy

Backing Up With Time Machine

Streaming Media to Other Computers From Your NAS

Downloading Torrents Using Your NAS

Hackintosh

How to Build a Hackintosh Mac and Install OS X in Eight Easy Steps

The Full Step by Step in Video Form

What You’ll Need

The Hardware

The Software

Install OS X on Your Hackintosh

Step One: Burn iBoot to a Disc

Step Two: Adjust Your BIOS

Step Three: Boot from iBoot into the Snow Leopard Install DVD

Step Four: Format Your Disk and Install OS X

Step Five: Update but Don’t Restart

Step Six: Run the MultiBeast Package

Step Seven: Copy Custom Kexts to Extra Folder, Manually Add Sound and Ethernet Kexts Using Kext Utility

Step Eight: Restart and Enjoy!

A Note on Performance and Other Loose Ends

Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?

Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?

What’s Really At Stake In ICANN’s Coming New Top-Level Domain System

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