Category: Mac

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General Mac Tech

Corrupted BIOS on my Hackintosh

The scariest thing happen to me last night after a very long gaming session.  If you read this blog you know my daily driver is a Hackintosh.  I try not to upgrade or tweak it too much considering it’s my daily work machine.  Here’s what happened:

Earlier in the night, I had bounce the machine to reboot it into Windows 7 so that I could play some serious Battlefield 4. After about 6 hours or so (okay, maybe 8), I finally shut down for the night.  I always reboot back into the Mac side so that I don’t have to worry about rebooting in the morning, etc.  This time, when I rebooted, I heard my machine “clunk” twice.   Yes – “clunk” – not a simple click or beep.  Once the machine powered up the display, I got this error (image stolen from internet):

CorruptBios

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Mac Tech

Hackintosh Upgrade 2013 – Part 1 Research

Screen-Shot-2012-01-02-at-7.57.44-PM.png

I haven’t written to the blog lately – I’ve been more of a consumer of knowledge and really haven’t contributed anything much. I’m hoping to change this stance as lately I’ve found myself referring back to my blog entries as my own personal documentation. So I figure, why not spend a few minutes to document my stuff and create a blog post while I’m at it?

I’ve been getting into two different services that really have help me out in organizing my entertainment – Calibre and Plex. Calibre is an ebook management system and Plex manages all my audio and video items. I’ve centralized everything onto my Ubuntu server in my home office. Unfortunately, the server hardware was damage due to a loose cpu heatsink. The server would reboot every 5-10 minutes when the system was under load. This is a major issue when I got the entire family gathered around to watch a movie. It was time for some replacement parts.

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Mac Tech

Silverlight Already Installed

Silverlight.pngSilverlight for some reason decided to take a Holiday during my Holiday. Ever eager to solve a technical issue during family events, I decided to start looking around for a solution. The installer package kept telling me I had a later version of Silverlight already installed. Very frustrating.
After about an hour goggling and trying a ton of different things, I came across something that was very close to the answer:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macother/netflix-silverlight-mac-problem-installation-says/0b71af78-cb94-46e3-9629-f97c8dda1361

Talking Moose detailed a pretty good uninstall instructions. Even after following the all the steps I still had the same issue. I had to resort to the manual removal method… with a slight twist.

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Categories
Development Mac Reviews

Learning iOS Development – Day 3 & 4: Lynda

Screen Shot 2012-01-15 at 8.50.05 PM.png

It’s been awhile, but I decided to take up this subject (yet again.) Although I do still have access to Safari Online, a friend of mine lent me his copy of iPhone SDK Essential Training DVD from Lynda.com for comparison. I spent the last two days watching the video. It’s just under 7 hours, but I spread it over two days because I was watching Tebow get his butt handed to him against the Patriots (sigh, I was hoping for more.)

The video in a word is Awesome.

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Mac Tech

Hackintosh Rig – Reloaded with Lion

Screen Shot 2012-01-02 at 7.57.44 PM.png My Hackintosh rig suffered a major outage thanks to my playing around. You would think I would just leave well enough alone since I need the machine to be online. I was playing around with some of the System Information to make it more custom and I ended up losing my sound kext. I thought it would be a simple re-install of the sound driver – however, it turned into a complete system rebuild (well, at least the OS) after I kept crashing the machine with the “backup” driver I had.

No worries, no stress at all – I hadn’t backed up in months, I was moving out of state, etc. Now it’s been close to 3 months without my machine and I’ve been making do on a 13″ Macbook. I was home for the holidays, so I figured I’d go ahead and try to bring the beast back. If you haven’t read my previous posts, here is my build.

Originally I used Kalyway build and over the years I eventually went to a vanilla OS install using LifeHacker’s process. Not to let any learning opportunity pass me by, I decided to upgrade to Lion and use a new method – UniBeast (with Chimera Bootloader.) Of course, all of this was possible thanks to the tonymacx86 site. Incredibly awesome sight/resource.

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