Tag: Mac

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Mac Tech

Hackintosh Upgrade 2013 – Part 1 Research

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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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Development Mac Reviews

Learning iOS Development – Day 3 & 4: Lynda

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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 Reviews Tech

Microsoft Love — Finally

201011250858.jpgI’m totally shocked and amazed by some of Microsoft’s latest offerings. If you are a Mac user, do yourself a favor and check out some of the Microsoft offerings. They have been quietly been making advances on a number of fronts:

Windows Live Office -> Windows SkyDrive: I signed up for the Windows Live Office when it first came out because I was testing all sorts of cloud based apps at the time. Microsoft has recently decided (for better or worse) to closed out Live Office and migrating all accounts to SkyDrive. While there seems to be some complaints online about this move, for the limited uses I have found for Live Office, I’m just happy about going from 5GB of free disk space to 25GB!!

Office 2011 for Mac: OMG – that pretty sums it up. Awesome features, very similar to Office 2010 on PC (which is actually a good thing for those of us who have to use PCs at work.) Connects to SkyDrive and SharePoint! I’m still playing with it and I’m pretty impressed so far with the overall functionality. I’ve delved into a little VBA coding and i’m trying to decide if I should try out the Outlook client. The only negative to adding this software to my machine – it doesn’t have anything to do with the product itself, but more my comfort level — I re-installed ClamXAV. Yeah, I’ve been burned too many times in the PC world. Now with this product (with VBA) being on the Mac, time to start thinking about security again.

Silverlight 4.0: Okay – in the past this was always a pain to install. However, I’d like to personally thank the install wizards for finally changing the install script to:

`/usr/sbin/system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml | grep “PowerPC”`;

Yup.. that’s right. It’s not looking for Intel chips anymore. It’s looking for PowerPC chip before erring out. Latest version installed without any hacking. Woohoo!

-JT

Categories
Mac Mac Goodness Tech Tip

Sharing via iTunes Playlists

201006282028.jpg Now that I’ve pretty much ended my quest for a great calendaring solution for the family, I’ve turn my attention to sharing our media. Like a lot of families, I have a ton of music, pictures, and video scattered acrossed a number of machines. I’ve corralled a lot of this data to one SAMBA share on my Ubuntu server. This is good – as now I have one central place for all data that my family can now avoid on purpose. “What server?”, “uh, where can I find that movie/song/pic?”, etc. No matter, I will win them over soon (well… eventually.)

In any event, my wife asked me last night to put some new songs on her iPhone as all she has is older music – her musice dated back to circa 2009. Biting back the first sarcastic comment that came to mind (“You can find it on the server..”), I said sure. This little exercise was going to eat through my evening. Just because everything is in one location, everyone has their own iTunes database and none of them are up to date with the contents of collection. I thought I would have to blow away her iTunes database and import everything in the library again, or I would have to at least manually add every new song. However, I found a neat little procedure that save a ton of time and thought I would share it.

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Mac

OS X 10.6.3 Updates

happymac.jpg Ahhh.. thought I forgot about you? No, no, my poor little blog, I haven’t forgotten. Look what I got. Yes, it’s new content. Yes, I know how much you like new content.

Seriously, it’s been some time since I’ve updated the blog. Shame on me, there were a number of opportunities that were perfect for the blog. I’ll start small and see if I can keep additional content coming. Out of the gate – I’d like to talk about my OS X 10.6.3 upgrade.

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