Tag: Tech

Categories
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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Categories
Blogging Reviews

Ecto .. taking a backseat?

Screen Shot 2012 01 16 at 7 52 49 PMEcto started acting up on me lately.  It may be because of new hardware, new version of WordPress, whatever.  It’s just not a smooth as it once was.  I’ve also been looking around and reading other reviews about blogging software on the Mac – and one term keeps resurfacing when it comes to Ecto: Abandonware.

It shows.  There haven’t been many posts about Ecto, no new versions, even their support forums are down (due to technical error, but still..)

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Categories
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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Categories
Mac Tech

IntelliType Pro and IntelliPoint for the Mac version 7.01

MSintelli.png

Great! It’s finally here! IntelliType and IntelliPoint v7.01 is now 64-bit compatible with Snow Leopard. I can finally go back to my Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 setup.  

The only issue is that it took literally 30 minutes to find the software. Microsoft’s site kept pointing me to an older version (v6.x) of the software no matter what combination of keyboard/mouse/desktop options I selected. The first 50 websites I found on Google pointed me back to Microsoft’s site.

I was able to find it finally on softpedia’s site, and it was mis-labeled. Here is the link. The page is labeled as Microsoft IntelliType v7.01, but it contains the desktop programs. This means that both IntelliType Pro and IntelliPoint are included in the package.

-JT