Hardware and Lion upgrade

Posted on September 17, 2011 by jberg

So in preparation for this year’s home movie (has become a yearly thing) I needed a hardware upgrade to my Hackintosh not only to get more disc space (I’ve completely run out of that) but also to get more performance to be able to work more effectively.

My harddrive has been awfully slow and USB 2 did not offer any good experience for the external storage when working with Terabytes of Full HD movie material. The bottleneck has usually been the disc read/writes – I’ve had troubles maxing out the processor when encoding and converting videos.

So I went out and got a Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD and a LaCie 2big USB 3.0 4TB external drive. USB 3 was a bit of chance since I had no idea if I could get it to work in the Hackintosh but luckily both the USB 3.0 PCI card and Lacies drivers (10.6 version) worked flawlessly and indeed I got a lot better performance than what USB 2 ever could give (my initial test I measured about 130MB/s (about 1Gbit/s) for copying a 8GB movie from external drive to the internal SSD – way better than the 20-30MB/s or so that I previously got out of USB 2).

 

Mac OS X Lion

So as I upgraded my internal drive to SSD I also took the opportunity to also upgrade to a clean install of Lion at the same time. I did follow follow the guide that tonymacx86 provided which again proved to be successful (and a lot less painful than my first Hackintosh install). The only thing to be noted is that I still can’t get the DSDT version working, tried the UserDSDT version for my mainboard but that immediately failed to boot so I removed the DSDT and then it worked fine.

For network I installed lnx2mac driver through MultiBeast. For audio I installed the Voodoo HDA 0.2.7.3 which worked great (HDMI not tested yet though). So far so good but I have some issues that I sometimes loose the installed drivers or booting fails but re-installing or reboot does the trick – haven’t bother digging more into those issues yet.

But, man, it feels snappy now with the SSD and the tamed Lion! Looking forward to doing some hardcore Full HD video editing.

And hey, I actually bought both Lion and iMovie from the App Store fair and square; it can’t get any easier to install apps (I already find installing from DMG:s a pain) and the prices are decent as well – App Stores (not the App Store) is the future people!

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Nostalgic views of Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Posted on November 12, 2010 by jberg

Some games never get old. Lately I’ve been playing one of my old time favourites, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, in the form of OpenTTD. Here are some screenshots of the latest highlights.

It’s amazing how fun a game can be even without competition or any specific goal – that’s right even though OpenTTD has an excellent online mode I prefer to play on my own without competitors – just building beautiful tracks and infrastructure. Have a look at the full screenshot(8128×4064).

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glGears updated for Retina Display

Posted on October 20, 2010 by jberg

I just updated glGears to support full resolution for the Retina Display on iPhone 4, Enjoy! I also added a speed setting so you can set the speed for the gears.

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Cleaning my iPhone

Posted on September 14, 2010 by jberg

I was thinking of cleaning my iPhone a bit before doing the iOS 4.1 upgrade to avoid a lot of backing-up. The first obvious part to clean would be the camera roll so I searched for a solution to remove all photos at once and found a way using Image Capture.

Yummy blueberries

Well this sounded good until I realized Image Capture would delete the photos one by one. For some people with a few hundred photos that may work quite OK but if you’re like me you haven’t removed a single photo in over a year ending up with a good 2380 photos in the camera roll.

Deleting all of these one-by-one is awfully slow even completely automated. It took like half an hour to purge the complete camera roll, picking up the speed towards the end. Oh well, I will know better next time.

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Zalman CNPS7700 Fan Swap

Posted on August 31, 2010 by jberg

A great old cooler but annoying loud with stock fan. Replacing it with a Noctua NF-S12 does the trick. Inspiration from silentpcreview.


With a bunch of other acoustical improvements is my HTPC/Gaming machine is now very silent. Only problem now is the poor ventilation in the TV cabinet itself.

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Hackintosh 10.6.4 with ATI 5770 working!

Posted on July 22, 2010 by jberg

Quite long ago I updated my gaming rig/video editing machine with a brand new ATI Radeon HD 5770. Gaming in Windows 7 worked great but unfortunately did the card not work with Mac OS (at the time 10.6.2). That led to a bit cumbersome situation as I needed to switch graphics cards between Windows 7 boots and Mac OS boots :/

Now finally I rechecked the situation with Mac OS 10.6.4. Although the card was not natively supported a nice guy named Netkas fixed a way to get it to work, see his post on the topic here.

My story is as following: First updated to 10.6.4 using software update, installed the kexts provided by Netkas, removed GraphicsEnabler from /Extra/com.apple.boot.plist, changed Uakari to Vervet in aty_init plist file (changing all values containing Uakari), shutdown and change graphics card and reboot. Now it works perfect, not even any extra DVI to VGA adapter needed, many thanks to Netkas!

toUakari
Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments

glGears finally updated

Posted on May 6, 2010 by jberg

Ok, the long awaited glGears update is finally here (Download from App Store). But, well, don’t expect much I just added an FPS counter and added landscape mode support. Originally I planned to release an Universal Binary to natively support the iPad screensize but apparently Apple did not feel that glGears is suitable for the iPad. Here is their response on the rejection:

“Thank you for submitting glGears Universal. We’ve reviewed your application and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to glGears Universal, we encourage you to do so and resubmit your app built with iPhone SDK 3.2 GM by Wednesday, March 31, 5 pm PDT. Until you resubmit a new app, your current submission will appear in the Manage My Applications section of iTunes Connect as ‘Rejected’.

After a few trials of adding functionality and resubmitting they finally even called me and told me the application would need much much more functionality as it is an Universal Application. Sigh, what’s the point, the app can already be run on the iPad, only just not using the native screensize. Why don’t let me provide an optimal user experience? So all you iPad users, that’s the reason you don’t get a native app, programmatically it’s working great it’s Apple that is the problem.

On the happy side of things, I also released the source code (under MIT license) for glGears so you can compile your own Universal glGears.

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Entering Low-power and Silent Era

Posted on March 23, 2010 by jberg

For several years I’ve been running my home server on an AMD X2 4200+ machine drawing well over a 100 watts from the plug on idle. Thanks to the Nexus Breeze Case it has been fairly low noise, quiet enough to have it running in the living room without too much disturbance, but still not even close to silent. Living in a bit space constrained appartment does also an extra midi tower case feel a bit cumbersome to have.

So the other day I put together a new server which has quite different characteristics which better suite my needs.

CPU Intel Atom 330
GPU Nvidia ION (GeForce 9400M)
Memory Kingston 2GB 800MHZ DDR2
Motherboard Zotac IONITX-F-E
Storage Intel X25-M G2 SSD 80GB
Case Antec ISK 300-65
Fan Noctua NF-R8 80 x 80 x 25

Now this is more like it, sure the processing power is not what it used to be but for my server needs it doesn’t need to be much more. And thanks to the Nvidia ION and VDPAU I’m able to playback my Full HD home videos as well, which my old server not even managed to! Add the SSD disk and passive cooling and we have the perfect silent package.

Zotac IONITX-F-E

Zotac ION mini-ITX looking good

Zotac IONITX-F-E inside Antec ISK-300-65

Zotac IONITX-F-E inside Antec ISK-300-65

This baby only draws 30 watts from the wall on idle and only comes up to about 35 watts on load which also is the reason it can be run passively apart from the saved cash on the electricity bill. I probably could run this machine completely passively but just to be safe I’m using a super silent Noctua fan on the lowest RPM setting to get some kind of airflow through the case.

Antec ISK-300-65

Antec ISK-300-65 - Pretty slick and great airflow

And the form factor is just great, I can really put it anywhere I like. It ended up below the TV next to the more powerful HTPC/gaming machine I wrote about last time. Besides beeing used as the home server, hosting this blog and other things I’m actually using it for casual web-surfing and watching movies so it serves many purposes. This did of course make the HTPC part of other beast a bit unnecessary and I only fire it up when really needing more firepower but it is still needed from time to time as the Atom processor can’t cope with anything requiring a bit more crunch.

But this is about my best investment so far; low-power, silent and small. And for real, it can’t be heard at all when put in the TV cabinet, you can’t tell if it’s on or off. The price-tag of the package ended up beeing quite low as well, about 500 € total but of that did 205 € alone go into the SSD disk. You certainly could make this cheap but also bear in mind that I did not buy a Blu-ray slimdrive with this package which easily could have added another 200 €.

Many thanks to AnandTech and Silent PC Review who helped me choose these high quality parts through their reviews Zotac’s Ion: The World’s First mini-ITX Ion Board and Antec ISK 300-65 Mini-ITX Case. Also note that Intel has an updated Atom processor and Nvidia has announced the next generation ION that can boost performance of this system one notch further but I just could not myself wait for those parts to arrive at my local retailer.

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Hardware upgrade

Posted on January 16, 2010 by jberg

I got tired of my old hardware not beeing able to playback Full HD home-videos recorded with my quite new Canon Legria HF20. So eventually I got some new hardware to install.

My target was to create a combined HTPC, gaming rig and video editing machine. This might not be the perfect combination as it would need to be silent and cool but yet powerful to play the latest game and ability to edit Full HD videos without problems. The following is what I ended up with:

CPU Intel Core i7-860
Motherboard Maximus Gene III
Memory Kingston 4GB 1600Mhz DDR3
Video Card Geforce 7600 GS soon to be AMD Radeon HD 5770
Optical drive LG Blu-ray reader and writer
Case Antec Fusion Remote Black
OS Hackintosh Snow Leopard
Windows 7

Now to the install:

Maximus Gene IIIInstalling the motherboard outside the case to test everything out before putting it all into the case.

Antec Fusion RemoteNow onto the case…

Bob the builderBob the builder helps putting everything together…

Motherboard installationMotherboard installation

Power OnPower On!!

HTPC installedHTPC installed and ready.

Newborn racerNewborn racer, a real gamer!

Actually I’ve already have had this installed over a month by now and everything has worked quite well, I’ve watched a few Blu-ray movies, played a few games and edited my videos in Full HD. If only my Radeon HD 5770 would arrive soon so I could get the best out of the games!

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glGears hits more than 300 downloads in first week

Posted on November 15, 2009 by jberg

I’ve just put together the download statistics for the first week that glGears has been in App Store. I’m quite pleased with the result as the application gained over 300 downloads the first seven days from all over the world, the US is quite understandable the most represented country. The number is maybe not super great and is just plain nothing compared to what really popular applications might have but nevertheless is it a little more than a handful. This without any kind of promotion outside this blog.

It would be interesting to know how you people found the application and how you did like it. Feel free to post comments about this below or just send your greetings :)

Posted in Mobile Programming | Tagged , , | 8 Comments