I had an issue tonight where I changed my IP scheme in my house from a 10.0.1.X Scheme to a 192.168.1.X scheme. I failed to remember what the IP of my static assigned NAS was and was unable to log in until I remembered the IP. I downloaded a tool called NMAP and started running some scans on the network to find my missing IP.

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I have ordered my new Apple TV and while I wait the 3ish weeks for it to arrive I have been working to get my Movies library converted from AVI to a nice apple friendly MP4 format. I did a bunch of searching and exploring and found the best solution was to use the HandBrake Command Line Interface and run a batch process through the terminal on my entire movies directory and convert all my files without individual file interaction.

What the following process will do is scan the "source directory" for all AVI files and one by one re-encode them from AVI to MP4. This is a timely process but completely unmanaged as once you get the files in the proper source directory and start the batch process you can walk away.

I have started the batch on my AVI directory of 204 items and am waiting for the final results. The files that have been converted thus far have been perfect.

Follow the process below to run the script:

Download the HandbrakeCLI from here

Place the HandBrakeCLI file in the "Source Directory" where you have the movies you want to convert.

Create a new directory for the destination files to go

Copy and paste the following lines into a terminal window changing the source and destination directories to match your directory structure.

sourcedir="~/Movies/source"
destdir="~/Movies/destination"
cd "$sourcedir"
for i in *.avi; do
./HandBrakeCLI -i "$i" -o "$destdir/${i%.*}.mp4" --preset="Normal"
done

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With my new Hackentosh up and running on my secondary 160 gig hard drive and everything working as intended it was finally time to merge that data over to the 1TB drive and blow away everything windows on my desktop. I didn't want to have to go through the painful process of reinstalling osx since I already spend the day doing that last month. I did some searching and found the amazing and simple SuperDuper! app would do exactly what I needed.

Not only was this application simple to use but it is FREE. All I had to do was launch the app, choose my source drive and choose my destination drive and sit back and watch the magic happen. It took several hours to copy everything but I just ran it overnight and when I came down in the morning I had an exact duplicate of my OS drive.

Next I just had to run the EFI boot tool on the drive and reboot. I now have my fully functional hackentosh desktop completely windows free and fully operational.

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After several failed attempts to read the ext2 partition on my old NAS drive I decided it was time to go to the old Linux partition and copy the files from there. It was a fun adventure that took me back to my college days of multiple terminal windows and text flying down the screen Matrix style. All in all I hope it will be worth it.

I wanted to get a Linux partition without doing a full install. I downloaded a neat app called Universal USB Installer and then downloaded a KNOPPIX V6.2 image. This allows you to do a full install of Linux on the USB drive. Booting to the drive will give you a fully functioning copy of Linux allowing me to do my file copy with ease.

First step was to make the USB boot drive. I grabbed my spare 4GB thumb drive and launched the Universal USB Installer application. When you run the installer it will ask for the ISO image you want to install, I selected the Knoppix image i downloaded and created a boot flash drive.

Second Step was booting to Knoppix, this went very smooth for my desktop, after booting to the USB drive it came up right away and detected my network card and grabbed an IP all without issues.

Now it was time to mount the old hard drive, mount the network drive, then copy the files. To accomplish this I did the following:

First, find the source drive by running the following command:

fdisk -1

I found that the disk I wanted was /dev/sdc2

Now I create a mountpoint for the drive by running the following command:

mkdir /mnt/sdc2

Then I Mounted the drive to that mountpoint. I had an issue when I tried to just run the basic mount command. The drive was part of a mirror and Linux refused to mount it, after some Googleing I found that I had to specify the file-system in the mount command and it worked no problem. I ran the following command:

mount -t ext2 /dev/sdc2 /mnt/sdc2

Next I created the mountpoint for the network share:

mkdir /mnt/network

Then I mounted the network share:

/smbmount //192.168.1.32/Volume_1 /mnt/network

Finally, I ran the Rsync command that would take everything from the source and move it to the destination. The source was /mnt/sdc2 and the destination was /mnt/network

rsync -auv --delete /mnt/sdc2 /mnt/network

I am letting this run overnight to see if it will finish the copy. Since Linux fully supports the ext2 file-system and since it has already gone further then it did in windows I fully expect it to finish. I will post again with final results.

I have lots of movies to watch this weekend, it better work!

*edit - 8 hours later and it is still copying!

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When I left off last night, I had installed my new drives in my NAS and formatted one of the 2 drives. When the Dlink DNS-323 told me that it had to format the second drive after finishing the first, which took 30 min, I decided that I could not wait any longer and would pick up in the morning before work. While the first drive was formatting I moved one of the old drives from the NAS to my desktop and installed Linux Reader, a tool that would allow my Windows 7 PC read the EXT2 partition on the hard drives.

I woke up this morning all set to begin my 1TB file transfer so it could run while I was at work. I came down stairs, fired up the Windows 7 partition on my PC and launched the Linux Reader application.

I selected the drive that I wanted to restore and told it to copy over to the new partition on the NAS. I left for work hoping that Windows would not jam up and that I would have a nice clean copy of my files on the NAS ready for my use.

There is a reason people like me switch from PC to MAC ....

Apparently the 970GB file copy was a bit too much to handle and it crapped out at about 15% in. I did some more research and tried to find a solution that would allow me to use OSX to mount the drive and copy it over but everything I see is not compatible with Snow Leopard. I decided to give this Linux Reader another try but I am going to restore 1 folder at a time hope that it doesn't crash out again.

2 hours later ... no go. The next step is to get a Linux boot disk made and boot into a Linux OS and try to get the copy running that way. I love how this would have worked in any other version of windows or any other version of OSX but Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are incompatible. I suspect my next blog entry will be, "Running Linux on an MSIx58 with an Intel i7".

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It happened, I didn't think I could do it but I did. I finally filled up the 1TB of storage on my DNS-323 NAS. I decided this week that I couldn't survive another week with less then 8GB of storage left on my precious network share so I started doing some research to find a compatible 2TB drive to replace the 1TB Hitachi drives that I bought almost exactly 1 year ago. I ordered 2 new Samsung Spinpoint HD203WI 2TB 5400 RPM SATA drives. These drives are not on the offical supported list but several users said they were working great in their DNS-323 so I took a chance and placed the order.

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I sat down this week and installed OSX on my desktop. Before I forget everything I did I am going to post. I did a LOT of Googling and blog reading before (and while) working on this project. Credit to all the people out there who did the real work for me so all I had to do was find their notes. Below is a step by step of what I did to get OCX working for me, hopefully it can help someone else and if not, I will have it documented if I ever need to reinstall.


NOTE THIS GUIDE IS NOT FINISHED YET, THIS WILL BE REMOVED WHEN IT IS FINISHED!!!

Here's a breakdown of my current configuration:

• i7 920 CPU
  
• MSI X58 Platinum Motherboard
  
• Corsair 6GB DDR3 1600MHz memory (CMX6GX3M3C1600C7)
  
• BFG GeForce 8000GTS 512MB
  
• Hitachi 1TB SATA HD
  
• IDE Light-on DVD Burner
  
• Logitech g-15 Gaming KB
  
• Logitech MX-510 Mouse
  
• Nostromo n-52e speedpad
  

Since I had a SATA Hard drive and an IDE DVD drive I was running into lots of issues getting the installer to boot. It kept hanging at "waiting on root device" prompt. This can be resolved in many ways (as found on Google) but I resolved it by using the DVD drive to boot the EFI loader cd, then installing OSX from an image that I placed on a USB thumb drive. If you have a SATA hard drive and a SATA DVD drive I suspect you will not have the same issues and you can simply install from the retail DVD.

Step 1: Download this zip file - MSI X58 SL

Step 2: Burn the LegacyBootCD.iso (found in the Zip) and boot the computer from the DVD/CD drive. You can also burn the remaining files to a second disc to make things easier later in the setup or you can re-download the zip file once you are in OS X to complete Steps 7 and beyond in this guide.

Step 3: Once you reach the boot loader insert your Snow Leopard Retail DVD, wait a few moments and press F5 then use the following parameters "-v cpus=1 busratio=20". If you are confused about the parameters just start typing on your keyboard and you'll see what you type at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4: After a series of screens of black and white text you will reach the OS X setup screen. Continue/Agree until you are presented with the location to install OSX. At this point click Utilities / Disk Utilities. Select your Hard Drive on the left side of the screen (not the partition) -- On the right side of the screen click the Partition Tab. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition, give it a name and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the format. Click apply and wait for the disk to be unmounted and partitioned. When complete you can close this window and it will return to the Screen to select destination for OS X. Click your hard drive and choose Continue.

Step 5: Wait about 30 minutes for OS X to complete the installation. At the end of the installation it will tell you that OS X was successfully installed and tell you that your computer will restart in 15 seconds. At this time open your DVD/CD drive and insert the LegacyBootCD. Let the computer restart on it's own or restart manually.

Step 6: You will once again reach the Boot Loader screen. Use the same parameters as we did before "-v cpus=1 busratio=20". After a few minutes the computer will start the welcome to OS X screen and have you complete the initial setup of entering your Apple ID / Mobile Me / etc. At this point your wired internet connection is working.

Step 7: If you didn't burn the files in the zip to a disc, download MSI X58 SL again. Inside the Zip file is Kext Helper b7, open it. Then go into the kext folder and drag the contents into Kext Helper, enter your password, and click Easy Install. When it completes DO NOT REBOOT.

Step 8: Open the Legacy Boot CD, go into extra / post-install and run the MyHackInstaller. This will take about 5 minutes to complete, do not end the installer even if it seems like it is taking a bit longer than it should. DO NOT REBOOT.

Step 9: Return to the contents of the zip file and open the VoodooHDA_pref folder. Inside run voodoohelper, when its done close the window. Next run VoodooHDA.prefane -- this will add the Voodoo settings to the System Preferences options (don't worry if it gives you some errors, that's normal). Now open the Kext Helper b7 once again and drag the VoodooHDA.kext file. Enter your password and choose Easy Install (if you closed it earlier).

Step 10: You can now Reboot the machine

Step 11: After rebooting you should have working sound, video, networking, bluetooth, dvd/cd drive. When you are notified of available software updates you can install them. This will leave you with a fully functional version of 10.6.3 and you ready to go.

Special thanks to Prasys' Blog, InsanleyMac Forums and anyone else I failed to mention. Hope you like your new i7 Hackintosh.

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I love my HP Mini 311 netbook. It is small, light cheep (free for signing up with Verizon for a year) but i love my Macs more. I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and spend some time getting OSX 10.6.3 on my HP to make it truly my portable of choice.
I bought the following upgrades:

1) I upgraded the RAM from the 1 gig onboard to the max of 3gig. This is totally optional but i wanted to get the best performance i could from the mini.

2) I replaced the stock WIFI card with a replacement Broadcom 4312HMG card that is supported in OSX (the stock card will NOT work in Snow Leopard). WIFI was a must for a netbook so i hit e-bay and picked up the card for just 15 bucks after shipping.

I used a combination of several guides posted below, i would not have been able to do this without those guides and Google to help me out.

Install 10.6

Upgrade to 10.6.3

Flash BIOS and replace WIFI Card

I followed the first and second guides to the letter and they worked perfectly. WIFI was another story all together, it took another day to get the new "fully supported" card working. Small price to pay for the result, a fully functioning 10.6.3 macbook with HDMI out and a lovely 11 inch 1366x788 screen.

Detailed instructions to follow…….
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I love my Mac but there are SOME things i do miss about a PC. Whenever I get up from my desk I lock the screen of my desktop by pressing "Windows L" and decided that I need to be able to do the same on my Mac. After spending about an hour Googling and finding several different ways to accomplish this goal I picked a method that required no 3rd party apps. These are the steps I followed to assign the "lock desktop" function to a keystroke on my Mac.
Open Automator in the Applications folder, and select Service from the screen that appears. At the top of the new Service's actions, in the Service receives drop-down, select no input from the options. Make sure that any application is selected in the second drop-down.

Add the Run Shell Script action (in the Utilities group of actions) to the Service by dragging it to the right. Add the following code:

/System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

Save the Service (Automator does not ask you where to save it, just to name it).

Next, open System Preferences and select the Keyboard preference pane. Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab at the top, then the Services group on the left. The service you created should be near the bottom of the list of Services under the General disclosure triangle.

Double-click on the right side of the entry for the Service you created and assign a keyboard shortcut. This was a bit unintuitive, because the shortcut column is not distinctly visible, so it is not obvious that you can double-click in the assigned shortcut column to add a shortcut.

Exit the keyboard preference pane to give it a try.


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