YouTube Audio/Video Specs

For anyone who finds this interesting… :P Explains why HD content looks pretty shitty, and nothing sounds particularly good.

The standard YouTube video player is 640*360 in size, so you’ll want to set 360p FLV or higher as default.

Apple vs Samsung Lawsuit

So apparently there are some people so stubborn and loyal to Android that they believe Apple has no right to sue Samsung for shamelessly ripping off their design. Yes. Really.

Here’s a lovely table showing what Samsung’s “TouchWiz” looks like next to what iPhone OS looked like a whole 3 years earlier. I don’t think I need to comment on the similarities, they’re just so strikingly obvious.

It’s also interesting that when Samsung removed some of Apple’s traits (some encapsulated icons, dock background), they then copied others (page indicator above dock, red icon badges). Originality at it’s finest.

iContainer: iOS icons for Mac OS X

I couldn’t find a decent pack of these so I thought I’d make one.

Contains all icons from standard iOS app, sourced from the iPhone 4′s iOS 4.3.2 and in retina resolution, plus few extras from various places.

Simply open open the iContainer in CandyBar and apply the icons. Almost all icons are assigned to something, but you can change that if you want.

Due to the way Adium overriders it’s dock icon, I’ve also included an Adium ‘theme’ which you’ll have to apply in order to keep the icon as the iOS messaging icon.

iContainer ~ Zip Archive ~ Adium Dock Icon

Thoughts on Lion

What I like:

Three finger swipe for changing spaces – Effing finally, I’ve wanted this feature ever since getting my MBP. Sure beats using control+arrow-key.

Different wallpapers for spaces – Helps differentiate spaces in Mission Control… and looks nice :)

Launchpad – I used to launch 20 out of my 110 apps from a stack, but LP is so much quicker, as you can arrange icons where you want them and get more on screen at once. It showcases the icons pretty nicely, too.

Fullscreen apps – great from when you’re working on something a browser and you don’t want to be distracted.

Springy scrollbars – Like iOS, they only appear when you scroll and ‘spring’ when you reach the end of a page, very nice.

New system profiler – It’s simple and elegant, great for people who would easily be overwelmed by the old system profiler (now know as “System Report”).

Restore partition – The UI is very similar to the installer. From it you can re-install OS X, launch disk utility, terminal etc. It’s nice to know that you can fuck something up, and always have terminal on hand without having to worry about having a linux flash drive nearby.

Aqua is dead, long live Aqua! – Or maybe this is just a re-imagining, who knows? Anyway, it looks awesome! Aqua was starting to look very tired.

Finder update – Just looks a lot neater, if not slightly dull due to the absence of colour. Still, a nice update.

What I don’t like:

Back/forward in Safari – In Lion, B/F is a two finger right or left, but you see the previous page being revealed as you swipe. It’s just an unnecessary distraction. Also, while the page is loading you get a compression artefact laden preview image, it’s just horrible. You can still use three finger swipe for simple B/F, but you can’t turn off two finger B/F. This wouldn’t be a big deal if safari didn’t occasionally mistake a two finger scroll for B/F.

Space management in Mission Control – MC seems to be a marmite kind of deal, but I’m on the fence. I don’t really use spaces a great deal, but now you can no longer drag a window straight from one space to another, you have to select the space with the window you want to move, then drag it to one of the spaces at the top :( Before you could simply drag and drop.

Will my mac become an iPad?

No, it absolutely wont. You don’t *have* to use fullscreen apps or Launch Pad, ignore them if you want. iOS scroll bars are hear to say, but I doubt that’s a big deal for many. So far we haven’t seen the extent to which Autocorrect will be enforced, which I can imagine will be the only iOS related annoyance.

Is the Developer Preview usable?

Pretty much. The main issue I encountered was “messed up” menu bar apps. Droplr and SmcFanControl were crashing quite frequently (with no “shit’s broken” dialogue box); also iStatMenus 3 couldn’t enable any monitors for me (and other people), but it does work for some. Everything seemed pretty stable and fast, though that could be due to the fresh install. Safari is also pretty glitchy, so you’ll want a backup browser at hand. It’s worth mentioning that if your Snow Leopard partition is mounted, you can run most of the apps off it just fine, though some with “bat-shit sensitive” anti-piracy measures will refuse to launch (CS5, basically). All things considered I definitely wouldn’t install it over SL, just make a small partition (10GB will do), and install it to that.

Is it worth paying $100 to fee to join the Mac Developer program?

Definitely not. It amazes me that people are willing to do this. If you can obtain the disk image, you’re in. There is zero/none/el-zilcho DRM on the installer. Hell, the official download package from Apple is just an installer with a DMG inside *rolls eyes*. I personally just used it for a day, then got bored with re-configuring all my apps (configurations do not carry over if you’re running apps from another OS X install). Some people are hoping that the ‘official Mac developers’ will get a free copy of the Lion Gold Master (which happened last year with SL), but there’s no guarantee on that. Also Lion could end up being cheaper than the initial $100, unlikely but it could happen :P

Why I’m Vegan…

I get asked this a lot…

- Ethics – Supporting the killing of animals for our own gain is just pure selfishness, whichever way you cut it. I don’t see how it can be justified, and this is reason enough for me.

Over 90% of eggs are produced from factory farming, that means spending as little as possible – mainly on space – to produce the highest yield possible, welfare does not come in to the equation. Free-range is not much better, because laws are not clearly defined on what the term actually means. Either way, only female chicks are useful to the farmers, male chicks are disposed of through, gassing, grinding or simply bagged and discarded.

The situation with dairy production is not much better, only female cows can produce milk, the males will either be sold to the veal industry or be disposed of. When a cow has stopped producing milk they will be forcefully impregnated, normally around 4 and half months after giving birth, then having their young separated from them, usually after only after a single day. This process is repeated until she’s too old or too weak to have another baby.

tl;dr: It’s simply not an industry I’m willing to support.

- Health – I’m not going to go in to how animals proteins are harmful, simply because I’ve never read anything conclusive, I’ve never read The China Study, and I doubt I will any time soon. I can say  that I’ve started eating a lot healthier, I’m now eating more fruit and vegetables simply because having somewhat limited options means I have I’m considering what I’m eating. So in a completely indirect way, it’s helped.

- The Environment – Supposedly, the combined emissions of CO2 from the rearing of animals is larger than every car, bus, truck, bus, plane and boat on the planet combined. I’m not going to pretend I have any idea about the numbers, but when you consider that the average american consumes around 80kg of meat per year, it wouldn’t be surprising. Not to mention that thousands of acres of Amazonian rainforest are destroyed each year for the rearing of animals (and  oh, look at that, more CO2).

Anyway, if you were interested enough to read all of that, please take the time to watch Earthlings. A cut, ~40 minute version which focuses on food production can be found at WatchEarthlings.com.

How To: Fix iPhone NAND Corruption

I’ve just found this thread over at the iDroid project forums warning that doing a hard reset (home + power) can kill Android and potentially your device’s NAND. This can corrupt the Android images and prevent it from booting, and even worse corrupt the NAND preventing the  iPhone from booting in to iPhone OS or even restoring in iTunes (it would show error 28).

If this happens you can use the OpeniBoot Console to wipe the iPhones NAND and zero-out the data on it. At the console type ‘nand_erase 0 0′ and wait about ten minutes. You should now be able to restore your device in iTunes.

To prevent NAND corruption you should shut down by typing ‘reboot’ in the terminal (you will need to root permissions first, so type ‘su’). You can use Gscript to create an icon on the homescreen to perform ‘reboot’, it’s hosted on Google Code here.

A lot of people with errors upon restoring are assuming NAND corruption is the culprit, if you haven’t touched OpeniBoot before then your issue is something very different.

Installing Snow Leopard on the Aspire One via a Live Leopard Install

This method is similar to one Mechdrew posted on his site. Leopard is booted off a USB stick or HDD, allowing vanilla Snow Leopard to be install to the AAO’s internal drive, and then patched to allow it to boot. This process is time consuming so you’ll probably want to try other methods first.

Stuff what you need:
An Aspire One with 1GB of RAM (According to SL’s specs, it might let you off with 512mb, I don’t know).
An external drive >= 8GB in size.
iDeneb 1.4 on a DVD
Snow Leopard (on a disc + USB DVD drive or a disc image on an external drive)

What works and what doesn’t:

Sleep & Hibernation – KP’s when trying to resume :-/

Audio – Requires a kext, headphones and speakers work but not internal or external mics.
GMA 950 – Works out of the box at full resolution, issues with external monitors.

WiFi – Works great after swapping the card for a DW1390 which is natively supported.
Ethernet – Requires a fix.
Trackpad – Works great, even supports two finger scrolling =D
Webcam – Works out of the box.

Back up everything on you AAO’s hard drive, it will be formatted during the install.

Step One:
Install leopard to an external hard drive or USB stick. For this I used iDeneb 1.4. You can connect a USB drive and USB DVD drive to your AAO and install it that way, but I just booted the DVD in a laptop and installed it from there. Just choose the iDeneb base package and the Aspire One 150 package, leave the rest.

Step Two:
Boot Leopard from the USB stick or USB hard drive by taping F12 burring the BIOS. If your drive doesn’t appear then reboot and try again. At the chameleon bootloader type without quotes “-x”. It will take a little while to boot, after that follow the setup process and you’ll be presented with the desktop. It’s lacking drivers but that really doesn’t matter.

Step Three:
Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) and click on your AAO’s hard drive, choose ‘Partition’ and choose a single partition, this guide will not go in to dual booting. Call the drive whatever you want, this can be changed later. Use Mac OS X Journaled unless you’re using an SSD, in which case use non-journaled Mac OS Extended. Now Hit Apply.

Step Four:
It’s finally time to install Snow Leopard =D First mount the install DVD, connect a DVD with the disk in or mount the disk image from another external drive. If you can find a way of packing it on the the Leopard drive that will work too.

Open finder and choose Go > Go to folder. Type /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/ and press return. Now launch OSInstall.mpkg, note, NOT OSInstall.pkg. Follow the prompts and choose the aspire one’s internal drive. I chose to uncheck everything but Rosetta and X11, but you can install whatever packages you want. Let the installer do it’s thing.

Step Five:
Almost there, if you were to reboot at this point it would kernel panic immediately, not cool. Download Netbook Installer here. Ignore the warning about an unsupported device, choose the AAO’s internal drive, check the chameleon boot loader and general extensions, and let it do it’s thing.

Now you can reboot, Snow Leopard will take a while to boot, so just give it time. You should see the welcome video but there wont be any sound, so just hum along if you know the tune

Step Six:

Now you’re at the desktop you can install VoodooHDA to get audio working, download it and install it with Kext Helper.

Step Seven – Optional

Updating to 10.6.2 is very easy. Intel Atom support was removed from the kernel, but you can still boot using the 10.6.0 or 10.6.1 kernels. Open the terminal and type the following command to backup your kernel.

cd /
sudo cp mach_kernel mach_kernel.backup

You can now safely update via Software Update (I wouldn’t recommend installing other updates). When the machine reboots leave it and it should boot up fine, otherwise type “mach_kernel.backup” at chameleon. About this mac should say 10.6.2.

Since neither Sleep or Hibernation work on OS X on the AAO, you might want to install InsomniaX or DoNotSleep.pkg. If you do put your AAO to sleep, when it resumes it will simply reboot and when ever it boots try to load the sleep image which will fail. If this happens boot your external Leopard drive and use Netbook Installer to reinstall Chameleon and general extensions.

About This Mac will show the correct RAM info but show the CPU as “1.6GHz Unknown”. Install this package to get the CPU string updated.

You can go to System Preferences > Trackpad and enable two finger scrolling, which works much better than edge scrolling on the tiny trackpad.

Snow Leopard on the Aspire One

Unlike Leopard where the only way to install is via an osx86 distro or Boot132 method, there are a few different methods thanks to NetbookInstaller.

Mechdrew has posted guides for four different methods using NetbookInstaller.

Installing via an 8GB USB stick (Mac) (Windows, Linux)

Installation via retail SL DVD

Direct install via a Mac

I’ve tried the first two methods without success. I could create a bootable USB drive, but Snow Leopard would always fail to install ~25% through, even after trying different version of NetbookBootMaker and two different drives. The NetbookCD method didn’t work for me with either of the two drives I had (waiting for device error).

In the end I used a similar method to the direct install which I will be posting soon.

SL runs fine but the lack of ethernet drives, vga-out and working internal – and USB – mics drove me back to Leopard.

How to install Mac OS X Leopard on the Aspire One

This is a guide for installing OS X Leopard on an Aspire One A150 and D250. The whole process should take around two hours.

Things you’ll will need:
iDeneb v1.4 10.5.6 Disk Image 4.7GB - You’ll find it on most torrent sites.
External USB DVD Drive – If you don’t want to purchase one, just buy a cheap IDE to USB lead, and pull an IDE drive from any old machine.
AAO OS X tools - Contains DoNotSleep and GMA950 packages

Things you’ll want for updating to 105.8
USB keyboard and mouse
Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update 760MB

What works and what doesn’t:
Sleep – Kernel panic on resume.
Ethernet – Working, hot plugging is dodgy though.
Graphics – CoreImage and QuartzExtreme fully supported, VGA out working perfectly.
Audio – Speakers, earphone jack, internal mic and USB mics all working. Audio in jack untested.
WiFi – Working with a replacement wireless card. This is an easy swap and only costs around £10.
Webcam – Working OOTB.
SDHC Reader – Working SD (no SDHC to test), can cause excessive bootup tims if left in during boot.

Back up everything on you AAO’s hard drive, it will be formatted during the install and all files will be destroyed.

Boot the iDeneb disk by taping F12 at the BIOS and wait for it to load. Next select your language for the installer and accept all agreements. The installer won’t show any partions to which you can install OS X so click Utilities > Disk Utility.

From here select your AAO’s hard drive and then click erase. Choose Mac OS X Extended Journaled if your AAO has a standard 2.5″ drive, or Mac OS X Extended (which isn’t journaled) if your AAO has an SSD.

You will now return to the installer, choose the partition of your choice and next, click customize and check Netbook > Aspire One 150 and click next.

Now you can let the installer do it’s thing. When the machine reboots it will get stuck at the Leopard intro video playing only the music. Reboot and start up with -x at the chameleon bootloader.

you will now boot to the desktop, now run the GMA 950 package for ‘AAO OSX Tools’ and reboot, no -x required this time (yay!).

You now have a fully functioning hackintosh, you can stop here or upgrade to 10.5.8 (highly recommended as it’s required for the latest releases of  Apple’s software – iTunes, Safari, iLife etc).

Open osx86 tools and click “Backup Extensions” and choose your desktop as the destination. Next click “Backup Kernel” and leave the name as default. Also enable Quartz GL.  Actually you don’t need to touch Quartz GL.

Now you can start the combo update. The update overwrites the Voodoo kernel with the official 10.5.8 kernel, so in order to get the AAO to boot, at chameleon type “mach_kernel.backup -x”.

At this point you will need to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse, since the update fudges up Voodoo PS2.

Open osx86 tools and restore your extensions.

Optionally you can move the Voodoo kernel back to “mach_kernel” you don’t have to choose it every time you boot. Launch the terminal and type:

cd /
sudo cp mach_kernel mach_kernel_10_5_8
sudo mv mach_kernel.backup mach_kernel

You can now reboot without a USB keyboard and mouse and without typing anything in to chameleon (W00P!).

Since sleep is unsupported, I’d recommend installing DoNotSleep to prevent the netbook from sleeping when it’s closed, instead the screen will turn off. If you do close the lid without DoNoSleep installed, the computer will simply reboot :(

I’d recommend installing VoodooPS2 to enable extra trackpad functionality like tap to click, two finger tap to right click and two finger scrolling.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments :)