Windows/Mac/Linux: Doit.im is a free, attractive, cross-platform task management application built on the principles of productivity guru David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It syncs to the web, it’s easy to use, and soon it’ll sync to your phone, too.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

Once you install the app and register for an account, you can start adding items to your inbox, creating projects, and scheduling your tasks. A lot of the organizational tools will be familiar to GTD followers: notice the Projects and Someday inboxes, as well as the next actions section for arranging your tasks. You can easily drag and drop tasks into any bucket across the application, and while I ran into a snag on my first run, everything seemed smooth sailing after I started it up again.

Doit.im is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, requires Adobe AIR. The developer claims mobile versions for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices are underway, which would be a real boon for accessing your tasks anywhere, especially since they’d sync with your desktop. If you’re looking for a new task manager and you’re keen on GTD, Doit.im is certainly worth a look.

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Doit.im Is a Cross-Platform GTD Task Management App [Downloads] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on November 16, 2009.

Many businesses and retailers offer discounts if you’re buying in bulk or buying for a large number of people. The trouble is: how do you get those discounts when you’re just shopping for yourself or maybe a couple of other people? Groupon can help; it’s a new Web service that provides you and your community collective buying power with participating businesses offering group discounts in your area.

Each day, the service posts a number of discounts and coupons for goods and services from retailers and stores in your area that you can sign up to take advantage of. The catch is that the bargain is only good if the required number of people to activate the deal also sign up. You only get the bargain price if enough people sign up for it as well, so the service depends on members to spread the word. 

Regional or national chains that don’t set their own pricing or schedule their own sales are a bit less likely to participate in a service like Groupon, but your local winery or brew pub may have a special deal on the site that’s only available if 20 people sign up for it, and you may find a local spa or gym that’s offering a discount off of a membership if they can get enough people to sign up to become members at the same time.

That’s the beauty of a service like Groupon: It has the ability to connect local businesses with communities and people who live near the business who may not even have known were around the corner from them. For example, in my area an indoor climbing gym with only three locations in my region offered their regularly #35 “Intro to Climbing Course” for $17 if they could get 15 people to sign up. The deal was successful, and 86 people signed up for the course.

One of Groupon’s strongest features is how local it is. The service calculates your location when you visit the homepage, and drops you into the Groupon section for your city or region. The service also pulls down Twitter posts from the Groupon account in your area and puts them in the sidebar, so you can read previous deals in your area or sign up to follow your local Groupon rep. If you’re curious what’s happening in a different city, you can click to see them all, or visit the Groupon forums to see what other members are talking about.

The service also offers deals from retailers on the Web; today’s bargain is from a bakery called Feed Your Soul, which donates some of its proceeds to charity. They’re offering 2 dozen cookies, normally $45, for $22 if they can get 20 people to sign up for it. So far, 53 people have signed up to take part in the deal, and even more can sign up now, comfortable in the knowledge that the business will honor the special group pricing. Only the first several people who sign up for the deal bear the possibility that the entire bargain may fall through if there isn’t enough interest.

Groupon isn’t going to get you any bargains at Amazon or your local big box store like Target or Best Buy, but it will likely connect you with some local businesses that would certainly be more appreciative of your business, and score you a great deal in the process.

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Groupon Gives Your Community Buying Power originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on November 13, 2009.

You registered a domain name and set up the free Google Apps Standard Edition to get Gmail, GTalk, GCal, and GDocs running behind it. Now, take a look at some advanced settings Google Apps (for your domain) makes available.

What the what? Sometimes we refer to all of Google's regular, free, public products as "Google Apps," but today we're referring to the product formerly known as "Google Apps for Your Domain" as just plain "Google Apps." (Note to Google: Come up with a clearer naming convention.) Give this flavor of Google Apps a domain name you own—like yourfamily.org or example.com—and it puts Google services behind it. If you've got a regular Google Account and you@gmail.com email address, that's cool—you can forward mail for you@yourdomain.com address to and from it. But Google Apps lets you create and manage several users associated with your domain and enable various services for them. Google Apps (for your domain) comes in several flavors: Standard Edition (free for individuals and non-affiliated groups, what we’re going to cover here), Premier Edition (for businesses), Non-Profit Edition, Education Edition, and Government Edition.

Nerd Threat Level: Orange

This flavor of Google Apps is only useful to people who own their own domain name (or want to purchase one), and who plan to set up a workgroup behind that domain. For example, if you’re Carol Brady and you register thebradybunch.com domain name, you’re going to want to set up several users at that domain. With Google Apps, Carol could create a greg@thebradybunch.com account, a marcia@thebradybunch.com account, all the way down to Cindy, Bobby, Alice, and Tiger. When Marcia gets hitched? Carol can add her spouse to the family domain. When Alice moves onto greener pastures? Carol could shut down or suspend her account.

The two key advantages to using Google Apps this way are: 1.) you get a custom you@yourdomain.com email address that you can take with you to another email provider if Gmail goes away or you want to transfer it. Your regular @gmail.com address is married to Google’s service, so you can never use it with another provider. 2.) You get system administrator-level capabilities for setting up your workgroup’s IT needs with Google’s easy interface. We’ve already done an an overview of what Google Apps can do; if you haven’t already, here’s how to get it set up with your domain.

If you’re not using Google Apps but you’re interested, know that it takes a low level set of system administrator skills to get it up and running. You’ll need to configure domain settings, such as your email MX record for your domain at your registrar. It depends on who you used (I recommend NameCheap), but most likely your registrar offers a settings panel to configure these things. You’ll also have to verify your domain by adding files to the web site, most likely via FTP or another method.

With me? Good. Take a look at some of the gems buried in Google Apps’ administrative interface. Access it at google.com/a/yourdomain.com, replacing the “yourdomain.com” part with, well, your domain name.

Name Your Domain

Google Apps give you the option to give your domain a human-readable label beyond just example.com. For fun and an inflated sense of self-importance, I called mine "Gina Trapani Enterprises," which you'll see in many of the screenshots here. You can set up your domain's name in the Google Apps Dashboard, under Domain Settings>General. You and your domain users will see this name in your apps tab titles, and when you sign into any service.

Map Multiple Domains to Your Account

If you own multiple varieties of your domain name—for instance, multiple top-level domains like example.com, example.org, and example.net—you can map those to a single Google Apps account using domain aliases. To add another domain to your primary domain, from your Google Apps Dashboard> Domains settings> Domain names, click "Add a domain alias" to set another up. (This is located at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/DomainSettingsDomains, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) As you can see from the screenshot, I've got both ginatrapani.org and ginatrapani.com running under Google Apps. This means that if someone emails user@ginatrapani.org or user@ginatrapani.com, those messages all wind up in the same place. This also works for totally different domains, not just different top-level domains (.org, .com, .net, etc).

Manage Domain Users and Groups

If you've got only a few users to create, you can add them to your domain one by one. However, if you've got a large group, Google Apps offers a bulk upload option. To use it, you make a spreadsheet of user's first and last names, username and password, and upload that to your Google Apps Dashboard. (Visit https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Users, but replace "yourdomain.com" with your domain.) You can also create user groups or mailing lists with various flavors of permissions—accessible to the outside world, only reachable from people sending from inside your domain, and with custom roles for each user (member or owner). For example, a softball league might have an "Umpires" group, a "Coaches" group, and a "Players" user group.

Activate Your Services

Once you’ve set up your domain’s users, it’s time to activate the services you want to provide. Google Apps Standard comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, an iGoogle-like start page, Google Docs, Sites, and Mobile services. (Sadly, there’s no Google Reader. Wah!) Activate servcies from the front page of your GApps Dashboard, and log in and use them at the /a/yourdomain.com URL provided in green below each service.

If you click on the “More Services” link, you’ll see more (less popular) services, like Contacts (for accessing your contacts list outside Gmail in Calendar and Docs), Sites (which appears to be a simple intranet application), custom applications hosted on Google App Engine, and even Labs services that include a URL shortener and Google Moderator. I haven’t used any other services extensively besides Gmail, GCal, and GDocs in my Apps account, but the more adventurous should dive right in.

Enable Pre-Release Features

One of the biggest complaints about Google Apps accounts is that they’re usually the last to get new and experimental features like Gmail Labs. (Yes, that took an excruciatingly long while.) To speed up the process and get new features in your Google Apps account faster, in your Dashboard under Domain Settings>General, check off "Enabled pre-release features."

(While you’re there, it can’t hurt to check off “Enable SSL” box in the section below that to encrypt your users’ sessions automatically for a higher level of security.)

Create a Catch-all Email Address

One of the advantages of having your own domain name is that you have control and access to every single word combination @ yourdomain.com email address that you want. If you create a "catch-all address," you can forward any email that comes to your domain and doesn't match a user to a specific address. This means that if you wanted to use custom email addresses on the fly—like amazon@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Amazon, or lifehacker@yourdomain.com when you register for an account at Lifehacker, you can do so without having to create custom addresses. Instead, set up your domain's catch-all address to forward to your user account. To set up a catch-all address, in your Google Apps Dashboard, from the Service Settings drop-down choose Email. There you can either reject mail that comes to addresses that don't match a user, or set up a catch-all forwarding address as shown above.

Share Calendars, Contacts, and GDocs Within Your Domain Only

Where Google Apps really shines is in its workgroup-level permissions-handling. In Google Docs as well as Google Calendar, you can choose to share docs and calendars with everyone within your domain only. That means if someone leaves your team and you suspend their account, they automatically lose access to sensitive workgroup data in one shot. You don’t have to remove them from every doc and calendar you’ve ever shared with them. Conversely, when you choose the “Share” option in Docs and Calendar, you have the option to share with everyone in your domain, instead of individuals, as shown here.

Likewise, Google Apps can automatically share a global address book across your domain users. When you add, remove, or update a user from Google Apps, with Contact Sharing enabled, everyone’s Google Apps Gmail Contacts list gets automatically updated. (So when someone changes his or her name, that change goes out to everyone’s address book in the domain, too.)

Essentially, Google Apps Standard Edition gives you IT director-level administrative control over your workgroup’s domain, for free. For more adventures in Google Apps migrations, see Scott Hanselman’s thorough writeup on how he switched his family from Outlook and Thunderbird to Google Apps.

This article only scratches the surface of what you can configure Google Apps to do. GApps users, what are your favorite tips and settings? Give ‘em up in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, likes her GApps goodness and a portable domain name, too. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain [Google Apps] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on October 28, 2009.

The Tomtom iPhone mounting kit is now available in the US Apple Store.  We still think it is exploitation of iPhone customers when a full Tomtom can often be had for less than the $120 Apple Store price of the Mounting kit alone.

Especially when you consider you have to buy the $100 App too.

Even newer Tomtoms with screens almost an inch bigger than the iPhone’s cost about the same as the mounting kit alone.

Can someone explain to us why you’d want to use your iPhone as a GPS rather than just buying a (cheaper, bigger, better) stand alone unit?

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TomTom car mount now available at US Apple store for $120 originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on October 26, 2009.

The Tomtom iPhone mounting kit is now available in the US Apple Store.  We still think it is exploitation of iPhone customers when a full Tomtom can often be had for less than the $120 Apple Store price of the Mounting kit alone.

Especially when you consider you have to buy the $100 App too.

Even newer Tomtoms with screens almost an inch bigger than the iPhone’s cost about the same as the mounting kit alone.

Can someone explain to us why you’d want to use your iPhone as a GPS rather than just buying a (cheaper, bigger, better) stand alone unit?

Go to Source

TomTom car mount now available at US Apple store for $120 originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on October 25, 2009.

There's a certain list of things we routinely clean, but your debit and credit cards probably aren't on that list—although they should be! It's easy and can greatly extend the life of your card.

Photo by ohadweb.

You might be wondering why you should bother, but if you’ve gone cardless for a few days while waiting on a replacement, the extra step of cleaning your cards can go a long way toward preventing such a hiccup. (As someone who once worked in a bank, I can vouch that this method works like a charm.)

All you need is an eraser and a damp towel. Wipe the card clean with the towel to remove any grimey build up deposited onto your card from your wallets or card reader machines. It’s not something that gets extra dirty, but the small particles when compacted with continuous swiping/use can rub off the magnetic strip holding your card’s information.

Next take the eraser (we prefer Pink Pearl erasers, but the one on the end of a pencil will do just fine) and gently erase/rub the magnetic strip on the back. It will remove any gunk that’s built up over time. This trick also works with old school cartridge based gaming systems, just in case you really have the urge to play some NES Duck Hunt.

Got your own methods for successfully cleaning off your grimy credit card and getting more mileage out of it—at least while you're waiting for a replacement? Sound off in the comments.

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How to Clean Your Debit and Credit Cards [Cleaning] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on October 13, 2009.

Two years ago, I detailed how to build a Hackintosh for under $800—then covered how to do the same with less hacking. Now that Snow Leopard’s out, we’re revisiting the Hackintosh, building a Hack Pro from scratch for roughly $900.

For folks eager to try a Mac but never wanted to plunk down the high price tag to get it, the Hackintosh—that is, a regular PC tweaked to run OS X—has always been an attractive option. That said, it’s not something you should take on lightly unless you’re willing—even enthusiastic—to build and maintain a PC entirely from scratch. I can’t guarantee it’ll be easy, but if you follow this guide step-for-step (it’s exhaustive) and stick with the same (or at least roughly the same) hardware as I am, I can vouch for a rock solid system that also happens to cost a good deal less than you’d pay for a comparable Mac.

Price Comparisons

Most Hackintosh enthusiasts will say you shouldn’t build a Hackintosh primarily to save money, as it’s more than just an insert-disc-and-click install. Still, I always enjoy looking at the price differences between my Hackintosh and Apple’s current offerings. At the moment, the cheapest Mac in the Apple store is a Mac mini sporting a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. For $300 more, I’m running a 3.0GHz Quad-Core processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a damn saucy video card. I could have made this build much cheaper by skimping on hardware and still ended up with a great little machine, but I liked aiming for around the $800 price point from my last build—plus I really wanted to make it fly.

The most expensive iMac, by comparison, has only a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory for $2,200 ($1,300 more than my build, but it is built into a monitor), while the cheapest Mac Pro has a single 2.66GHz Quad-Core processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 640GB hard drive—and it costs $2,500 ($1,600 more than mine, though it’s a different and better processor and DDR3 rather than DDR2 RAM). In short, my $900 “Hack Pro” sports nearly as good or better hardware than any Mac that Apple sells short of the $3,300 8-Core Mac Pro (which can, incidentally, get more expensive, but it won’t get much better).

The Hardware

You can find plenty of hardware capable of supporting OS X on a Hackintosh—there’s no definitive build—but we’re not going to go into that here. I’ve put together a list of hardware that I’m using and that I can guarantee will (or at least has) run Snow Leopard like a dream.

Here’s a link to everything I bought over at Newegg:

• Antec Sonata III 500 Black ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply
• GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad 3.0GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor
• GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16
• Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory x 2 (for a total of 8GB)
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
• Pioneer CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model
• 10/ 100/ 1000/ 2000Mbps PCI Copper Gigabit Network Adapter (The motherboard has onboard Ethernet, naturally, but this particular board has some problems with onboard in the Hackintosh world. Luckily, Ethernet cards are extremely cheap.)

The Build

Rather than detail every step necessary to put the actual pieces of your new computer together (this guide already reads like the Bible as is), I’m just going to point you to our first-timer’s guide to building a PC from scratch. Do your building, make sure everything’s booting up as it should be (i.e., you can boot the computer to the point where it does nothing, because you have nothing installed on it), then let’s move on.

What Else You’ll Need

Assuming you’ve purchased all the necessary parts for your build (linked above), you’ll still need a few other things before you get started:

• A USB thumb drive that’s at least 8GB in size (I’m using this 16GB Corsair drive, but obviously any sufficiently sized thumb drive should do just fine.)
• A copy of the Snow Leopard Install DVD. You can use the $29 “Upgrade” disc to install, even though this is a fresh installation. Note: If you feel like being completely honest, go ahead and buy the Mac Box Set—though, honestly, Apple’s practically made it hard *not* to buy the fully functional install disc.
• Another Mac to do some Terminal work on. (You’ll only need this other Mac for a few steps. I used my MacBook Pro, but you could also borrow a friends for an hour or so, too.)

Step One: Prepare Your Thumb Drive

We’re going to be installing Snow Leopard to your Hackintosh from your thumb drive rather than from the Snow Leopard install DVD, since in order to run the installer on your PC to begin with, you’ll need to slightly customize the way the installer is loaded. (More specifically, we’ll be loading a custom bootloader onto the thumb drive that will make booting into the install work like a charm.*)

So first things first: You need to format your thumb drive and then turn your Snow Leopard install disc into a disk image on your desktop. Here’s how to do it:

1. Launch the Disk Utility application on your borrowed Mac (located at /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)
2. Format and partition your thumb drive: Insert your thumb drive; after a second, it should show up in the Disk Utility Sidebar. When it does, (1) click on it, then (2) click on Partition. (3) Choose 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme, (4) give it a name (I called my HackintoshInstall) and select Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) from the Format drop-down. Now—and this is important—(5) hit the Options button and make sure GUID Partition Table is selected as the partition scheme. Once you’ve made sure to set all the appropriate settings, just (6) click Apply and Disk Utility will get to partitioning your thumb drive.
3. Copy the Snow Leopard Install DVD image to your hard drive: In the following step we’ll be turning your thumb drive into a Snow Leopard Install drive, but before we do that, we need to get the installer off your DVD and onto your hard drive. To achieve this, insert the Snow Leopard DVD. When it shows up in the Disk Utility sidebar, (1) click on it, then (2) click New Image in the Disk Utility toolbar. Choose where you want to save it (for the sake of convenience, I put it on my Desktop), then click the Save button. Now go grab yourself a cold drink. This will take some time. When it finishes, move on to the next step.
4. Restore the Snow Leopard Install disk image to your thumb drive: Now, in Disk Utility, (1) click on HackintoshInstall (or whatever you called your partitioned thumb drive) and (2) click on Restore. (3) Drag and drop Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg from the sidebar to the Source field, then (4) drag and drop your thumb drive from the sidebar to the Destination field. Now simply (5) click on Restore and enter your password when prompted. Disk Utility will take everything on the Snow Leopard Install DVD and restore that image to your thumb drive—since, like I said above, we’ll be installing Snow Leopard from our thumb drive instead of the DVD. Again, go grab yourself another drink; this will take a few minutes. When it finishes, your thumb drive has basically been turned into a Snow Leopard installation drive.

As I said earlier, the thumb drive needs a little finesse before you can boot the Snow Leopard installer on your PC hardware; let’s apply that finesse now.

Warning: Semi-heavy Terminal work ahead. It’s not that difficult, and I’ve gone into a lot of detail to make it as easy to follow along as possible, but if you’re not at least a little comfortable with the command line, it may make you pretty uncomfortable. Beg or borrow a command line geek for an afternoon, if needed.

1. Make sure your thumb drive is still plugged in, open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type in:
   diskutil list

   
   We’re interested in two pieces of information here. The first is the root identifier for your thumb drive (mine looks like disk2, as you can see in the screenshot). The second is the specific identifier for the portion of the thumb drive that contains the Snow Leopard installer. (Again, see the screenshot.) In my case, the first is disk2 and the second is disk2s2. Yours may vary depending on how many disks are on your system. Copy your identifiers down somewhere. We’ll need them later.

2. Head to the Chameleon homepage, find the Latest Releases section of the site’s sidebar, and download the latest version of Chameleon. (As of this writing, it’s Chameleon-2.0-RC2-r640.) Uncompress the download and move the Chameleon folder to someplace that’s easy to access. I’m putting it on my Desktop.
3. Now, in Terminal, cd to the i386 folder of the Chameleon folder. On my Mac, the command looks like this:

   
   (1)

   cd /Users/adam/Desktop/Chameleon-2.0-RC2-r640-bin/i386/

   Yours should look similar if the Chameleon folder is on your Desktop, except your username should replace mine. (Quick shortcut: In Terminal, type cd , then drag and drop i386 folder inside Chameleon-2.0-RC2-r640 to Terminal.) Hit Enter.

4. You’re going to be running a couple of Terminal commands that will use Chameleon to make your thumb drive friendly to booting up the OS X installer. They are, as follows:

   (2)

   sudo fdisk -f boot0 -u -y /dev/rdisk2

   IMPORTANT: On your computer, replace rdisk2 with whatever you copied down above. In my case, the thumb drive’s root identifier was disk2, so /dev/rdisk2 is as it should be.

   After you type in that command and hit Enter, you’ll need to enter your user password to execute it. Do so, then execute the following command, again paying special attention to the disk identifier we took note of above:

   (3)

   sudo dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdisk2s2

   IMPORTANT: As I noted, my Snow Leopard partition was disk2s2, so that command is right for me. You should replace the disk2s2 portion of the command with whatever you noted as the portion of your thumb drive that contains the Snow Leopard installer.

5. Now we’re going to place an awesome, custom EFI bootloader on your thumb drive that lets us load into the installer (and into Snow Leopard in general). So first, head over to netkas.org and download the bootloader from the bootloader link. Make sure you download it somewhere convenient. (Again, I’ve just downloaded it to my Desktop.)

   Now head back into Terminal, where we’re going to copy the boot file to your thumb drive. (One might think that you could just do this using Finder via drag-and-drop, but in this case, doing it via Terminal is necessary.) So, in Terminal, your command should look similar to this:

   sudo cp /Users/adam/Desktop/boot /Volumes/HackintoshInstall

   The easiest way to do this is simply type in sudo cp , (1) drag and drop the boot file into Terminal, then (2) drag and drop your mounted thumb drive from the desktop into Terminal. (The drag-and-drop method is a quick Terminal trick that pastes the full path to each file or directory.) After that, simply hit Enter. (Enter your password if necessary.)

6. I know it seems like we’ve already run a marathon, but you’ve got one last step and then it’s relatively smooth sailing from here on. Download Extra.zip, unzip the file, and then drag and drop the Extra folder into your thumb drive. Nothing fancy, a simple drag and drop with your trusty old mouse will do. Once you’ve done that, open up your thumb drive and verify that it looks something like the screenshot below. (Notice the Extra folder, the boot file, and the OS X installer.)

Take a deep breath. By this time, you’ve completed all the hard work. Now it’s time to boot up your machine, tweak your BIOS settings so they’re ready for your OS X install, and then it’s smooth sailing.

Step 2: Set Your BIOS

Before you can boot into or install OS X on your Hackintosh, you’ve got to make some small adjustments to your BIOS. Rather than taking you step by step through every change you need to make, I’ve simply snapped a picture of the relevant BIOS screens and added some notes. Just click through these images and make sure your BIOS settings match up.

Step 3: Install Snow Leopard

If you’ve made it this far, the hard part is over. Now it’s time to install Snow Leopard, which—unlike what we’ve done so far—is extremely easy.

Make sure you’ve set the boot priority in your BIOS to boot from your thumb drive (you can see how in this pic), then simply plug your prepared thumb drive into your Hackintosh and power it up. Since screenshots aren’t really an option—and since it’s a fairly easy process—my install instructions come in video format:

The quick version goes like this: Boot into the Snow Leopard installer, format the hard drive you want to install Snow Leopard to (go to Utilities -> Disk Utility, then click on the drive, select 1 Partition, Mac OS X Journaled (Case-Sensitive Update: Several readers have suggested that case-sensitive formatting can cause problems with some applications, like Adobe’s Creative Suite, so you may be better off sticking with plain old Mac OS X Journaled.), give it a name, and make sure GUID Partition Table is set in the Options. After you Apply the new partition, go back to the installer and install like normal to that drive. When you reboot after the install completes, press the arrow keys at the graphical boot menu and select the drive you just installed Snow Leopard to.

A Few Final Tweaks

You’ll notice that, the first time Snow Leopard boots up, you’re not enjoying any sound along with that snazzy intro video. We’ve got one small, but very simple tweak to make to get sound up and running. Here’s how it works:

1. Download the Kext Utility, then download this audio kext (a kext is kind of the Mac equivalent of a driver) and unzip it to your Desktop. Once you’ve got both in front of you, drag and drop the ALC889.Fix.kext file onto the Kext Utility. You’ll be prompted to enter your password, so go ahead and do that when you’re prompted.
2. Once the Kext Utility finishes running, open up Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app). Once it loads up, (1) click on your Snow Leopard drive (mine’s called Hack Leopard), then (2) click Repair Disk Permissions.
3. Once Disk Utility finishes repairing your disk permissions, just restart. After your computer reboots, your audio should be working like a charm. (If not, open up Sound in your System Preferences and try changing the Output device.)

As things stand on your system right now, you need to have your thumb drive plugged in every time you reboot in order to load the bootloader that allows your Hackintosh to load OS X. There are certain benefits to this (for example, right now you could quite likely unplug this hard drive from your Hackintosh, plug it into a Mac Pro, and it would work just fine), but it can also be a bit of a hassle. At this point, though, you can load the bootloader and other necessary components onto the Snow Leopard hard drive and change that drive to your primary boot drive in your BIOS. All you’ve got to do is head back to the step-by-step bootloader guide above and repeat every step, except this time you’re applying each step to your hard drive rather than your thumb drive.

Congratulations! You’ve Got a Fully Functional Hackintosh

“But for realz,” you ask, “does it actually work well?”

I’ve been using one or another Hackintosh as my main computer for two years now, and while I’ve run into the occasional bump in the road, they’ve generally run extremely well. In fact, things just seem to keep on getting better and better, and the current build I’m running (the one I walked you through above) feels like the fastest, most stable build to date.

That’s not to say that you won’t experience an occasional kernel panic—you may very well. But I get crashes on my MacBook Pro, too, and I’ve never felt that my current Hack Pro has any more problems than any other proper Mac I’ve used on a regular basis. That may seem a bit crazy, but it’s true.

As for upgrading—often, you’ll be able to upgrade your Hack Pro without any problems. That said, it’s something you normally need to check on beforehand, and you should take all of the upgrade precautions before giving it a go.

I’m planning on letting readers know how my Hack Pro handles various 10.6.x updates shortly after they happen, though, and if it requires a little extra work, I’ll show you how to handle it.

Let’s hear your thoughts—whether you’ve dabbled in the world of Hackintosh, are interested in doing so, or just think it’s plain crazy—in the comments.

Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker; he loves a good hack, cherishes his Macintosh, and craves a Mac Pro, so building a Hack Pro was a perfect fit. His special feature Hack Attack appears on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

* OS X boots in a different way than, say, Windows, using a boot tool called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). On store-bought Macs, EFI is loaded on the hardware by default (in fact, in place of the standard BIOS most of us are used to). In order to boot OS X on our non-factory Macs, we need to create our own custom path to EFI.

Huge thanks to stellarola, Onetrack, and weaksauce12 for all their help in getting me up to speed on installing Snow Leopard on a Hackintosh PC. The Hackintosh community is large and active, and they are awesome.

Go to Source

How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish [How To] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on September 7, 2009.

E-Commerce websites are often thought of as typically being unattractive or poorly designed. In this post we will feature 35 appealing designs of online shops. Those featured in this post include examples from a variety of different industries and showcase several different styles of design.

Throughout this showcase the most noticeable trend of well-designed e-commerce sites is the use of high-quality photos. Many of the sites use large images on the homepage, and product and model photography is always important for creating interest from visitors.

You may also be interested in these other posts from Smashing Magazine:

• 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process
• Shopping Carts Gallery: Examples and Good Practices
• Showcase of e-Commerce Fall Sales Designs
• 5 Universal Principles for Successful eCommerce Sites

Fresh Well-Designed Online Shops

Madsen Cycles

Dripping In Fat

Custom T-Shirts

JAQK Cellars

Weta Shop

Uniqlo

Myla

Zoomii.com – The “Real” Online Bookstore

Pure and Little

Nixon

Amazon Window Shop

Behance Outfitter

Opera Ma-Ge

Struck Apparel

Hot Sauce Emporium

Ophelia Fancy

One Horse Shy

Onetribe

Volkswagen

Decoder

Uppercase

Rawlings

Siege

Crate and Barrel

Brilla Mare

Teapot.cl

Free People Clothing Boutique

Nicholas Deakins Clothing

More of Me

DSW

Closed

Soma Intimates

Fred Perry

MANKINDdog

Brio

Martin + Osa

James Perse

ShopRush

Clever Craft

Burberry

The Company Store

Rapha

The Sak

HelmetDress

Dune

House of Fraser

Nau

The Specials

Lucky Brand Jeans

Schwans

Bergdorf Goodman

Buckle

Roots

Pixie Market

About the Author

Steven Snell is a web designer and freelance blogger. He also maintains a gallery, CartFrenzy, that showcases the best e-commerce websites.

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2009. |
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Post tags: e-commerce, shops

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Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on September 6, 2009.

Hacker Jesse Vincent, who’s previously written software to allow PDFs and ePubs to be read on the Kindle, wheedled and cajoled the Kindle 2 into running Ubuntu 9.04. You know, just because.

Vincent called it “a lovely little Linux box” when showing it off at geekfest Foo Camp last weekend. We’re not really sure what the practical applications of a Linux Kindle would be, but it’s an impressive proof of concept for sure. [Boing Boing Gadgets]

Go to Source

Amazon Kindle 2 Hacked to Run Linux [Kindle] originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on September 5, 2009.

Toshiba today introduced a new range of 2.5-inch hard drives, running at 5,400 rpm with a maximum 640GB capacity.  Although that is less space than the 1TB monsters that Western Digital have rolling out by the end of the year, the Toshiba drives are 8.5mm thick.  That is small enough to fit in most laptops, making them the biggest such announced drives in this category.  The WD drives are 12.5mm thick which are better suited to external enclosures.

The 640GB MK6465GSX drive range also includes 500GB, 320GB, 250GB and 160GB models. These are being shipped to OEM’s now.

The advantage of the new design is that energy efficiency has been improved by 28 per cent. (So, a battery-powered device carrying these drives would gain significant increases in operation time in between recharges)

The new storage will also be made available as external drives in a variety of different-coloured chassis, including Vivid White, Liquid Blue, Komodo Green and Rocket Red.

These drives are expected to cost $179, however, Amazon carries Toshiba drives at heavy discounts, for example the Toshiba 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Dive HDDR500E04XL (Liquid Blue) is available at a hefty 40 per cent discount on the retail price – $92.

Go to Source

Toshiba bows 640GB 2.5-inch drive range originally appeared on Shai Perednik.com on September 3, 2009.