How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish [How To]

My Clippings September 7th, 2009 by System

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

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).

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Free Portfolio WordPress Theme: Creative by Nature

My Clippings August 1st, 2009 by System

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online


 

In this post we are glad to release Creative by Nature, a unique and flexible high-quality portfolio WordPress theme for artists, photographers and designers. The theme was designed by .css{mayo} and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Creative by Nature

Download the theme for free!

Creative by Nature is a free portfolio theme created by CSSMayo.com and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The designers created a funky theme, particularly useful for artists, photographers and designers who are looking for a flexible portfolio solution. The theme’s .zip-package includes all necessary files, server installation guide and a help file which describes how to add entries to your portfolio section. Besides, a PSD source file is available for free download as well.

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this post and also to CSSMayo Release Post if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

Creative by Nature

Installation guidelines

  1. Download the latest version of “Creative by nature” theme either here or here
  2. Unzip and upload the theme to your “wp-content/themes/” directory
  3. In WordPress, go to “Appearance > Themes” and activate the “Creative by nature” theme
  4. In the theme archive you’ll find file creative_by_nature-export.xml. Import it to your WordPress installation from “Tools > Import > WordPress”
  5. Go to “Settings > Reading” and:
  • Check “A static page (select below)” in “Front page displays” field.
  • Select “Home” in “Front page: ” drop-down menu
  • Select “Blog” in “Posts page: ” drop-down menu

Adding Portfolio Entry

Here are instructions for adding portfolio entries:

  1. Go to “Pages > Add new”
  2. Enter Portfolio entry title
  3. Insert your image into the post(preffered image size: 290×230 px), then add “more” tag. Add short description for the entry, then add one more “more” tag. Then enter the remaining text. (Check out test portfolio entries for example)
  4. You may also enter custom fields “url” if you want to add additional information to each portfolio entry.
  5. You’ll need to setup few things in “Attributes” section:
  • Choose “Portfolio” page for page parent
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10 Handy WordPress Comments Hacks

My Clippings July 23rd, 2009 by System

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online


 

Comments sections are neglected on many blogs. That is definitely a bad thing, because comments represent interaction between you and your readers. In this article, we’ll have a look at 10 great tips and hacks to enhance your blog’s comments section and give it the quality it deserves.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

1. Add Action Links To Comments

Screenshot

The problem.
Whether or not you allow readers to add comments without having to be approved, you will often need to edit, delete or mark certain comments as spam. By default, WordPress shows the “Edit” link on comments (using the edit_comment_link() function) but not “Delete” or “Spam” links. Let’s add them.

The solution.
First, we have to create a function. Paste the code below in your functions.php file:

function delete_comment_link($id) {
  if (current_user_can('edit_post')) {
    echo '| <a href="'.admin_url("comment.php?action=cdc&c=$id").'">del</a> ';
    echo '| <a href="'.admin_url("comment.php?action=cdc&dt=spam&c=$id").'">spam</a>';
  }
}

Once you have saved functions.php, open up your comments.php file, and add the following code where you want the “Delete” and “Spam” links to appear. They must go in the comment loop. In most themes, you’ll find an edit_comment_link() declaration. Add the code in just after that.

delete_comment_link(get_comment_ID());

Code explanation.
The first thing we did, of course, was to make sure the current user has permission to edit comments. If so, links to delete and mark a comment as spam are displayed. Note the use of the admin_url() function, which allows you to retrieve your blog admin’s URL.

Source:

2. Separate TrackBacks From Comments

Screenshot

The problem.
Do your posts have a lot of TrackBacks? Mine do. Trackbacks are cool because they allow your readers to see which articles from other blogs relate to yours. But the more TrackBacks you have, the harder the discussion is to follow. Separating comments from TrackBacks, then, is definitely something to consider, especially if you do not use the “Reply” capabilities introduced in WordPress 2.7.

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UIF in Linux

Uncategorized June 3rd, 2009 by Shai Perednik

Why do people decide to still use obscure cd image formats?

UIF, didn’t that die?

Well, thanks to this post at Life Rocks 2.0, I converted the UIF file to the standard ISO format!

UIF (Universal Image Format) is an image compression format developed by Magic ISO. Universal Image Format(UIF) is a powerful compression image file format for backing up CD/DVD. It is fast, reliable, and has rich set of features which include password-protected, data encryption, MD5 checksum support and much more. UIF format is available for Windows and if you are using Linux/Ubuntu, you need to convert UIF to ISO format.

Ubuntu_logo

How to Convert UIF to ISO Format

You can convert UIF files to ISO using the freeware application UIF2ISO by Luigi Auriemma’s for Linux. This is a command line convertor for changing file type UIF to ISO format.

1. First Step is to install install zlib and OpenSSL with apt-get.

sudo apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev build-essential

2. Second step is to download the freeware from the authors site.

wget http://aluigi.altervista.org/mytoolz/uif2iso.zip

3. Once the file is downloaded we need to unzip it.

unzip uif2iso.zip

cd src

4. Create the executable by compiling the code.

make

sudo make install

5. To Convert the files from UIF to ISO format, use this command

uif2iso example.uif output.iso

Here example.uif is the file to be converted and output.iso is the output file.

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Auto Update to Latest Chromium Build

Uncategorized May 29th, 2009 by Shai Perednik

Finaly got Chromium running on my Ubuntu 8.04 Machine.

You could download it from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/

Below is a script that will download the current Chromium build and get it ready to run.

Theres not much to it, but it automates the process.

6/1/09 Update – I noticed that CRON ran in the user directory, so I fixed that.  Also added an rm to remove any old downloaded zips.  I ran the CRON job manualy and it works.  So we’ll see tomorrow to see if it works.

#CODE START

#!/bin/sh

#Buy Shai Perednik 5/29/09

#Change directory

cd /home/shai/Chromium

#Delete any existing LATEST files

rm LATEST

#Delete any old Chromium Zip Downloads

rm chrome-linux.zip*

#Download the LATEST file that contains the newest chromium build for linux

wget http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/LATEST

#reads the last line of LATEST file

VAL=`cat LATEST |cut -f1`

#Download the latest Snapshot

wget “http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/$VAL/chrome-linux.zip”

#Kill Any Existing Chrome Proceses

killall gchrome

#Extract the archive

unzip -o chrome-linux

#Make the chrome file executable

chmod +x chrome-linux/chrome

#End Code

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Large ZIPed Drivers

Uncategorized May 20th, 2009 by Shai Perednik

I need a driver for a DLink NIC card for win98. The dirver on DLINKS site is 18MB!!!

Why do manufactures insist on bundling all os drivers together?

WobZip has saved me again! Extracts the zip on their server and I can download only what I need!

Thank you WobZip!!!

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