Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi I bought yesterday was incredibly easy to get up and running. The $40 was good for just the main board, but I actually had enough spare parts lying around to cover everything else. Here's what was needed and where I got them from...

• 5v USB power = borrowed from by HTC Incredible
• SD Card = the default one that came with my camera... never used it
• HDMI = borrowed from my upconverting DVD player
• Keyboard = from my Mac mini
• Mouse = from my Mac mini

Besides that, I also needed to get the Linux image and install that on the SD card. I went for the recommended Raspbian Linux (based on Debian). Once that was setup, all that was left was to plug everything in. I didn't come across any problems at all. It just worked!

Cool... so now what? The next steps are to get a compatible USB wi-fi dongle. Without internet, this system isn't too useful. Getting connected will open up a lot more for me to do. I also need to rig up some kind of case for it. Because of its size, this device allows makers to pretty much use anything as a case. There's even a printable PDF. So I'll see if I can come up with something. To be continued...

Windy City adiZero Rose 2.0

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More Clam Case Pics

The Clam Case I just wrote about deserved more photos, so it was the subject of my first photo shoot with my new class 10 memory card:

White Clam Case

I ended up getting the Clam Case after all as the white one just came out last week. The generic case I bought back in June didn't turn out to be so good. Sometimes it would work perfectly and other times the keyboard would act up, either not responding to keypresses or typing multiple letters on a single press. This started to make me less efficient when typing on the train. I was backspacing so much to make corrections that documents often took me 2-3x longer than they should have. So even though the Clam Case was $150, I still felt it was worth it because I'd be able to type normally. Since the generic one was just $35, I didn't feel too bad. Some parts of the imitation leather were starting to wear down and it did a great job of protecting my iPad for 6 months. While the keyboard was mediocre, it was an excellent folio case.

The Clam Case is worth every penny. It's a solid construction that will protect your iPad on all sides. It's versatile because you can use you iPad as a tablet or laptop without removing it from the case. The keyboard is solid and as responsive as a computer's keyboard. The generic one I had was to soft, which is probably why it had contact issues. If there's one downside to the Clam Case it's the weight. In order for it to stand up like a laptop, the base/keyboard needs to be heavier than the iPad otherwise it would tip over. When attached to the case, the iPad weight doubles and feels like a netbook.

Tiger to Snow Leopard

The Upgrade
While most people were probably going from Snow Leopard to Lion this weekend, I was upgrading my G1 Mac mini from Tiger to Snow Leopard. The system had gotten corrupted over the past few months for some reason. Everything became slow and the Internet connection was spotty, only going through about 5% of the time. So instead of returning to factory settings, I took the opportunity to go up 2 versions to Snow Leopard (10.6). Almost nothing is compatible with Tiger (10.4) now. When I first got the iPad, I tried to set it up with the Mac mini and it was incompatible! I ended up syncing with my Core i7 PC. Ironically, the iPad IS compatible with Windows XP... a 10-year old OS.

iTunes and Media
One of the concerns of switching operating systems was my iTunes library and purchases. The solution was simple though. All I had to do was backup my Music folder and copy it back after the upgrade. As long as the path to all of your music and movies remain intact, you should have everything as is after the upgrade (and after you logon to the iTunes store for the first time). Your movies will even be in the same position you left them in.

iLife
The main purpose of my Mac mini is for video editing. The $29 upgrade to Snow Leopard gets rid of the whole iLife suite though. So I had to spend another $25 on iLife 11 (on order) so I could get iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. The new version should give me 2-3 versions of themes I was behind on too. That alone is worth $25 to me.

Windows VM
As part of Apple's backwards compatibility issues, I also had to change my VM. Previously, on Tiger, I was running Windows XP over the first version of Parallels. I switched to the free Oracle VirtualBox, which is a smaller program with the same features (same VM I used to run OS X on Windows 7). The Windows VM acts as my home network's file server, so it's a minimal install. Out of the 80 GB total hard drive space, I only allocated 15 GB to the Windows VM. After the installation, all updates and Google Chrome, there's 6 GB free for me to move files around across my systems.

Driving Simulator

Originally, I said to myself that I wasn't going to go crazy and setup a steering wheel for Gran Turismo 5. The setup takes up too much space and the steering wheels start at $150... almost the price of PS3 itself. Premium wheels that have more weight and are life size cost around $300... a hefty price for a controller that will only be used for one game. The best low-end wheel, the Logitech Driving Force GT went on sale a couple of weeks ago at CompUSA though. It went from $150 to $100. I had plenty of Amazon rewards credits too, so I basically got the wheel for free on years of accumulated credits. The rest of the items I already had.


This weekend, I checked out my real car to see where everything was placed. I replicated the setup as best I could, placing the pedals about 2 ft diagonally away from the wheel. I aligned the brake pedal with the center of the wheel. It's funny that we never think about these things while driving. Just placing these items in the right spot made the game easier to control and the driving feel very realistic. The only thing I should fix is the table the wheel is on though. I just put this together with things I already had. So the only table I had of the right height was a laptop stand. It really needs something more stable because the force feedback on the wheel is strong, even on the lowest setting. And of course the sharp turns require big wheel movements.

Other items in this project include a Hannspree 28" monitor and iLive Soundbar. For the monitor, you'd want to stick with something from 28"-32"... not too small and not too large because it's supposed to look like a driver's view of the front window. It should be placed about as far from the wheel as the end of the window on a real car. The soundbar is must for any small LCD just because they need speaker upgrades. If you want to go overboard, then a 5.1 system will make the sounds more realistic.

Wireless Eee Macbook

When I last left off on my Windows XP/OS X Leopard dualboot netbook, everything was functional except for the wi-fi on the OS X side. Most instructions I came across mentioned a hardware swap of the internal 802.11n card. I went as far as doing a trial run of this just to see how far I had to dig to get to the wi-fi card. On the ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, it's surprisingly hard to get to. You seriously have to take apart the entire machine, including part of the monitor. So I backed up on that idea and put everything back together. I don't think it's worth the risk. There's actually a much simpler solution that none of the sites mention and I hadn't thought about it initially either... a Mac OS X compatible external USB dongle! There aren't many of these out there and of course it's ideal to find one of those new ones that has a short dongle. I did find one on Amazon for just under $15 (AirLink101 AWLL5088) and now I have wi-fi on the OS X half of the netbook. Since it has the short dongle, it's pretty much just as good as an internal one. It doesn't stick out and I don't have to remove it when I pack up the machine.

iPad2 Keyboard Case

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Originally, I was looking at the Clam Case for my iPad. The design really makes it look like a laptop as it's solid and well constructed. They even made a white one to match the new iPad2. The $150 price tag factored into the decision not to get it though. And while it has a nice protective shell, it looks like it susceptible to scratches. I didn't want to get a super nice case that's going to make me baby the iPad even more than when it was unprotected. So instead, I found a $35 generic keyboard that works pretty well.

Related: iPad2, Clam Case, Generic Keyboard Case

OS X on Windows 7 Desktop (Part 2)

Intro.
Installing Snow Leopard onto Oracle VirtualBox on Windows 7 was a lot simpler than I though. Originally, I read that you had to install a hacked version of Leopard first. Then use that to install a legit copy of Snow Leopard. It turns out, all I needed was the legit copy.


In the photo above, I have OS X fullscreened on my secondary monitor so I can use both operating systems simultaneously on my Core i7 system.

Materials
- Oracle VirtualBox (I used 4.0.4)
- Snow Leopard 10.6.3 DVD
- iBoot ISO image
- A Mac system or Hackintosh... with a dual layer DVD burner

Instructions
1) Using an actual Mac (any OS X should do... I used 10.4.11 on my Mac mini), convert the Snow Leopard DVD to a .DMG.

2) On the Mac, open up a terminal window and follow these instructions.

3) Moving the .ISO is a problem because it will be over 7.5 GB. Most file systems support up to 2GB. So you'll get an error if you try to transfer to a FAT or NTFS drive. The best way to move it is to burn a UDF DVD DL.

4) Boot the virtual machine (see setup in the previous entry) to the iBoot image. You'll see a boot menu with the iBoot disc.

5) In the virtual machine, swap the iBoot ISO with your Snow Leopard ISO. Hit F5 to refresh and then choose the Snow Leopard ISO.

6) Follow the normal steps to installing Snow Leopard. One bug I ran into was I had to do a full install. When I went to "customize" to remove some languages I wasn't going to use, I got a kernel panic with 17 minutes left. When I left everything, things went perfectly smooth.

7) When that's done, shutdown the virtual machine. Put iBoot back in and startup. From the menu, choose the Snow Leopard installation you just setup. And that's it! You have a basic installation of a working Snow Leopard.

That's where I am now. It can be taken further by installing Chameleon so that you don't have to depend on iBoot each time. So far, everything works except sound. But it's functional and fast.

OS X on Windows 7 Desktop (Part 1)

I didn't want to risk installing OS X on my new system, so the safe way to do this was through a virtual machine. So this is basically the opposite of what people do on the Mac with Parallels. I installed Oracle VirtualBox on my Windows 7 Ultimate PC (3 Ghz Core i7-950). This project was a lot easier than OS X on Eee PC 1000HE mainly because each attempt on this super computer only took 15 minutes... as opposed to 2 hours on the netbook. Also, in this case the instructions on the net are much better. I don't even have to write my own findings. I follow this one:

http://www.taranfx.com/install-snow-leopard-virtualbox

I'm really only half way there though. I basically have Leopard (10.5.7) installed right now. The goal is to get Snow Leopard (10.6.3) running because I originally purchased a copy for the netbook. But it turns out 10.6.2 was the last version that supported the Atom processor. So I don't want my Snow Leopard DVD to go to waste. The next step is to install it using the Leopard install that's currently there. I'm at the point where I need to convert the DVD to .ISO format. That's actually done and sitting on my netbook. Transferring that 8 GB image is a problem though. Stay tuned!

Cleaning up the Dualboot

Audio Fix
I got the audio working on my dualboot Eee PC, so that completes all of the compatible components. All it took was a program called Audieee, which can be downloaded here.

Software
Most of my standard programs work and at decent speeds. So far, I installed:
- OpenOffice.org
- Firefox
- Filezilla
- Eclipse IDE
- iPhone SDK / iPhone Simulator
- Google SketchUp
- Adobe Reader
- DivX Player

Accessories
All of my accessories work as well:
- Mimo 7" monitor (via DisplayLink driver)
- Ext. hard drive for Time Machine (Essential when experimenting with kexts because you'll come across kernel panics)
- Gigaware wireless laser mouse
- The trackpad works just like a Macbook Pro one except the hardware doesn't physically depress

I'm pretty happy with the system right now even without wireless. I installed EasyTether so I can tether with my HTC Incredible, but haven't tested it yet. I'll stick with my current setup unless I get an urge to do a hardware swap with the internal WLAN!

OS X on Eee PC 1000HE

Intro.
Back when I bought the Eee PC 1000HE, one of the things I had in mind was setting up a dual boot with Mac OS X. I already read that it was one of the more compatible netbooks, so that weighed in on my decision. Naturally, I didn't want to do it right away in case it destroyed the netbook. Now, it's about 2 years later and I could risk factory resetting the netbook as a worst case scenario. I decided to document this project because the whole process is very sensitive to your exact system and all of its components. Not even 2 Eee PC 1000HE's are alike. This guide is generally for those who bought this model when it first came out. I read a lot of documentation and didn't end up using any of them 100%, so this post just outlines my path.


General Info.
There are 2 main methods to getting OS X on to a PC. The first is to do the full install from a real Apple system and target an external drive. Then you modify files on that drive and image the entire thing to your PC. The second method is to make a copy of the Mac OS X installer DVD and modify files on the copy. For this project, I went with method #2, using the iDeneb built installer.

Materials
- iDeneb 10.5.7 burned to a DVD
- External DVD drive
- External keyboard & mouse (just in case)
- 10.5.8 Fixes (click here)
- VoodooPS2Controller (click here)
- Kext Helper (click here)

Setting Up the Eee PC
The Eee PC 1000HE came with a 160 GB HDD. The main partition for Windows is ~85 GB. Then there's a 5 GB one for the system restore and a 45 MB one for ASUS's fast boot. Those 3 should not be touched. The data drive, is ~65 GB, so that's the one we'll wipe. You must use the full capacity of this drive because you can only have 4 primary partitions and 3 are already used up. I originally wanted to have OS X take up 25 GB, but then I'd lose the 30 GB to limbo.

1) Boot up Windows like you normally would.

2) Go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management

3) Select Disk Management. Delete the data drive and create a Primary Partition. Don't format it or give it a drive letter.

Installing OS X 10.5.7
4) Connect your external DVD drive and pop in the iDeneb 10.5.7 disc.

5) If your system is not already set to boot from DVD, keep hitting F2 as the system starts so you can get into the BIOS.

6) Change the boot order to boot from DVD first, save and exit.

7) The installer will take a long time to load. Remember, we're trying to put this into a 1.6 Atom netbook when it's normally getting installed on a Core 2 Duo or higher!

8) Once the installer starts up, go to Utilities -> Disk Utility

9) Select the partition you just created in Windows. Format it with Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This should take less than a minute.

10) Quit Disk Utility and go ahead with the installation. Read the terms and agree. Then be sure to click on the "Customize" button. If you don't do this, it WILL NOT work!

11) In the custom menu, choose:
- Chipset -> ICHx Fixed
- Fix -> ACPI Fix (there are 2 items), Cpus=1 Fix, FireWire Remove and PowerOff Fix
- Video -> Intel -> Intel GMA950

12) Now you can go ahead with the installation. It's going to look slow in the beginning as it estimates 3 hours. Later on, it will quickly reduce to 1 hour and then get stuck on 1 minute for like 10 minutes, but the whole thing takes less than an hour.

13) You system will reboot when done and go right into OS X. You'll see the Leopard intro. video. I've done this many times and it has about a 50% chance of detecting the keyboard. Have your external keyboard and mouse ready just in case.

14) Now you should have a working OS X, possibly without keyboard and mouse. It didn't seem like anyone else ran into this problem, but I got it fairly consistently.

Update to 10.5.8
15) By default, the root account is disabled. You need to enable this in order to install kexts. In Finder, go to Go -> Utilities.

16) Open Directory Utility. Unlock the padlock icon.

17) Go to Edit -> Enable Root User and create a password.

18) Lock the padlock icon.

19) Install Kext Helper. This will be useful for the future as well.

20) Doing the next Apple Update to 10.5.8 is safe. Go ahead and install all 6 of the updates.

21) After rebooting, your resolution will get downgraded to 800x600 stretched. Open up Kext Helper.

22) Drag all of the .kext items (they're in various folders) from Thireus' 10.5.8 Fixes to Kext Helper. Type in the root password and install.

23) Reboot and your resolution will be back to 1024x600.

24) If your keyboard and trackpad still don't work, go into System/Library/Extensions and delete anything that looks like "ApplePS2" or "PS2Nub" as well as "ACPI4ASUS"

25) Install VoodooPS2Controller and reboot.

Fin
I'm still figuring out the sound issue, but my model cannot have wi-fi working because the first release of the 1000HE uses Atheros/Azurewave, which is not supported at all. A later release of the same laptop uses Ralink, which will work. So at the end, I have a pretty functional OS X netbook. It works a lot faster than I thought it would too.

Note: For future Apple Updates, it's safe to install software updates like iTunes, Safari and Quicktime, but DO NOT select the security updates. You'll risk kernel panic and have to start over from Step #1!

Weekend So Far

Gift Wrapping
I finally got to gift wrapping... a little bit before I met Lewis yesterday and then the rest today. As I did last year, all gifts were wrapped in green (as in environmentally friendly) paper... either brown paper bags or holiday circulars. I didn't buy any wrapping paper this year. Then I grouped each family's gifts together in recycled bags. It was good to get that out of the way a week early.

Home Theater
The home theater project from last week was wrapped up as I got the 2 optical cables I was missing to complete the system. So now the digital cable box and PS3 are connected with fiber optics for crystal clear 5.1 audio. Movies sound great as expected. I tested it with Casino Royale Blu-ray. The intro. scene was a good test because of the breaking ceramics and great title soundtrack. Basketball games actually sound good too. I didn't expect that at all, but it has a stadium like feel because you can hear ambient noise from the fans coming from all directions. Video games are also great... played Batman Arkham Asylum, Gran Turismo 5 and Force Unleashed II (DEMO).

Core i7
I noticed that sometimes my new desktop system would reach 92 degrees in temperature, so I quickly ordered 2 extra fans... one exhaust fan for the slot area and a 5.25" bay for the front. That dropped the temperature down to a more comfortable 83 degrees. So the system also looks more modded now. There are only 2 5.25" bays left... one is reserved for a future BLu-ray burner. The slot fan I added also has blue LED lights, making my system look super geeky.

Weekend Projects

The past weekend was a very productive one for me. I ordered my computer during Black Friday from CyberPower and it arrived last Thursday. The timing was perfect because I had already backed up the old system and planned for a long weekend. Whenever I get a new system, I end up working on more than one computer because I always swap parts and reassign systems to different rooms. Check out the Picasa album for details.

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I also worked on an audio system with my dad for the living room. We had purchased the main parts last year, but didn't get a chance to install it because we were undecided about other fixtures. But we finally did it Saturday night! The hard part, which is laying out the speakers and cutting the cables is done. We're just missing the fiber optic cables to connect PS3 & the digital cable to the receiver. Those should be in later this week and we'll finally have a modern sound system that matches the visuals!

Sunday was relaxing because we celebrated Emily's Birthday. She just got back from Thailand Thursday, so the party was a day later than usual. We stayed in and just ordered a ton of food.

Weekend Projects

Since nothing much was going on this weekend, I had a couple of computer projects to catch up on. First, I went back to last week's Dual P-III. So all the hardware was installed, but the system wouldn't startup. I tried an extra power supply and got the same results. So it's possible that the motherboard got damaged the first time I turned on the system will all the devices installed... maybe it couldn't take the stress. For now, this one is on hold until I get another idea.

The next project was optimizing my netbook, an Asus EEE PC 1000HE. I read about overclocking, but the final result didn't seem like a good enough reward to try at this point. I just upgraded the BIOS to the latest, which allowed the integrated graphics card to take more RAM. I haven't noticed a big difference with this change, but I guess being up to date is good enough for me.

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And finally, I wanted to get Android working on a desktop since Chrome OS isn't out yet. There's a very easy implementation called Live Android. You basically download 2 files, combine them to make one ISO image. Then burn that to a bootable CD. Then you boot from that to get a read-only version of Android. I decided to give it a shot with my old Pentium-II laptop and it was perfectly smooth. Check out the Picasa album above for details and screenshots.

Dual P-III (Part 1)

Uncle Bock dropped off his old computer last week since he just upgraded to a much more powerful one. I always take in computers about to be tossed. If anything, the screws are useful to me at the very least. I still had a bunch of spare parts because one of my old systems that died had good parts. Uncle Bock's computer had a good motherboard with dual Pentium-III, but all the accessories are basic. Click on the Picasa album below for more details.

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So the system is still a work in progress. It's physically complete. The next step is just to figure out why it doesn't turn on. If it's not a problem with the motherboard, then the system is still OK. After that, I'll install some basic software on it and see how it runs compared to the single processor 1 Ghz P-III it's supposed to replace.

Flushing Apartment

Since it's a work in progress, I just shot the completed parts of the place. I'm slowing filling in the furniture based on sales and color match, so it's going to take a while. Remember, it took me 3 years to get a sofa for the Manhattan place!

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Centrino SSD (Part 3)

I've been using the Centrino laptop with the SSD drive for almost a month now and the boot times are still consistent. This system, which was one of my slowest booting machines is by far the fastest now. Here are some other factors SSD manufacturers advertise.

Weight
I really didn't think this would make a difference because all laptop hard drives are light. When you hold both in your hands, there's not much of a difference. But once it's installed, you'll feel it. The hard drive in my laptop is located at the front left corner. The SSD weighs almost nothing, so I notice it most when the system is folded up and I carry it on my side like a book.

Battery
SSDs are suppose to make a small, but noticeable difference in battery life because there are no moving parts. In my case, there was no difference. The laptop ran for 4 hours under normal use with both the HDD and SSD. Maybe this makes more a difference with newer systems.

So once again... nothing here really makes the laptop blow away the old configuration with the HDD. It was just a nice experiment because I had to see if for myself. I also have a laptop with a virtually unbreakable drive now, so I'm going to make it my repository for any important files I have.

Centrino SSD (Part 2)

Cloning
The fair way to go about testing this was to clone my old hard drive so that everything would be in the same exact place, same software and startup items. If I did a clean install onto the SSD, it would hardly be a controlled experiment. I used a free software called Disk Copy 2.3 by EASEUS to do this. Unlike other cloning programs, this one does a true sector-by-sector copy. The download from their site burns to a bootable CD, which starts up a mini OS that detects all hard disks, including USB and Firewire ones. Since Windows isn't running during the cloning, you won't run into any permissions errors.

Stats
Cold Boot (powering on from the off state up to the logon screen)
45 seconds

Windows Start (logon until all startup items have loaded)
18 seconds

Photoshop CS (Photoshop startup & plugin load)
7 seconds

Conclusion
There you have it... same exact systems on 2 different hard drives. The SSD swap made a significant difference. There wasn't as big a difference with the cold boot, but that's because both tests went through the BIOS sequence, which doesn't occur on the drives. The Windows startup was unbelievably fast... 1 minute and 8 seconds to just 18 seconds!

Centrino SSD (Part 1)

Transcend 64 GB SSD
SSD (solid state drives) have been dropping in price, but not the PATA/IDE models for older computers. There was a Transcend model a few months ago on New Egg for $195. I thought that was an OK price and waited for it to go down as one of their daily specials. Instead, it got sold out. I put myself on the email alert, knowing I should've pulled the trigger on the purchase. I got the alert just last week and bought it right away.

Sager NP3750
My old laptop from 2003 is a 1.4 Ghz Centrino maxxed out at 1 GB RAM (shared memory architecture w/ 32 MB allocated to VRAM). It was the first widescreen laptop (yes... before Sony or Apple) and also first glossy screen released. Let me start by saying that I only spent this money for my own curiosity and knowledge and don't recommend this upgrade at all. Even if an SSD double my laptop speed, it's not worth $195 for a measly 64 GB. I could've gone with a 500 GB for under $100. But any computer or car enthusiast can vouch for the fact that we spend tons of money for slightest performance upgrade.

Stats
Cold Boot (powering on from the off state up to the logon screen)
1 minute 12 seconds

Windows Start (logon until all startup items have loaded)
1 minute 8 seconds

Photoshop CS (Photoshop startup & plugin load)
20 seconds