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By Matthieu, February 12, 2010 6:16 pm

Enabling ATSC & QAM in Canada for Windows 7 RTM – Peter Near’s Blog.

Today, I wanted to PVR the Vancouver 2010 opening ceremonies in HD, but was dismayed to find that Windows Media Center does NOT support ATSC if your region is set to Canada. Fortunately resourceful users have found a workaround patch. See link above.

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By Matthieu, January 18, 2010 9:38 am

Update: For anyone who is having problems, I have a new kext package. This is a zip of my /Extra folder that I’m using right now on my Inspiron 640m. 640mExtra-Updated Also my system is 32-bit only, so I can’t guarantee this will work in 64-bit mode.

After much trial and error, I finally found the proper procedure for installing Snow Leopard onto my Inspiron 640m. For reasons that I cannot fathom, I was unable to perform the chameleon cdboot/swap to boot from the retail Snow DVD. It might be my DVD drive, or some other cause, but I didn’t bother finding out; I just took the hard drive out of my laptop and connected it via USB to my iMac.

Here’s the procedure that I followed yesterday to install Mac OS X 10.6.0 on my Inspiron 640m. It’s tested, working and stable, everything is great except that this laptop does NOT wake from sleep. It goes to sleep just fine, just won’t wake. Here goes:

1. Remove hard drive from the Inspiron. Connect it using a hard drive dock or USB to SATA enclosure/adapter.
2. Put Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD into existing Mac (Hackintosh or real mac, doesn’t matter).
3. Using Disk Utility, partition your Inspiron’s drive as you like, using a GUID Parition table.
4. With your Snow Leopard DVD mounted, in Finder, choose Go to folder. In the box that comes up type “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages”.
5. This will open a folder with a lot of install pkgs. Find OSInstall.mpkg and double-click it.
6. Follow the steps to install Snow Leopard, making sure to pick the proper drive for installation.
7. Once the installation is done, eject your USB drive and put the hard drive back in your Inspiron.
8. Download the Inspiron6400.iso and burn it to a CD.
9. Power up your Inspiron and boot from the CD
10. From the Chameleon menu, use the arrow keys to select the hard drive.
11. Type the following boot arguments: -v cpus=1
12. Your Inspiron should boot into Snow Leopard. Congratulations!
13. Download my 2 Inspiron kext packages: Inspiron640mExtensions Inspiron640mExtra
14. In the Inspiron640mExtensions, you will find kext helper. Run it, and drag AppleBCM440XEthernet.kext, VoodooBattery.kext and VoodooHDA.kext onto it, enter password and install.
15. You will also find the Chameleon RC4 installer. Run it, but DON’T reboot at the end.
16. Extract the Inspiron640mExtra.zip. Copy the contents of the extracted Extra folder to /Extra.
17. Remove the Inspiron6400 CD and reboot. hopefully your laptop should boot fine from the hard drive.

Just a few notes:

• I cannot get the laptop to wake from sleep. As such, the SleepEnabler.kext is not included. I also included the InsomniaX app which you might choose to install to prevent your laptop from sleeping.
• This method seems to be update-safe. I just updated to 10.6.2 using Software Update and all is ok.
• When the clamshell display is closed, the Dell BIOS or something blanks the screen. Mac OS cannot re-enable the screen and you’ll be stuck staring at a black LCD. To circumvent this, set one of your screen corners in Expose prefs to put the display to sleep. If ever you find yourself with a black screen, move the cursor to that corner to force the display to sleep, then wake it up again.
• The Intel PRO 3945 ABG wireless card that came with my Inspiron (and all Inspirons that are branded “Centrino”) does NOT work with Mac OS X. I swapped mine for a Dell 1505 Draft-N card (cheap on eBay) that works perfectly out-of-the-box.
• The Broadcom 440x ethernet card seems to work fine, I tested it briefly with some light web browsing. However, the original thread says that the driver occasionally drops connections, so YMMV.
• Finally, a quick thanks to all the OSX86 devs. None of the kexts found here are made by me, all credit goes to the original authors. I found all the necessary info over at the InsanelyMac forum.

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By Matthieu, January 10, 2010 7:35 pm

grep ‘Googlebot’ access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq

Fantastic little command.

via » How to extract uniq IPs from apache via grep, cut, and uniq Dan Collis-Puro.

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By Matthieu, December 22, 2009 10:42 am

Today I booted up my Windows Server 2003 laptop. All seemed OK, but I couldn’t get an IP address on my wired connection and my wireless card didn’t detect any APs. I thought i would have to reimage my machine, but a quick google brought up this page:

Tech Support Guy Forums – View Single Post – Solved: Wireless networks detected – no wireless networks found.

In a command prompt window,
Reset TCP/IP stack to installation defaults, type: netsh int ip reset reset.log

Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults, type: netsh winsock reset catalog

And it works!

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By Matthieu, December 18, 2009 11:39 am

http://trac.adium.im/ticket/6569

XSLT could be used to transform the .chatlog files to HTML. Attached is an XSLT stylesheet that I have written to do this. The libxslt library is present on all versions of Mac OS X since 10.2, and its command-line tool can be invoked in a sub-shell using system(3):

xsltproc -o 'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).html' format-html.xsl \
            'foobar (2007-03-08T09.19.11-0700).chatlog'

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By Matthieu, December 2, 2009 4:42 pm

I’d forgotten how much Vista sucks… I waited through over 45 minutes of “Preparing you computer” and “Installing software” and “Measuring your computer’s performance” for this?

Well, I suppose there is the spiffy sidebar and flip 3D……

Or, to be more accurate, I forgot how much garbage OEMs put on your brand new PC. *cough* HPToshibaDell.

OOH COOL! McAfee, Norton, Windows Live OneCare AND ZoneAlarm! Now my computer is quadruple-protected!
But wait, there’s more you say? A copy of Microsoft Works AND a FREE trial of Microsoft Office? and AOL, Yahoo! and Google toolbars, each with pop-up blocking? AWESOME!

-_-

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By Matthieu, November 28, 2009 3:16 pm

Early this morning I was at Tim Hortons. I had the opportunity to see this:

Tim Hortons uses LINUX!

tim hortons uses linux on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

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By Matthieu, November 15, 2009 8:08 pm

Update 4: Please see updated post.

Update 3: I recently tried to format and re-install snow leopard, and now I can’t get the laptop to boot from the Chameleon cdboot. I’m working on it and will post when I find a solution.

Update 2: The Broadcom 440x kext found here makes the card detected in Snow Leopard, however, it works intermittently. Most of the time you will fail to get an IP.

Update: You can run updates from Software Update, however remember to DELETE SleepEnabler.kext before upgrading to 10.6.2 (check /Extra and /System/Library/Extensions). Otherwise you’ll get a nice kernel panic.

Just installed Mac OS X 10.6 on my trusty old Dell Inspiron 640m.

Intel Core Duo T2050 processor @ 1.60GHz
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
Intel GMA950 integrated graphics (1440×900)
Intel 3945ABG Dell TrueMobile 1505 802.11n Mini PCIE WLAN card

It was quite easy; actually easier than Leopard.

I basically followed the steps found here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=182227

(ISO mirrored here: Inspiron6400.iso)

Make sure to always boot with cpus=1

Then, I installed a few additional kexts for the onboard Broadcom 440x (AppleBCM440XEthernet.kext), battery status display VoodooBattery.kext, and HD Audio VoodooHDA.kext.

To fix the cpus=1 problem, install VoodooTSCSync.kext

I have only one problem with this setup, the laptop does NOT wake from sleep.

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By Matthieu, November 4, 2009 2:35 pm

Windows XP offers a handy feature that allows you to take files stored on a network drive and use them even without a network connection. The files are then re-synced back to the server the next time network access is detected. Unfortunately, the service, while a fantastic idea, is not very stable in practice. In case of errors, there IS a procedure to recover files from the local cache. It involves using version 1.1 of Microsoft’s csccmd (not available directly on MS website.)

csccmdv1.1.zip

(Note to Microsoft: if it isn’t ok for me to host this file, then let me know and I’ll remove it.)

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By Matthieu, October 31, 2009 9:49 am

TSC sync XNU patch – InsanelyMac Forum.

Fix to avoid needing cpus=1 at boot for Core Duo machines (typically Dell)