I recently went about the task of installing Mac OS X on my ThinkPad T43. I installed both Leopard and Tiger, so I will layout pretty simply how to install either on your T43. First of all the disclaimer: I will not be responsible for what may happen to your laptop, or the grey hairs you may get doing this. And you are only supposed to do this if you are an Apple developer and or have a license for the OS you are installing.

It is actually pretty cool to show off to your buddies that you are running OS X. My computer specs are the following:

IBM ThinkPad T43, Intel 915GM Graphics Chipset, AD1981B Sound Chipset, 2GB DDR2 RAM, and 60GB HDD.

Now onto the fun stuff. Firstly, the steps that are the same for Tiger and Leopard.

• You must use the paperclip trick to short out pins 6 and 12 on your VGA out. Just bend a paperclip into a U shape, with ends long enough to touch the contacts on both sides. Look at the following diagram to see which pins. Alternatively, you can take apart your laptop and solder the pins together from the inside like I did.

• Now you must back up all your data onto an external HDD, because we will be formatting the entire drive.
• Also, disable all CPU power management features in the BIOS because this slows the computer down quite a bit.
• We are done the initial setup stages.

Leopard:

• Download the install ISO from the green demon, or the pirate of the internet seas. Make sure you get the Kalyway 10.5.1 ISO and not any of the ToH ISOs. I repeat ToH WILL NOT WORK!
• Fire up the computer using the burnt DVD, and press enter when it asks you for startup options.
• Now, get a beer, and wait for this thing to boot up. If you get stuck on a blue screen with no cursor, that means that you did the paperclip mod wrong.
• Open up Disk Utility from the top menu, and create one partition (and name it whatever you want)
• When you get to the setup options screen, select SSE2 System, the MBR Bootloader, and also the Azalia Audio package.
• Wait for the computer to finish installing, and then restart your computer.
• Everything except the wireless and Quartz Extreme should be working now (No GMA900 leopard support yet).
• Go to http://code.google.com/p/iwidarwin/ and download the latest 10.5 Stable package.
• Run this in your terminal

  sudo -s
  chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions
  chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
  rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext (if exists)
  rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache (if exists)

• Reboot, and everything should be working at this point.
• Enjoy.

Tiger:

• Download the XxX 10.4.11 ISO from your favorite ’source’.
• Put DVD in, reboot, and press enter at the prompt to start the install.
• As same as Leopard, if it stalls at the blue screen without a cursor, it means that your did the paperclip trick wrong.
• Open up Disk Utilitiy from the top menu, and create one partition (and name it whatever you want)
• For the install, Select the NoEFI Package, the 8.9 SSE2 Kernel, and the GMA900 package, but NOT the fixer.
• Wait for the install to finish, then reboot.
• Once running, you will probably notice that not much is working, don’t worry we’ll fix that.
• Insert the Install DVD, and install the GMA900 Fixer and the AD198x package. You may have to dig in the install DVD to find the latter package. Once installed, reboot.
• You should not notice that you have working QE+CI, and also working sound.
• Now, download the Broadcom Ethernet Kext file, and extract it to wherever you can remember. You will need to copy this file over from another computer because ethernet/wireless isn’t working yet.
• Now, run the following commands.

  sudo -s
  rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext
  mv /PathToFile/IONetworkingFamily.kext /System/Library/Extensions
  chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions
  chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions

• Now reboot, and you should have fully working ethernet, with the exception of your MAC address being 00:00:00:00:00:00. You can set your MAC Address by using the command:

  ifconfig en0 ether <MAC Address>

• Go to http://code.google.com/p/iwidarwin/ and download the 10.4 Installer (Stable), and install the package. Reboot, and you should have working wireless (although you can only connect to unencrypted or WEP APs).
• Enjoy!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask via comments or just send me an e-mail.

Brennan

I got the iPhone 3G on Rogers on the first of this month, and I’ve been happily using it for the past few weeks. I had the silent/ring switch break off, but Rogers was great about sending a replacement unit right away, and I had a new one (albiet with one little nick in it) within 3 days.

Anyways, I hear all this crap about the iPhone 3G having reception issues, but on the EDGE network in Canmore RIGHT in the middle of the Rocky Mountains seems to be perfectly fine. I even have reception where my buddies with HTC Smartphones don’t. And with 3G reception anywhere in Calgary, it’s been flawless, with me having steady 4-5 bars all over the place. I haven’t have a single dropped call on both the 3G and EDGE networks, and no random switching from 3G to EDGE – although the phone switches from EDGE to that really really slow data connection when I only have 1 bar or less sometimes.

This goes for THREE iPhones we have in our house. Two 8GBs (including replacement), and one 16GB. I’m begining to wonder whether or not it is Apple’s issue, and just the networks being overloaded by the extensive data-usage that iPhone users rack up?

What’s your take on this?

I recently was coding in PHP, and needed to get just the fully qualified domain name from the (FQDN) $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’] variable. So I whipped a quick function up that may help some of you beginners out there looking to parse a URL:

function domainviaurl($url){
$parsed_url=parse_url($url);
$fqdn = $parsed_url['host'];
return $fqdn;
}

This will just spit out the domain name. The next one will take it one step further, and actually get the IP address of the referrer via the domain name.

function ipviaurl($url{
$parsed_url=parse_url($url);
$tld = $parsed_url['host'];
$ip = gethostbyname($tld);
return $ip;
}

Hope this helps out!

Brennan

Here is a quick guide on Jailbreaking an iPod touch. I personally recommend just capping it at 1.1.3 until 2.0 comes out with full SDK support. You get all the vibrating icons, and movable icons, and still get to install the ‘unofficial’ official iPod touch applications (eg. Mail, Weather, Stock, and RSS).
Jailbroken Touch

1. Firstly, if you already upgraded to the official 1.1.3, downgrade to 1.1.1 and navigate to jailbreakme.com to jailbreak your iPod using the TIFF exploit.
2. Then, add http://ijailbreak.com/repo.plist to your Installer.app Sources.
3. Now, a crucial step before you run the Jailbreak. Go to Settings->General, and disable Auto-Lock. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL
4. Launch Installer and you should find a new version of Installer is available (refresh your Sources otherwise.) Install the Update. Be sure to follow its instructions.
5. You will also update the “Community Sources” package. If not, go and install the it; it’s under the “Sources” category.
6. Now you want to install the “BSD Subsystem” package. You can find it under the “System” category. After installing it, you must reboot your iPod touch by holding down the Power button until the Red Slider appear, otherwise iJailbreak.app will not work.
7. Go to the “iJailBreakMobile” category and select either the “iJailBreakMobile 1.1.1″ or the “iJailBreakMobile 1.1.2″ (depending on your current iPod touch’s firmware version) package to install. After installation, you will find a new app by the name iJailbreak
8. Tap on iJailbreak on your mail screen. If you see that it’s stuck with just a spinning wheel on the screen, it’s safe to manually reboot the device. But you want to do so after at least 45 minutes since you started.
9. Launch Installer and install the “Remove 1.1.3 Upgrade Data” package. It’s in the “iJailBreakMobile”. You can Uninstall it after it’s done.
10. You are done! Install your third party apps without having to pay!

Brennan

I recently started to notice that I’m having an awful shortage of RAM after upgrading to the latest version of iTunes. I remember back when I was using 6.x iTunes used no more than around 30 MB of RAM. Now that I have an iPod touch, I have to upgrade to 7.6. I don’t mind upgrading at all. As a matter of fact I am an upgrade freak. But when that upgrade causes the program to use 200MB of RAM, that’s an issue. My specs are:

* Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 4.0GHz
* 4GB Crucial Ballistix Low Latency RAM
* nVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX * 2
* 6356 Songs with around ~85% with Cover Art

I use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver… frequently simoultaneously. And I can’t have software hogging up already scarce RAM.

How is everyone else’s RAM usage using iTunes 7?