Introducing SkyHUD...

Skyhud is an application which allows the downloading of Sky Poker hand history files in a text format. It currently only supports Cash Games.

These files are readable by poker tracking apps and enable the user many associated features such as analysis, results tracking and a Heads up Display (HUD).

Get it at http://apps.groomi.net/skyhud

Enjoy! Any questions, support etc I will do via here or Skype (sjgroomi)

If I typed a keyword, or website title into the firefox address bar, google and it's wonderful "I'm feeling lucky" feature whisked me off to the #1 result in google for the keyword I had typed.  This was particularly handy if I knew a page or website title but not the full URL.  Since installin AVGFree however, this functionality disappeared and it started directing me quite annoyingly to Yahoo sponsored by AVG.

To fix this do the following:

• Go to "about:config" in the firefox address bar
• Click the "I'll be careful, I promise" button on the page that loads in order to view the bowels of firefox.
• Type "keyword.url" in the search box at the top of the page
• Simply right click the item displayed below and click reset.  If for whatever reason you are unable to reset, enter the following value manually.
  "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q="
• Enjoy firefox being back to it's normal function

I hope this was useful
Stephen

My gripe in this area was the importing of contacts.  Apple does not support sim-card contacts so I had to go through the lengthy process of exporting them into Windows Contacts and then synchronizing via iTunes.  This is a huge inconvenience if you are used to simply plugging in your sim card and being able to access all of your contacts.  My particular contact list was about 5 years old and was invaluable.

Whilst using my iPhone today I stumbled upon a feature that allows the importation of SIM contacts into the iPhone's contact system.

This is located in Settings - >Mail, Contacts, Calendars ->Import SIM Contacts

This simply loads all of your sim card's contacts into the iPhones memory and makes them immediately usable within the iPhone.

Hope this is useful
Stephen Groom

Rent A Producer is a hub where musicians and producers can get together from across the web to compose, record, mix, master and produce music.

The aim of the website is to fill a gap the music industry as a provider of freelance work for sound and music professionals over the internet.

The website is a directory where bands and musicians can advertise projects which require help from a professional.  This can range from writing and arranging a song all the way to mastering an album and distributing it.

This is the first glimpse of the website and it will be continually developed until it's official release in the coming weeks.  Of course the website is useless without content so I urge all artists and producers to visit rentaproducer.com and join this unique service.

Please post suggestions/reviews and comments about the website on this blog and I will be sure to write back.

Thanks
Stephen Groom

http://www.rentaproducer.com

Preperation

The new server (the destination for the database) must be accepting connections on port 3306 to MySQL.  This is acheived using the following steps:

• Edit it's my.cnf file and ensure that the line "skip-networking" is removed
• Ensure the server is accepting connections on port 3306:  "[]$ iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3306 -j ACCEPT"
• Add a user to mysql who is authorised to connect from a remote IP.
  <mysql>: CREATE USER 'transfer'@'[OLD SERVER IP]' IDENTIFIED BY '[PASSWORD]';
  <mysql>: GRANT ALL PRIVILAGES  ON *.* TO 'transfer'@'[OLD SERVER IP]' WITH GRANT OPTION;
  Don't forget to replace [OLD SERVER IP] and [PASSWORD] with your own values

Process

Now we will dump the data from our old server at [OLD SERVER IP] to the new server.  From a shell on our new server run the following command:
[]$ mysqldump -u[USER] -p[PASS] --all-databases | mysql -utransfer -p[PASSWORD] -h[NEW SERVER IP]

This command will then transfer all databases from [OLD SERVER IP] to [NEW SERVER IP].  Remember to delete the user 'transfer' from the mysql database for security reasons after this process is complete. For information on the mysqldump command see the mysqldump page and for any additional information please leave a comment below

Thanks
Stephen

A Review of the Pirated Windows 7

Blogging frequency will improve when I get finished with my current-uber-secretive coding project

Stephen

I don't know what caused it, but all of a sudden, after a stint in Windows, located on the same harddrive as MacOS, the MacOS partition refused to play nice and took 15 minutes or so to boot.  I tried everything to get to the bottom of it and there were no errors shown in the verbose boot or system.log

Eventually, after un-overclocking the rig, I ruled out all hardware besides the Harddrive.  Windows was having a little bit of a grumble about that too and partition magic identified a number of "boot sector problems" which it fixed.  As this didn't fix my OSX issue, it was time to dig deeper.

Off I popped and booted my iAtkos install DVD and launched "Disk Utility". This identified a number of problems

• Invalid volume file count
• Invalid volume directory count
• Missing thread record

I then set it away for an hour doing a command something along the lines of:

fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y && ... ...

but that didn't help me either.

After a little Googling, I found that Disk Warrior was the solution, so I burned it to a DVD and tried to boot.. D'oh!  My Hackintosh can't boot OSX native DVDs and it took me a few days to work this out.. stupid.. I tried to launch Disk Warrior from within OSX but it wouldn't do any of the fancy stuff to the disk as it was in use.

Sooooo.. After playing with the Chameleon bootloader for a few days and giving up on that route, I had to take drastic action.

I did a little reshuffling of my harddrives and made room for a partition.  I then installed ANOTHER copy of iAtkos onto this and booted into that partition.  On this partition I installed Disk Warrior.  FINALLY I was able to repair the disk and this is where I am now.  I had a quick read through the files that were damaged/deleted and there were a few worrying ones in /System/Library/Extensions that were deleted and the rest were all chinese user manuals and recovered files.  These didn't bother me too much so I booted and all is well, so far.

I hope this wee guide helps somebody diagnose there problem faster than me and I hope this will see me returning to the internetz more!

Thanks
Stephen

Hardware

The hardware I am installing on is as follows:

• Asus P5KC
• Intel Q6600
• 4GB Geil Ram
• NVidia 8800GTX

Software

There are a few choices for which installer to use when installing MacOS on PC hardware.  The one I chose was iAtkos, mostly because I already had a DVD burned lying around but I'm sure last time there was an educated reason for it.  The following Guide uses iAtkos 5.0i 10.5.5.  I'm not going to offer a download link but if you're creative you should be able to find it pretty easily..

Method

This is not a step-by-step guide.  I am merely typing my notes up into readable form in the hope that it is of to some use to somebody.  For a step-by-step guide or more information about the osx86 project visit their wiki.

So....

The DVD booted without any problems, I loaded the setup, chose Utility > Disk Utility.  I then created a partition and set on my way.

I chose my new partition as the install location and then hit next.  On the next screen I chose Customize and this is where the important stuff is chosen.

I am not going to go into details as to what every option does (mostly because I don't know) but there are descriptions for each on the install disc.

Bootloader:
PC-EFi
X86 Patches:
 - Decrypters
 Appledecrypt
- Enablers
SmBios Enablers
-Removepowermanagement
-OHR
Drivers:
- VGA
-- Nvidia
NVinject
Efi Strings > 8xxx 
- System
Sata/IDE
NTFS -3G

Once you have chosen these options (or different if you have slightly different hardware), run the installer and let it reboot.  If all has gone well you should be able to Sleep, Shutdown and Reboot.  For my the P5KC onboard lan and sound is missing.  As I don't use onboard sound you'll have to use your initiative.  Lan drivers however can be found here.

I am now installing updates to 10.5.6 and then will quest to re-find my soundcard drivers.  I hope this information is useful to you.

Stephen

P.S.
is it disc or disk?!

It was never a perfect install, but I had gotten used to all of the hangs, crashes, bangs and rattles that it had and they would warm my heart  like no native MacOS ever could.

But today, the dreaded day came.  I booted up the box this morning to a POST error (I can't remember what exactly).  I thought this was a little strange as the box has always posted despite being overclocked to 3GHz from 2.6GHz.  I had turned off the power supply last night as the fans had kept spinning despite shutting down (one of the mac install's lovable traits).  I didn't think that this was going to be a big deal so I rebooted, got it to post and it started to load MacOS.  This is where the problems started.

It hung on boot up, so I rebooted again.  This time it got to login prompt but would go no further so I rebooted yet again.  This time I tried a verbose boot and it flagged up an error about corrupt HDD (something about keys, I can't remember exactly).  Then came safe mode and it hung again.  I repeated this for a few hours trying to boot from my install CD and run Disk Utility.  My final try came when I burned Disk Warrior to DVD, only to realise 3 DVDs later that it wasn't going to boot on PC hardware.  I finally (about an hour ago) conceded that there was going to be no way I could recapure the old install so I have began to backup data.

I am using TransMac to copy all of my needed files from the Mac partition onto a FAT32 drive and it is working rather well.  I will then be installing a fresh copy of MacOS again and praying that I didn't leave anything obvious behind.  I will be doing a little bit of research before I install as I wasn't overly happy about the shutdown/restart/sleep not working so I may try a different install CD to iAtkos.  Most likely not though as I cba downloading any more ISOs.. I wasted enough DVDs today.

I'll make some notes during the install and write a little guide up here when I'm done

Stephen

He is looking to get some feedback as far as I know and I think that the software is pretty useful so I will give it a mention here.

Here is the description from Craig himself:

What is ScreenStamp! going to do?When ScreenStamp! has been fully developed for the release of the BETA version, it will once run ask you for a location to save your screen shots to, along with a name that the program will number, allowing the user to concentrate on the job at hand as a pose to saving screen shots.ScreenStamp! will also time and date stamp the screen shot at the top right hand corner.

Where did the ScreenStamp! idea come from?

When myself and my work group at University, where we are studying Ethical Hacking for Computer Security were carrying out an Information Gathering exercise the task of taking and saving screen shots with the clock opened and date showing was becoming really boring, so myself and a couple of other group members decided that and application that would do this for us would be well worth the time spent on creating one, after we had looked at failed to fins an application that did exactly what we had in mind.

I urge you all to go try it out and let us know what you think and of any bugs you find, it is available for both windows and linux with the possibility of Mac version coming soon (although the linux version may work on Mac??)

You can find out more and download @ http://www.screenstamp.co.uk