New photos!

As promised, I finally uploaded all of the Rabbit photos I have and also some others from Siobhan such as karting, the lakes and more..

See them here

Thanks
Stephen

Long time no post – a list of excuses!

Hello there,

It has been, at the last check, well over a month since I last updated my blog.  I have also not updated any of my other websites for this same period of time, and I thought that if I posted a blog and tried to justify why; it might just make me realise that there’s no good reason for this.

Drag Racer is still going from strength to strength in terms of user numbers but the morale of the regular users is suffering due to the lack of updates and involvement that I have been offering them.

This blog is still delivering impressive user numbers too despite the lack of content that I am injecting into it.  It is very low-maintenance and I will have to try to make it my first visit on my daily web-browse so that I am more motivated to post blogs.

So, a little background.  At the moment, Siobhan and I have been very busy not doing a great deal.  Siobhan just started uni at Newcastle University (congrats) and I am recommencing my second year of my Degree at Newcastle College.  We have just recently bought two rabbits, which are in the process of being trained to be given the free roam of the house, but this is proving difficult. I will probably put up some photos of the two little terrors on the Photo section very soon.

Since my Hackintosh had it’s harddrive faliure, I have found it really difficult to be motivated to spend 6, 7 or 8 hours in front of a PC writing hundreds and thousands of lines of code.  I seem to have found a much better pastime in losing at online poker!  This is going to change though, and I will not be playing poker online for atleast a few months now until Siobhan and I are more sorted with the furnishings for the flat, etc.

I have also just recently started a new job, at TK Maxx newcastle (lol), which doesn’t take a great deal of my time (16-25 hours per week), but now means that most of the time that I spent alone, and did most of my coding, (weekends while Siobhan was at work) are now occupied.

I hope this provides a good insight of why there has been a lack of activity around here and I apologise for this!

Thanks
Stephen

Hackintosh is back!!!

As some of you more regular readers may have noticed, I am back from a period of absence.  This is mainly due to my main PC (my Hackintosh) having a little harddrive trouble.

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

Using OpenDNS for reliable, feature rich DNS

Yesterday and today I was annoyed to find that some of my domains had disappeared from the face of the earth.  Others that were assigned to the same server were responding normally and the server was up and functioning fine.  At first I thought it must be a problem relating to Godaddy DNS services (they host my DNS) which would pass.  After 12 or so hours, the problem hadn’t went away so I looked for another solution.  After a quick google search for alternative DNS solutions I stumbled upon the OpenDNS project.  The goal of OpenDNS is simple:

OpenDNS is a better DNS service. We make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. It’s free, and there’s nothing to download.

So I went ahead and switched my DNS IPs to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (if you don’t know how to do this post a comment below and I’ll reply with a guide ).  Straight away a ping to www.groomi.net showed that the problem was with Virgin Media’s crappy DNS servers.

One thing that annoyed me though, was OpenDNS’ money-making method.  I mis-typed a web address and was instantly greeted with an ugly search page littered with banners: http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.qwertyuiop.  This alone was enough to put me off using OpenDNS until I discovered that you can register an account at OpenDNS.com which allows you to disable this feature, track your DNS traffic,  Enable/Disable content filtering + phishing protection and much more.

Since finding this I am very happy with the service that OpenDNS offer and would reccomend it to anyone!

Long time no blog

I must apologise for my lack of blogging lately. It has been over a month and a very busy one at that!

Over the last month I finally moved in with my girlfriend Siobhan! We have a cool little 2-bed flat in Hebburn and having our own place is absolutely brilliant!

This is a very uninteresting blog but it is just word to let you know that I am still here and will start posting as soon as I have something interesting to post about! I’m sure you guys don’t want to hear about our lovely new bed linen and wardrobe…

I have just started to learn socket programming in flash and I am intending to develop my second Facebook application over the summer. Watch this space

BBQ Rules

We are about to enter the BBQ season. Therefore it is important to refresh your memory on BBQ etiquette. When a man volunteers to do the BBQ the following chain of events are put into motion: 
Routine… 
(1) The woman buys the food. 
(2) The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes dessert. 
(3) The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces, and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill – beer in hand. 
(4) The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities can take place without the interference of the woman. 
Here comes the important part: 
(5) THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL. 
More routine… 
(6) The woman goes inside to organise the plates and cutlery. 
(7) The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great. He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer while he flips the meat 
Important again: 
(8) THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN. 
More routine… 
(9) The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins, sauces, and brings them to the table. 
(10) After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes. 
And most important of all: 
(11) Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking effort s. 
(12) The man asks the woman how she enjoyed ‘her night off ‘, and, upon seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that there’s just no pleasing some women.

Extra man puzzle

Where does the extra man come from

Look at this image and count the number of men.  Then when it switches their heads, count again.

This will drive you mad for hours and even though I have been given a solution to it, it doesn’t make sense to me and is driving me CRAZY!

Check it out and see if you can work out where he comes from

Facebook cheat code

Today I read a fun post on a Facebook forum which told me to do the following:

On any Facebook page type in:
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, and then press enter

It will add some nifty effects!

lol.. 

This may be recognised by many as an old Konami cheat code and it’s pretty cool that facebook has stolen it

Check it out!

Holidays!!!

Hey,

Yesterday was the final deadline for all of my assignments and projects at College.  This means that I am free now until september!

I can’t wait for the free time and am very glad that I will be able to have more time to put into web projects such as Drag Racer and SJGmusic.  The fun won’t last for long as it won’t be long until I run out of money.  This weekend is a bank holiday but on Tuesday I intend to do alot of phoning around to get myself a temporary job .

In the meantime though I have alot of free time which I have thus far wasted playing Facebook games and looking at youtube.  It wasn’t fruitless though as I did find this HILARIOUS clip from Galaxy Radio below:

Enjoy

Love
Stephen

Guide: Hackintosh with Asus P5KC

If you read my previous post you will know that this afternoon I have spent a little while (re)installing MacOS on my PC hardware.  The reason is due to a harddrive corruption on the previous install.  I do not place the blame for this on the software I am going to tell you to use, but mostly the choice of drivers that I had installed.  I would warn you off the drivers in question, but I stupidly neglected to take any notes on my last installation.  This time I did not!

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?!