Short Order Tech

Hacking an AppleTV to play any file type without Boxee or XBMC.

Bush Williams — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:53:46 +0000

*It is extremely important to be completely familiar with this material, the process, and the required software/resources needed to execute it properly before trying. As far as they go, this one is fairly long and complex. I have written this as simply as possible for someone who knows what they are doing. Remember that if at anytime you bork your AppleTV you can reboot it and hold MENU and – at the same time to do a factory restore*

What a typical day to take on a complex hacking project. I sat down, prepped, and put about an hour into this project. You know, just enough time to become fully committed when my kids begin bouncing between all out fighting as loud as they can and pounding on the piano. To add to the distraction, my wife needs me to help her move furniture so she can paint the laundry room, and in the midst of all of that, I screw up the hack and now my AppleTV boots into a black screen.

To recap progress thus far, the house is crazy and upside down, everyone needs something from me, and the AppleTV is FUBAR. Lets reset.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we used an Apple TV in our living room as the main source of on demand content. That is, until recently when I renovated our dining room into a Mac Mini driven Home Theater. Once the theater was complete, I found that the Apple TV in the living room began to slowly spiral into obsoleteness. Its not that we don’t watch TV in the living room anymore, its that we stopped watching downloaded content. Since AppleTV requires that all its content be MP4 and synced via an open iTunes library, I was previously converting every AVI/MKV/WMV/etc. etc. to MP4 before we could watch it. This was such a monumental pain in the ass that once we got Plex up and running on the Mac Mini, I just couldn’t bring myself to continue converting the content for the living room.

The goal of this post is to pass on the process I used to allow all other media containers rather than just quicktime to be played on an AppleTV without having to load Boxee and XBMC which simply do not perform on the AppleTVs hardware. Now, lets get dirty:

1.) Navigate to this website and download ATVUSBCREATOR http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

2.) Find yourself a USB Key (henceforth known as patch stick), back up any data you have on it as it will be erased, and run the program.

3.) You can unselect Boxee/XBMC at this point if you want, or install them. It doesn’t hurt to go ahead and load them up. I personally think they perform poorly on the AppleTV, but I encourage everyone to come to their own conclusions. We are mostly after the Software Menu and SSH tools.

4.) Now, run the patchstick creator, plug it into your AppleTV, and reboot. Once the loader is complete you need to pull the Patchstick out, and reboot the AppleTV one more time.

5.) You will notice now that your AppleTV is back online that the menu on the far left is “Software Menu” Browse over there and click on “3rd Party”. In the “3rd Party Menu” go down to “Check for Updates” and run it. After the update runs you should see a whole list of 3rd party plug ins. If not, see step 5a below, otherwise, at this point I am only installing “NitoTV”. There are also options to add Couch Surfer to surfing the web, and emulator program to play old console games, and many other plugs ins. There is also an option for ATVFiles, but I MUST WARN that both times I installed ATVFiles, my screen went black on the AppleTV after a reboot. I could hear the menu selections but the screen was black. The only way to fix this problem was to SSH to the Apple TV and remove the following directory via delete:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns/ATVFiles.frappliance.

5a.) You ran the 3rd party sofware installer and didn’t have NitoTV appear. Click this link to go to the download page and get the direct download for AppleTVs latest build. The install instructions will be included in the download and simply require you to copy the contents of the download to the root of Users/frontrow on your AppleTV and then execute a terminal command to install it.

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/NitoTV_Take_2

6.) Okay, so your hacked with NitoTV running. Now its time to setup install the AFP server so that we can browse network shares and start watching custom content.

Of course, at this point, we have a little problem… we need to get AFP up and running on the AppleTV so we can browse out to network shares for our content and use our external HDDs via the USB cable. Here comes the painful part.

7.) At this point, if you have an AppleTV that was made prior to October 2007 (Version 1.0) your good. Skip to step 12 and give yourself a big thumbs up because your very fortunate. For the rest of us, your going to need to turn up an AppleTV 1.0 Image. I am not going into any details than that, but without that image, your not going to get AFP to work. The steps from this point assume you have the proper OS.DMG file.

8.) Alright now, its time for a touch of voodoo. SSH to your AppleTV. Your going to need its IP address and an SFTP client like Cyberduck. However, before we use the client, the Terminal will get us going. Open up Terminal and type in SSH frontrow@your.appletvs.IPaddress You will then be prompted for a password, again, type in frontrow at this point your in. Now to make a recovery.dmg file.

9.) From the terminal, copy this line: sudo dd if=/dev/disk0s2 of=recovery.dmg bs=1m

10.) With that done, open Cyberduck and create a connection to your AppleTV using the information we used in Step 8. Once connected, browse to the users/frontrow directory and drag the “Recovery.dmg” file to your desktop.

11.) Stay with me here, lets open up “Recovery.DMG” and find a file called “OS.DMG”. This file needs to be deleted, and the file you got from the internet needs to be put in its place. (may be necessary to rename the file to OS.DMG if it has some odd name like OS-DOT-DMG.dmg or something like that) with that complete, copy the modified Recovery.dmg to the /Users/Frontrow/Documents folder on the AppleTV via cyberduck and then head back to the AppleTV.

12.) From the AppleTV, browse over to NitoTV and then down to Settings. From there you want to find and run the “Smart Installer”. This will take a while, don’t fret. Once this is done, it may say “Failed… Partial install”, but disregard. Go ahead and reboot the AppleTV.

13.) At this point you are good to Share the folders you want your AppleTV to be able to access on your remote Mac and the got to NitoTV -> Network and setup access to them.

Now thats it, your AppleTV is streaming content from any of the popular containers without the need to run a cumbersome and poorly executed program like Boxee to do so.

Moving iMovie Resources

Bush Williams — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:37:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I took the plunge and upgraded the 500GB internal 7200RPM drive in my Macbook Pro to a 256GB SSD. The problem is that just prior to that, I upgraded the 320GB 5400RPM drive that came with my Macbook Pro to that very 500GB drive because I was short on space. This isn’t hard math. I was out of space on my 320, so I got a 500, and then downgraded to a 256. How does that work? Well it finally put me in a place that many laptop users find themselves (or at least did prior to the 1TB 2.5″ HDD) The place where a single drive just isn’t going to cut it anymore. Its time to start toting around an external drive, but more importantly, decide what stays ever available internally and what can be pushed to “as needed” externally.

The decision wasn’t that hard. I work with Aperture constantly, and while my master library is a hefty 40 gigs (16% of the total 256). I want to have it available all the time. My music library on the other hand (90 gigs) can move to the external and be considered the “Master iTunes Library” and all the songs in my various playlists can be kept internally as my “Local Library” which will be a reasonable 6 gigs. My virtual machines are a good 40 gigs, and I rarely use them, I can easily move those to the external. That solves three major space hogs, but what about the other one? Video.

I shoot 720P HD video from a Canon T1i which consumes quite a bit of space in its unedited form. The problem is that I rarely stay on top of video processing as well as I do with photographs. I can go months before finally guilting myself into editing that video of my girls bowling for the first time, and until I do, its countless gigs just laying around dormant. Factor into that the other videos I took over the same period of time and all the ones before it, and I am easily sitting on 30 or 40 gigs of space that I do not actively use. Sounds like a perfect candidate for my external drive.

I edit all my video with iMovie. Its easy, its light weight, and its my daughters bowling, not a super bowl commercial. The problem is that iMovie natively wants to keep all its files in my home\movies folder. However, with a couple of very simple changes, it can use that external drive and remain very well organized. Here is how to do it:

1.) Plug up the external drive and open iMovie. In the main project window, right click your external HDD (mine is named R2) and choose new project. This will create an “iMovie Projects” folder on your external and generate the project file.

2.) Now that your project is created, we need to import your movies. Choose File -> Import -> and then then choose the type of import that fits your source video. On the next screen be sure to choose your external drive in the “Save to:” field and below that “Move Files”. This will finish completing the project and move all of the videos that project needs from their current location to the external drive.

Thats it, iMovie is now ready to work on the external drive and isn’t choking my drive with tons of unedited video.

iPad questions I would like answered

Bush Williams — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:52:08 +0000

TMO Recently tossed up a post over at http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/forums/viewthread/78069/ requesting comments on our questions about the iPad. I ended up with quite a few and wanted to take a moment to toss them up over here for posterity sake.

I am curious how printing is going to work. Its great to be able to create content easily with the iWork suite but what about printing it off? My wife prints content from the web all the time for shopping/school/etc and is drooling over the ipad so much she wants to replace her macbook with it, but if she can’t print its going to toss up an immediate wall.

What about multiple users? If this is to sit on my coffee table, it makes no sense to lock it down to one person. Can we each check out mail and calendars independently, have unique favorites, etc?

File transfer and itunes handling is going to be another big question for me. Currently my content is shared on a Drobo via a Mac Mini server. The Macbooks in the house use individual iTunes libraries that reference that content but don’t copy it locally. Can I reference the DVDs and Blu-Rays I have ripped and shared off the Drobo with iTunes on the iPad or can I only watch what I sync?

The picture dongle… I rarely travel, but when I do I create gigs of photographs shooting in RAW. Can I dump RAW files to the iPad where they will remain unmolested and in that format for easy transfer back to an iMac or MBP for post processing? How does this work?

These are the bulk of my questions, bear in mind that regardless of the answers I am still onboard and plan on picking up at least 1×16GB WiFi for the house, the question about the Camera dongle depends on if I get another 64GB w/ 3G to travel with or if I still lug around my 15” MBP.

For the record, since its such a highly debated product, I will take this opportunity to plant my banner in the corner of those who believe this is going to a revolutionary product. After the keynotes, I had some serious doubts, but once I applied a little imagination and intelligence to the equation, it was clear that this is going to launch as, and further evolve into the future of computing. Brilliant piece of hardware.

The Home Theater Project

Bush Williams — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:36:56 +0000

Well, I have been away for quite a while and, in that time, completed a couple of projects that were the epitome of blog worthiness but unfortunately, I didn’t blog them. To try and get caught up and rolling again, I am going to dust off the blog and give the highlights of my latest project. In a nutshell, we previously turned our dinning room into a play room for the kids which turned into a black hole for junk and was a total waste of space. Rather than converting it back to a dining room and sticking a table and six chairs we would never sit at in there, we opted to build ourselves a full on home theater system.

So, it was decided. We would build a theater. Luckily, I already had many of the needed components including 5.1 worth of 2003 Klipsch Reference speakers. To power the speakers I used my old school Denon AVR-3805 which doesn’t have HDMI, but was too expensive to be expendable, and a 110″ screen from a theater I built in a previous home. Aside from these major components I was also already packing the accessories like Xbox, PS3, Wii, and my Media library of 15000+ songs and 700+ DVDs ripped and stored on a Drobo. The room, having been a play room, already had DirecTV service so, out of the gate, content was covered.

Having taken inventory of the items I had, it was time to figure out the items I would need. Since my receiver didn’t have HDMI I would definitely need an HDMI switch that worked on remote to change sources and obviously, I was going to need a projector. For the switch, I scooped up a Monoprice 5×1 HDMI switcher for some absurdly cheap price, $30.00 I think (Go Monoprice) and bundled that order with 150 feet of speaker wire, a couple of HDMI cables, and a universal ceiling mount for the projector. With the basics out of the way, it was time to sit down and figure out what projector to use. I begin by looking at the Optoma HD20 which was all abuzz around the net claiming to be a sub $1000.00 1080P projector. While the stats on this little guy looked good, complaints of fan noise and the appearance of the word “Acceptable” over and over in the reviews, had me somewhat cautious of this device. The noteworthy part of the HD20 reviews and articles were that almost every author referenced the Epson Powerlite Home Cinema 8100 as its step up and main competition. After seeing this projector mentioned over and over, I pulled its specs, read several reviews, and decided it was the 1080P device for me so I sailed over to www.projectorpeople.com and picked one up.

Okay, components and a projector out of the way, I had the body of my beast, but no brains. I needed something to handle the online streaming and media library delivery, and while many think an Xbox/PS3 is that solution, I am not in that camp. The choice, for me at least, was obvious. I would need a Mac Mini. At the time I was building this system, Apple had released the $999.00 Mac Mini Server which appealed to me because a regular Mini is $599-$799 stock, but configured for my Application, $799.00 was the more accurate price. Subsequently, a Snow Leopard Server License is $499.00 so picking up a bundle for $999.00 was a deal I couldn’t pass up. For anyone else out there who isn’t as savvy with the Computer part of this built, the server license is so completely and totally unnecessary, don’t sweat it. A regular Mac Mini with 4 gigs of memory will serve just fine.

So here we go, the gear is assembled, time to build it out. As you can tell from the picture at the top of this post, the room was designed around my two little girls and about as far from my idea of “theater” as possible. There was also one other minor stumbling block. My wife. As it turns out, the only way I could get her on board with this project was to double the theater room as my office and workspace thereby moving my current workspace into the newly designed theater. This would mean a dismantling of all of my tech and toys on an epic scale. My old office was to become a laundry room, a small price to pay for what I was about to start building. I shouldn’t get ahead of myself though, before tearing all of this down, it was time to clear out the room, paint it, run the wires, and load in the gear. I began the week before Thanksgiving, and worked all of my free time for about a week to complete the project. That being said, it was only until recently that I actually called it “good” and have spent more time enjoying content than tweaking the gear. Which is the more enjoyable is a matter of opinion. I am sure I will find a reason to tear it all apart so that I can tweak it more in the near future.

The build out was simple. I ran speaker wire in the wall and through the crawl space. The HDMI and power for the projector was run tightly up the back corner of the room and over to the unit, .Charcoal Grey paint, curtains on the windows, some appropriately themed movie posters (it was Christmas time after all), a media stand I already had in another part of the house, and a smaller desk for my workspace. The result? I have to say that my family spends almost all of our time in this room now. The girls get to play Wii on a screen who’s diagonal is cumulatively longer than their combined height which blows their little minds, and 110″ of 1080 Disney Channel delivers wide open mouths and loads of excitement. My wife is now having friends over every week for her Tuesday night line up and can now watch TV throughout the week while I am on my Mac working or playing. Bringing the two of us into the same room while still letting us enjoy our own content is brilliant. For myself, I have been jamming out with Beatles Rock Band and Modern Warfare 2 on the big screen, enjoying my movie collection, and generally drooling over Discovery HD theater every night since it was completed. To anyone who is thinking “hmm, what the hell good is my dining room for?” I say tear it down and make yourself something amazing. To any who reads this post and thinks there is no way you could build something like this, find me @bushwilliams on twitter or e-mail Sysop@shortordertech.com and we will make it happen.

The specs are as follows:

110″ 1080P HD Epson 8100 Projector Display
5.1 Klipsch system including: 2X RB-75s, 2x RS-7s, 1X RC-7, and a RSW-15 powered by a Denon AVR-3805
Game Consoles: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii
A Windows 7 PC / Hackintosh 2.66 Quad w/ 8GB of RAM, fully water cooled, sits beside the components to facilitate Blu-Ray and DVD Ripping as well as video encoding and the occasional Windows based video game.
Direct TV HD DVR for Live Content
Mac Mini Server 2.53ghz 4GB RAM connected to my media library (Drobo) via FW800 distributes content at 1080P via Plex as well as serves iTunes libraries to three other Apple TVs and Macbooks in the house. This server runs TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) and wrangles all of our TV show torrents, streams Netflix, and provides crystal clear 110″ web browsing and Gaming. The Mac is fully controlled via a Logitech Harmony 880 Remote and functions just like a regular AV component. It has a small form factor and is absolutely fantastic for this application.

Additional Photos Below:

SoT is Back Online

Bush Williams — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:06:06 +0000

Its been a month of rocky relationships with hosting companies, but having migrated off Squarespace, to Dotster, and now finally having landed at Network Solutions, I think I have found a home for the blog. Look for posts to start rolling out once again starting next week. I am still in the process of adding images back in and unfortunatley my previous web links are broken as Squarespace formatted them slightly different, but regardless, its good to be back!

The Good, The Bad, and The Nasty…

Bush Williams — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:49:35 +0000

Back in June when I got my 3GS, I decided to try out an InvisibleShield from ZAGG. A friend of mine from work raved about his, and although I was some what “iffy” on the texture of the product and how “grippy” it made the screen feel, I decided to give it a try regardless. Now, three months later, here is my review.

The Good:The InvisibleShield is very grippy. It wont slide around in the car and it feels firmly planted in your hand. The protection it provides is incredible. I have literally keyed, scratched, bitten, and abused the phone with this on without any fear of damaging the finish. Note, I said the finish. I still wouldn’t drop it on the ground. This material is what helicopter blades are coated with, and I can personally verify that I was unable to puncture it. On the website they show a video of a person pushing the material down over a ballpoint pen and it will not damage it. I did just that and it didn’t

The Bad:The grip of this product is some what of a double edged sword. While its great to hold on to, its not very comfortable against the ear. It grips at your ear the same as your hand, which I found to be unpleasant. Given that I rarely use my iPhone for talking, I was able to live with it. The other issue is that installing this thing is a royal pain in the ass. It is wet applied with a mister and squeegee . You begin by misting down the shield, carefully placing it in position, and then working the water out from under it with an applicator. Once that is done you need to let it cure over night, and if you don’t get all the bubbles out of it, it looks like crap. Did I mention that if you get it good and stuck, there is no going back as pulling it off pretty much ruins it? Its like plastic model decals. You get one good shot at it and every other attempt after that just screws it up little by little.

The Ugly:As seen in the pictures below, I started to notice that the shield was turning yellow. I used it for three months and assume it just absorbed enough funk over that time to discolor. It could be due to heat, I am not sure. I will say that ZAGG is replacing it free of charge because of the discoloration.

The Verdict:If you want to protect your phone but don’t want a bulk case, I say go for it. These things run about thirty bucks and are replaceable for life through the warranty. I can also verify that it pulled right off with no damage to the phone. I have one of these on my SLR camera and my kids iPhone, and have full trust in its ability to prevent screen and body scratches no matter how severe the conditions.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Sent from my iPhone

Folder Icon of Death?

Bush Williams — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:05:46 +0000

I’m guessing that’s not a good thing to have when you reboot due to unusual sluggishness?

Update on Friday, September 4, 2009 at 10:00 PM by Bush Williams

Well, at this point I have tried the following in this order:

I rebooted into the Snow Leopard DVD and ran Disk Verify. It verified fine so I ran Disk Repair, it completed, then I repaired permissions, and rebooted. No change, blinking icon o’ death.
I rebooted into the Snow Leopard DVD and re-installed Leopard (didn’t format). No good. Still toast
I held down CMD+OPT+P+R and turned on the Mac to clear the PRAM. No good
I grabbed the Super Duper clone of my wifes Macbook that I made prior to installing Snow Leopard and booted right up to it and am currently authoring this post on my Icon o’ Death Macbook Pro booted up as my wife’s Macbook (twisted eh?)

While writing this, I ran another verify against the HDD and it came back clean as well. (See screenie on right). I am going to try and re-select the HDD as my startup drive and reboot. If that doesn’t work I am going to nuke and pave this son of a bitch and see how it likes them Apples. Be back shortly.

Update on Friday, September 4, 2009 at 10:28 PM by Bush Williams

Alright, this has got to be something simple. My last updated stated that I was about to try and reselect my startup disk and see if that fixed it… Well, prior to doing so I had the brilliant idea to actually try and access the drive… (go figure) Sure as I did, I am streaming video off it, and currently 1/2 way through copying off my Aperture Library (14gigs) my iPhoto Library (8 gigs) and my iWeb Domain database (2gigs) and so far haven’t stumbled once. So, to use another series of bullets and numbers (Im a sucker for lists), we know the following:

I can’t boot to the internal drive, there are no repairs to be made
I can boot from a clone of another Mac via USB
While booted into said clone, I can access the drive that wont boot and have all but proven it is fine.

I’ll take 3:5 that the boot voodoo is corrupted and if I wipe and re-install it will be all good. If that doesn’t work, then there has to be a larger issue and this bad boy is going back to Apple… This is the first time I am kicking myself for not having a copy of Drive Warrior on hand to sick on this drive, but between the stuff I just pulled off and Time Machine, its not really that big a deal if I have to go all hard pipe hitting geek on the install.

Update on Friday, September 4, 2009 at 11:26 PM by Bush Williams

Well, after numerous attempts to reset the drive as the startup drive and no luck, I have resorted to plan Y. I have wiped the drive and am currently running the installer. It is installing suspiciously slow but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me. It also seems like the fans are going all out, but the progress bar is moving so I guess its doing its thing. The machine isn’t warm and I don’t hear head collisions so who knows what the hell is going on. One way or another, if this doesn’t work, its on to plan Z which is engaging Apple on Tuesday and getting a new drive.

Update on Friday, September 4, 2009 at 11:57 PM by Bush Williams

Well, that seemed to have done it. I am up and running on a clean install. I am going to reboot a half a dozen or so times and then get some sleep. I will migrate everything back over tomorrow.

Update on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 9:03 AM by Bush Williams

Alright, working off the Mini this morning while I perform a (drum roll) Time Machine Restore… I have heard the horror stories surrounding Time Machine, so I am slightly concerned about how well this is going to work. Then again, I am also sort of glad this happened as I can notch the whole “Disaster Recovery” on a Mac thing on my bandolier o’ geekery.

That being said, I have learned a few things, and come to a few conclusions moving forwards after this event. First and foremost, I have to say this is the first time in my life (I have witnessed it happen to others) that my system simply died on me. Granted, it was more of a mock up as I still had access to my drive and data even though I couldn’t boot to it, but for all intensive purposes, a sound simulation. Bear in mind that I did copy data off last night, but am proceeding with the rebuild as though I had not. Taking all that into account, I want to talk about Time Machine.

Like most Mac Users, I run 24 incremental backup jobs daily. I send mine to a networked HDD hooked up to my router. I have been tempted with the idea to get a mod that will only backup my systems once per day however had I done that I would definitely be missing a couple of hours of work given the time frame of this event. I will leave Time Machine alone. Secondly, I learned a good bit about restoring after a disaster. Since I backup to a network volume, Time Machine only wants to look for that volume to restore my data. Well, there is no way I am going to restore 95 gigs over the wire when I could plug the HDD directly into my Mac. Enter problem number:

If you plug the previously networked Time Machine Volume directly into your Mac, it will see the drive, but if you try to open Time Machine it will not see the backup.
If you hold down Option while clicking the Time Machine Icon in the menu, you will see “Browse other Time Machine Disks” but if you click it, a blank menu comes up without your Time Machine Volume…

Now this may sound silly that I didn’t try it, but the actual solution here is to plug the drive up locally, open it, and then double click on the sparse bundle for the Mac you want to restore. In my case “Macbook Pro”. At this point it will mount the sparse bundle like a drive and you can either “Option + browse other Time Machine Disks” or, do as I have done and launch the migration assistant. This of course has it a hurdle of its own as well. Since I had to perform a clean install, I naturally setup my user account like always once it finished. Well, the problem is that the migration assistant wants to setup that exact same user account and as a result will not import your data unless you rename your account. To avoid this, I created an admin account and named it “Sysop” and then deleted my user account off the Mac. After that I simply logged in as Sysop, mounted the sparse bundle, and then launched the migration assistant. The assistant immediately found the sparse bundle, I clicked import, and in 2 hours I should be back to where I was at 7:46PM last night (the time of my last incremental) with no harm done. That however will be the subject of my (hopefully) final update to this event and will have to wait until after farmers market.

My thoughts are somewhat scattered here since I am writing this real time, but I also need to plug Mobile Me here. I just so happened to try the 60 day trial last week to agree that it was crap or to debunk and sing its praises, and please plug your ears whilst I sing. I am syncing Mobile me from my (dead) Macbook Pro to my Mac Mini media server, and its brilliant. Even with my Mac down, I have access to my contacts, calendars, and mail accounts and bookmarks. I was able to jump over to the Mini, open up Safari, and operate as though I was still on my Macbook Pro. My wife and I have already been going over the Calendar, and I am using the Mail App to check my IMAP accounts as though nothing ever happened. I am very pleased with this and will now officially roll it into my recommendations for the ultimate disaster recovery suite. Its like a Colo in a can.

Before I wrap this update, I will say that as cheap as hard drives are these days, I am going to go ahead and take my backup strategy to the next level and go buy myself a small dedicated drive. I will use that drive to run a scheduled Super Duper clone nightly so that the next time something like this happens I have at least a 23 hour and 59 minute old bootable snap shot of my Mac. With something like this available, I can use it to regain access to my Mac, or any Mac for that matter and then clone it back over to my Mac and use time Machine to catch up on whatever happened in between. If that last paragraph went into orbit, I apologize, its been a runaway train of a post.

Alright, Farmers Market…

Update on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 1:04 PM by Bush Williams

Back from the Farmers Market and the migration was complete. I am now back up and running with no issues. I can only presume that the boot voodoo on my HDD got corrupted or perhaps it is a larger issue waiting to crop back up anytime… Not sure, only time and usage will tell, but all in all, recovery was a breeze.

/Cheers

Component to HDMI

Bush Williams — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:56:00 +0000

Component to HDMI in 3 parts.

1. HDMI to DVI-D.

2. DVI-I / D / A, three way converter

3. DVI-I to Component

All parts purchased at www.monoprice.com

Okay, time to test it out.

Update on Monday, August 31, 2009 at 7:49 PM by Bush Williams

errm… too bad it doesn’t work.

Taming Snow Leopard

Bush Williams — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:46:47 +0000

Well, its done. Here I sit on my freshly formatted, brand spanking new install of Snow Leopard. I am going to use this post to track the process as I go. I don’t know if it will be all that interesting, but here goes nothing. First off, I did clone my Macintosh HDD last night via Super Duper, so my stuff is basically in stasis right now. Let me just say first and foremost, that the ability to rip a clone of your hard drive so quickly and easily prior to performing an overhaul like this is freaking brilliant. I have network access to a bootable copy of the drive I just obliterated. Good stuff.

Moving on. So, put in the new DVD and booted. Before installing the Snow Leopard I entered the disk utility via boot DVD and erased my drive and from there, proceeded to install. The next screen told me to wait 30 minutes while it loaded the program (notice, no verify DVD option anymore), and so I went and blew off the back deck. When I came back in, the install was complete and so I gave it my nationality and Apple ID at which time it wrapped up the install and now we are all caught up to the here and now. So far, so easy…

I am going to kick this off by switching my 32″ 1080P TV as the primary monitor and already I have found a new setting. Check this out:

Looks like Snow Leopard knew I was hooked up to a television set and had a display setting ready to go for me. I like this very much. Okay, I have work to do. I will post back as I make progress. Until then, lets hope the sailing remains this smooth. Oh, and for the record, that screen shot when taken by Snow Leopard via CMD+SHIFT+4 was named “Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 1.45.46 PM” not “Picture 1″.

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 2:09 PM by Bush Williams

Having access to my cloned Library files is almost making this silly. I have the SuperDuper clone hanging off my Airport Base Station and am sucking down all my settings for the stock apps first. Again, cake. Safari is fully restored, working on iTunes next to get that over with.

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 2:34 PM by Bush Williams

Whoops, last night I created a bookmark bar folder and marked every one of my favorite apps websites… errr after I ran the SuperDuper clone. So, time machine to the rescue. I have my Time Machine Drive hanging off the Airport Extreme as well and with a quick connect to it, I restored the most recent data. Sometimes being really O.C.D. about backups really pays off.

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 3:08 PM by Bush Williams

Alright, iTunes (all 21 gigs of it) has been motored over to the fresh install, and my iPhone is syncing up without any issues. Honestly, I figured if anything was going to be a pain in the ass it would be iTunes, but with that behind me, I am going to start loading in Apps.

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 3:26 PM by Bush Williams

I have the mail App set backup with all five of my IMAP accounts and I noticed that it no longer takes 5 minutes of spinning wheels for the Mail App to configure your account. I setup all five in easily what it would have taken to setup one previously. Now I am moving 15 gigs of pictures and digging up iWork and iLife.

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 4:08 PM by Bush Williams

So far so good. I have installed and run the following so far:

AppZapper 1.8
Cyberduck build 5167 – tested upload download to my blogs
Evernote 1.4.8 – Synchronized my data from their servers, no issues
GIMP 2.6.7
Handbrake 9.3
MetaX 2.4.6
NameMangler 2.0
MactheRipper – required Rosetta so I didn’t install it
PDFPenPro 4.1
Perian 1.1.4
Reader Notifier – does not work, its unable to connect to Google.
SuperDuper 2.6
Sync!Sync!Sync!LE 3.7.1
VLC 1.0.1
Omnigraffle Pro 5.2
VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 – Haven’t loaded upa VM yet

Update on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 4:54 PM by Bush Williams

Alright, Aperture and iWork are now installed as well. I am going to run a round of software updates and go out for some Bloody Marys. So far I have only rebooted once because iLife made me, and the system seems rock solid. This is my first time to nuke and pave a Macintosh as well as my first time to upgrade an OS on a Macintosh and all in all its almost disgusting its so fracking easy.

Update on Monday, August 31, 2009 at 9:34 AM by Bush Williams

Well, the weekend is over and all my Macs are back on their feet. As I have found with most Apple ordeals, the biggest part of the “ordeal” is the waiting game on when we are going to get our hands on the product. I know there have been some rocky OS updates in the past, but only approaching my first year of being PC free, I haven’t had that experience.

I performed a clean install on two Macbooks this weekend and an in place upgrade of a Mac Mini. All of them went off without a hitch, and so far the only two issues I am having is the lack of a final build of Growl and a non functional Reader Notifier. All in all, a non issue. After playing with the new OS this weekend, I have to say that I am very happy with the progression from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Dock Spaces is already a feature I couldn’t live without, the sleep/shutdown/restart times are brilliant, minimizing windows to their icon is fantastic, and the performance gains feel very real to me. For the price, this was worth every bit of the hype.

Follow Friday: August 28, 2009

Bush Williams — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:48:28 +0000

Its Friday already? This week flew by and I have to say that not a whole lot of interesting things happened folks. I think the community at large is taking a large inhale as the anticipation for Snow Leopard builds. I know that I have digested every tidbit as it has come out from Gina at Lifehackers early claims that you had to have Leopard on the drive to install, then Mossberg broke that was false, now we can upgrade Tiger with Snow Leopard…

Now we have posts flying around trying to dumb down the anticipation. The first half of the week was news to the tune of OMG OMG OMG with the last half of the week showing posts on “Why you should wait”. While all of this is going on every other feed presents something else the OS does that I didn’t previously realize. All in all, its been a week of Snow Leopard news and prep. I really hope to get back to regular content soon enough as well as expand to a whole new section on App reviews in the coming weeks, hopefully with video.

What was I saying? Right, Snow Leopard (imagine that). Having thumbed through the list of Apps that are/are not compatible last night and finding that mainly Growl and Cyberduck are the two I am most concerned about as well as “Reader Notifier” which is my favorite convenience, I have decided I am in good standing. I am not going to upgrade all the Macs in the house out of the gate but today, focus on my own Macbook Pro. I ran a SuperDuper Clone last night and wired it into my Base Station so I can reference / access all of my files and the plan, as it stands, is to swing for the fences and do a fresh install. At this point, I am sitting back, and waiting for FedEX to come. If he isn’t here by 10:30 I am going to get a pitchfork, a torch, and go looking for his ass with the rest of the village.

Okay, how about some non Snow Leopard items from this week, brief though they are.

Flixster: A great app for finding show times at your local theaters, buying tickets online, and reading up on newly released DVDs receives an update and can now manage your Netflix Queue. /Crowd goes wild
Facebook 3.0: The new Facebook App is released to masses and the masses go wild. I was really starting to lose interest in Facebook as the previous iPhone App was complete crap, and logging in from a Computer is an inconvenient, inefficient, waste of time. This might just revive my Facebooking as I already spent 20 minutes doing a couple of “Pick 5s” from my phone this morning. Did I mention I can also post to the Short Order Tech fan page? #Brilliant
Quake Live came out for the Mac and its a great waste of 10 minute chunks of your life.

Alright, well, thats it for the Friday Wrap this week, going to make a last check of the Snow Leopard prep and will be back later today to make some notes as I go through the process. Happy Friday!