Archive for October, 2009

OSX On My Dell Mini 9!

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I have always wanted to try out OSX. i’ve heard only good things of it, and I’m just simply curious. What’s so good about it?

One of the reasons why I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the Dell Mini 9 is because it is one of the few netbooks where OSX can run without a hitch. I got the the netbook with the default specs. It has a default 8GB of SSD storage. Of course, it wasn’t enough for anything but XP (and Ubuntu). I decided to swap it for a Runcore 64GB SSD, which costs the same as the netbook itself! Lucky me, it was a worthwhiole upgrade; read-write speeds was much faster than the old brand, and everything zipped around, despite the much-maligned Atom processor.

At this point, I’ve been reading up on how to run OSX on it. However, all of the guides pointed out that an OSX 10.5 Leopard retail disc was needed. So I scrapped that idea for the time being. I whacked Windows 7 on it and was surprised at how well the netbook handled it. It felt much more responsive than Windows XP for some reason. Is it the snappier Runcore SSD? Probably. I was too happy with Windows 7 running perfectly on it to care too much about trying out XP on it.

And then Snow Leopard got released.

One of the huge perks of Snow Leopard when it arrived is the fact that an upgrade disc costs only S$48 (US$29)! My interest in OSX perked up again and I scoured the MyDellMini forums for news and updates on installation of Snow Leopard. So far, there were some problems with getting audio to work, so it was a big deal breaker for me.

Last week, I decided to check up on it again. This time, there were many reports of people getting it to work. There was a new release of NetbookInstaller & NetbookBootMaker, version 0.83 RC3, from mechdrew, the software responsible for making this work. Then, it was a simple matter of following instructions (which I have long since realised is a very difficult task for some people.).

And lo and behold, I now have a 9″, 1kg laptop running OSX 10.6.1 Snow Leopard!!

DellWithOSX

OSX is running very smoothly on this small Atom-powered netbook. I guess the 2GB ram and 64GB Runcore SSD upgrades helped tremendously in this regard. Another surprise is the fact that the touchpad is capable of multitouch! It supports up to 3-finger touch/swipe. I am absolutely fond of 2-finger scroll. It makes life so much easier on the touchpad.

Of course, there were some things not working out of the box. Sound is only available through the in-built speakers. To get headphones and the microphone jacks working, VoodooHDA is required. There are problems with hibernate, but sleep is fine. So after installation of SmartSleep, I needed to disable the hibernation and only enable sleep. Using an external monitor, I am not able to mirror, else both screens will be garbled. The older kexts (something like drivers in Windows, but for Mac) for the Intel GMA950 works, but graphical performance is a bit sluggish. There’s no fix for that yet as of now, except to use the older kexts, which I don’t recommend.

Other than that, everything else works! From the in-built webcam to the some special function keys, like volume. The whole thing just rocks!

Of course, being a purist, I am now bugging my wife to get an actual real-life breathing Macbook. A nice 13″ Macbook will do nicely. The Macbook Pro line isn’t necessary, since now even the Macbook has a 9400M as its graphics adapter.

I do hope that such projects will thrive and Apple will leave them well alone. Because of them, I manage to try out OSX with relative ease and without actually having to buy another laptop. A big thanks to mechdrew and all the guys over at MyDellMini forums!

Posted in Hardware, Software | 1 Comment »

I, mat.

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

I love Physics. I’m always fascinated by the world around me. How infinitestimally tiny particles, governed by the Uncertainty Principle, can form everyday objects, which if large enough, can influence space and time itself, is truly a miracle to even fathom. And to think, just a 100 years ago, we thought we were at the precipice of knowing all there is to know about our physical world.

A friend of mine recently showed me a very cool way, how I can show I am mat.

We start with the definition of an Impulse. Impulse, I, is the change of momentum, p, of an object.

I = Δp

Momentum is simply the mass multipled by its velocity.

p = mv
I = Δ(mv)

Mass is usually constant (unless one is eating while moving around which, according to the superstitions of my culture, means that one will become polygamous), and velocity is usually the property that’s changing.

I = m(Δv)
I = m(v - u)

, where u is initial velocity & v is final velocity.

From Newton’s equations of motion we have the simple equation relating initial and final velocity.

v = u + at

, where a is acceleration and t is time.

u = v - at

We can plug that equation into the equation for impulse derived earlier.

I = m(v - u)
I = m(v - (v - at))
I = m(v - v + at)
I = mat

Therefore, I equals mat. There has never been better proof of this.

Of course, there’s a much simpler way to do this but where’s the fun?

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Posted in Ramblings | 1 Comment »

Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold: Plug And Play

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Disclaimer: This worked on my Windows 7 64-bit but it should theorectically work the same on Vista 64-bit as well.

RT2Gold_cover

Apparently, Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold does not require any fancy-smancy registry entries. I’m currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and i was pining for some nice strategy game. For reasons unbeknownst to me (read: wife), I did not want to purchase a game for that. (But I do have that Stardock code, and Elemental sounds cool…) I remembered purchasing Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold some time back, so that seemed to hit the spot. The sad part: RT2Gold uses a 16-bit installer. Bummer.

So I decided to check XP Mode out.

XP Mode is not too bad an addition to Windows 7. It is a complete full virtualized Windows XP running on Virtual PC. What prevents it from being described as “good” or even “great” is that fact that you need a processor that supports hardware-level x86-virtualization. That’s Intel VT or AMD-V, depending on which camp you are in you stupid dumb idiotic fanboys. The other requirement is that this is only for the Ultimate version of Windows 7 (not sure about Professional edition though). There are free ways to getting this of course (Virtualbox + who-doesn’t-have-a-not-so-legit-copy-of-XP-by-now) but the nice thing about XP Mode is that you don’t have to go through the entire XP installation routine and everything, including license and the fact that all your drives on the host are seen as network drives, has been preconfigured. Plus, any application you installed in the virtualized XP can now be run via your Start menu in Windows 7 and you can simply invoke the program to run as though it is in XP, UI and all. That is quite impressive actually.

Anyway, I’m digressing. For a multimedia intensive application like a game, trust me, you don’t want to run in a virtualized environment. There’s just too many graphical glitches that makes it seem as though the game is unpolished. It’s one of the major reasons why I’m not in favour of running Linux at this time, but let’s not stir a hornet’s nest shall we?

One can install Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold on another machine and simply copy it over to another and play it there! RT2Gold can now join WoW and other games I can archive and take all over with me! Cool!

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Posted in Gaming, Software | No Comments »