OSX86 Log

This is just to help myself out for future reference.

Inspiron 9300 Guide
9.5.0 Voodoo Kernel (Need for SSE2) **
NEVER Install NVIDIA $$
Chipset: ICH6-M (Need to read SATA drives)
Audio: AC97
Ethernet: Broadcom 440x
RT2500 doesn't work, Zydas most reliable, IPW2200 needs open network

Extra iPC options:
Patched USB
GenericCPUPowerManagement
Dual Boot Time Fix (needed?)
** Seatbelt 10.5.5 (NEEDED)
PS/2 Device Fix (keyboard/touchpad break otherwise)
Apple SMBIOS ToH

$$NVIDIA

Titan seems to be the only thing that works.

1. Download Titan

2. sudo cp Titan.kext /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext

3a. sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext
3b. sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext

4a. sudo nano /System/Library/Extensions/NVDANV40Hal.kext/Contents/Info.plist
4b. Change:
0x004010de&0xfff0ffff 0x00f010de&0xfff0ffff 0x022010de&0xfff0ffff 0x014010de&0xfff0ffff 0x016010de&0xfff0ffff 0x009010de&0xfff0ffff 0x01d010de&0xfff0ffff 0x039010de&0xfff0ffff 0x029010de&0xfff0ffff

into

0x00c810de

REBOOT. DONE. FINALLY.

Summer Log 3

"It's not summer!" you say, "Hahaha, oh? BUT IT IS!" I respond. There is no such thing as autumn or winter in this city. :P Anyway...

The semester is coming to an end. My grades are beautiful and my average *should* be higher than last semester. Unfortunately that means not seeing most of my friends for 2 months, but...at least I can get to work on some projects I have in mind.

Well, first off I can get back to daily updates at my "Just Deserts" comic. However, I've been thinking about it for a while and I'll probably get to it sometime next week, but I'm planning on starting another "side" comic. Actually, it could easily convert it to a "main" comic, but I don't plan on dedicating incredible amounts of time to it. I'm sure the craze is just as bad in the US (and worse) as it is here, but a certain series of books has been getting a lot of attention lately (though it seems its a couple of years old already), especially now with a new movie out. "Twilight" seems to have 80% of my female classmates in some mentally altered state, with the disease slowly infecting more and more. I think it is my duty to bring the light to these people, and plan on starting a parody comic called "Twinight". Technically, my goal is to piss off every Twilight fanatics out there, and hopefully amuse the "normal" fans as well. This comic could actually become a stream of revenue for me seeing as how the target audience is huge. My Just Deserts comic has always been a more personal comic with a very small audience of my old tournament buddies. Anyway, we'll see how that whole thing works out. :D

Learning more Japanese, creating a work of art in Photoshop, making a Spanish version of my mastastealth.com site are all small goals I plan on completing during my vacations.

Another interesting tid-bit of news from my life is the fact that I have touched my bass again in the longest time. Been playing with it for the past 3 days or so, just listening to my music library and playing tunes by ear. It's an interesting thing; I don't consider myself a musician at all, and I'm not good for heavy practice sessions or anything, but oddly enough I do have a knack for the play-by-ear thing, don't know why. Sometimes it feels like I subconsciously know the notes, and I actually nail the notes before I even start listening to the song. It makes me feel all awesome inside. Normally, I have to move my fingers around quite a bit testing to see what note I need to play, but those few times I just get it instantly is just a wonderful feeling. I have 2 nice bubbles in my right index and middle finger now. ;P

Looking at my last post, I was suppose to share some apps so...here goes some more:

Shrink-O-Matic is an interesting and quick image resizer I got. It's pretty boring having to open up a big photo editing program like Photoshop just to resize an image. I also don't like going through the hassle of opening a quick app like Irfanview and going through the menus to do it. This app does it nice and quick, thuogh it has a file limit size of 2600 pixels or something. That's pretty bad as most of my photos are at a higher resolution (and are normally what I want to quickly resize), but there should be an update soon that fixes it.

Two websites I want to recommend are tr.im and is.gd. Pretty cool names right? These 2 sites are URL shorteners. You know when you have a huge link to an image in the middle of a forum post or something, maybe a facebook album, or some strange google image you want to share? These sites give you a tiny link to pass on to friends! Just enter in the URL you want to share, and it will create one for you to pass out.

Lately I've been messing with a lot of music apps. Winamp starting to mess with my explorer and stopped updating properly for some reason, so I had to find an alternative. Songbird was one of my first choices, being a popular new open-source player. It's quite nice, with its iTuneseque interface. I think my only gripe with it at the moment is the lack of audio output customization. I have 3 sound cards to choose from (USB headset, integrated, and Xi-fi card), and normally make my music apps output to the integrated sound (I can barely tell a difference from the Xi-fi, and the Xi-fi won't work in linux yet, incase you're wondering why I'm not using my card :P) and leave everything else through my headset. However, in Songbird I have to open up the Windows sound settings, change default sound device, open Songbird, change back and close. Kind of annoying. Foobar2000 is a sweet player, the thing starts up in 2 seconds and the UI is fairly customizable. It's main problems for me are lack of podcast support (Songbird doesn't have it yet either, but will soon) and the playlists. There's no recently added, now playing, or recently played playlists like in Winamp, and apparently I really like to use that feature.

Currently I'm trying out Media Jukebox. Another iTunes looking player, looks nice but it also has 2 little niggles. There seems to be no customizable global hotkey support, and its probably slower than most of the other players (maybe even more than Winamp). I also gave Windows Media Player a whirl but quickly stopped because of it's crappy library browsing. Ugh, why Winamp? Why did you have to start misbehaving!?

Summer Log 2

Yay, more blogging. Well, continuing from where I left off, I've made awesome progress on my Japanese and can now read the whole Hiragana alphabet pretty well. Of course, I will need to practice until I stop second guessing what letter it is I'm reading, but at least I can start reading stuff. Next up is the Katakana alphabet, which is the exact same thing except it uses different symbols. I don't really get that, but whatever, it looks like I'll need it since sometimes when I'm reading different things I see there are symbols I run into that I don't recognize (and I don't mean the weirder, complex kind. They are just simple symbols I haven't learned yet). For instance, my name in Japanese would be pronounced: BU-RA-I-A-N which using Hiragana would come out to:

ぶらいあん

and in Katakana would look like:

ブライアン

(you might not see the above if your Windows doesn't have the Oriental text fonts installed).

Anyway, you can see they are quite different styles, with the first one leaning to what appears to be Chinese. Either way, I'm looking for programs to help me out with this. The best one I've found is this game for the DS called Japanese Training. It looks great and the exercises are fun, but the thing crashes very 5 minutes so it's VERY annoying.

Besides learning Japanese, I've also been learning another "language". Lua! This is a programming language used in a variety of different games and stuff, and in my case, is used in my regularly played Spring. The language is a LOT like Python, and has been pretty easy for me to catch on to. Unfortunately, in my adventure of making a "Ferry Widget" for the game, I've come across quite a lack of documentation on all the functions provided. This doesn't help since I'm stuck doing trial-and-error tests, and when I get stuck, no one helps me out, since most don't know Lua (on the Spring forums). The ones that do are to elite to talk to a noob like me I guess.

Also I've met a really cool client thanks to Scope who hired me to do a web template for him. I've done that work, and he was pleased, saying he'll contact me for future work too! So it's really cool that I'm finally starting up my business. Interestingly enough, it's this type of thing that makes me wonder why I'm going to college in the first place. I mean, am I not studying and paying vasts amount of money to eventually do what I am already doing? I mean, I won't even "learn" any computer stuff (be it web design, Photoshop, or whatever) until 4th semester, meaning I gotta wait another YEAR. Just watch, when that year rolls around, I'll probably end up correcting my teacher on faster methods to create this or that effect in Photoshop.

In other news, I bought Team Fortress 2, have been using Twhirl a lot, and didn't get to see Ghostbusters that last time. It was ending, and my sister just called me to hear the ending song apparently. Though I did get to see Jurassic Park (the first one) again the other day, and I think some friends are gonna go out to see Hancock on Thursday.

Summer Log 1

All right, so I've burned around 2-3 weeks of my "summer vacation". As usual my summer's consist of 100% more computer time, sitting here in my house with little contact to the outside world...you know, besides the internet. X-D

Actually, I don't mind it, and prefer it that way sometimes, but geez. You start to realize that despite the fact you are from Florida (you know, the hot and humid state, where temperatures are usually above 80's, 90's in summer, and humidity makes it feel like the 100's) when you are indoors those large numbers are easily maintained at a more comfortable level by a little something called a Centralized Air Unit. Which, practically doesn't exist here. :P

Each room in the house has 1 AC unit, which we only use at night because electricity here is ridiculously expensive compared to the States. We probably pay more using these 3 units at night then maintaining our old (and large) house back at Tamarac at a nice 77 degrees 24/7. I feel more sorry/worried about my computer than my actual comfort, because this type of ambient is what can kill it easily. :( Good thing the case has large fans, but I've had to keep the case side open since it seems every time I close it up, I start getting some funky errors with the hard drives.

Anyway, besides burning up in my chair, I've also started up another chapter of my webcomic, Just Deserts. I've also been reading a lot of Manga online, currently having finished the latest of Eyeshield 21 and School Rumble (both of which are a bit more than 270 chapters long, around 4-8 pages a chapter).

It has also finally pushed me to point of learning Japanese, reading these mangas. So I've started practicing the writing first, memorizing the supposed 46 main symbols of Hiragana. So far I got my vowels done, and the ka, ke, ki, ko, ku syllables as well. There is no real alphabet, it's a syllabic alphabet, and then there's the Kanji symbols, which are full words or phrases. There are thousands of those, so they will be last on the list. :P Though you don't have to memorize all of it to read manga and stuff. Anyway, Ghostbusters is on TV, so I'll write down everything else I was thinking about later. X-D

Graphic Design Competition

This is something I posted about a while ago on my comic blog, but I think I should move it here to avoid any future problems. ;P This was posted 5/9/08.

So, my group won the competition. It was extremely nerve wrecking as they went down the list of all the entries, which were e-mailed to the director to be judged by a group of professors and herself. First half were the entries for the concert, second was ours with the Communication and Design entries. They showed ours second to last, so the whole time I was worrying whether I had e-mailed it wrong or something. Anyway, let's go back to the beginning.

We started on Tuesday with 2 speakers, Guillermo Valverde and Germán Barreneche. In the evening we began brainstorming the ideas for the poster we had to make. My group was really enthusiastic, and they were throwing ideas around everywhere. I sat back and doodle the following in my book:


So I showed my idea to the 1 or 2 people sitting by me, but I never presented it to the group. They had their own idea going, and weren't really paying attention to my sketchbook, so I didn't really care about anything at that point. They had asked the 2 guests for help and advice. On one of these discussions, the guest through out an example for us (as it seemed he wasn't really into any of the previous ideas). The idea he drew, was pretty much my second doodle, a speech bubble with a scribble (in my case, a blob of paint) in the middle. When he drew that, I pulled out my sketchbook. He looked at it and seemed impressed, asking if I had presented this. Admitting I hadn't, he told me not to stay quiet about anything, present everything. Anyway, we continued the brainstorming.

By then, seeing as how my idea didn't seem unanimously received, I got bored and was walking around checking out the other groups' designs. Near the end, I was outside talking with friends, almost ready to leave when they called me inside. They were talking to the second guest (Germán, I believe) who had a speech bubble with the appearance of a paint palette. The group told me to show him my book, so I did. He was really impressed as well (something to note, is that both of them pointed out my first doodle, the one with the pencil. They seemed to have liked that one a lot as well.) He congratulated me for the idea, and told me that I just needed a little bit more effort to have reached the palette idea. My group cheered and that day ended awesome.

Unfortunately I wasted that night Photoshopping some images of the idea I last heard we were gonna use (as the group never told me, ok, let's use yours). Oh well, Wednesday came, 2 other dudes spoke (mainly on urban art), and once again we started working in the evening. This time I busted out Inkscape and started working on the actual design of the palette bubble. By the end of the evening I had a cool vector style drawing. However, Germán suggested we try a more realistic approach, by Photoshopping a palette into a bubble. At night, I finished up a set of the final designs to choose from:


So, Thursday came, final day to finish our work. We decided to use my photoshopped palette, but the various teachers we asked recommended different backgrounds. The group decided on black eventually, and I had to edit the darn JPEG manually to fix it seeing as how I left the editable PSD at home! :P The end result is below, once again. So, it was definitely an interesting experience. I apparently won a tablet (getting it Monday) but it's probably the lesser-known Genius brand, one that doesn't really compare to my current Wacom. ;) So I'll be selling that. Lastly, the Germán dude told me to stand up, and I was actually complimented as a "serene intellectual" in front of all the graphic designers at the University! (At least, the ones who were still left in the auditorium, some had left since they lost ;P) Congratulated by all my class, we then watched the University's salsa dancers show off their moves, and here I am, feeling great. Back to work on all the finals I have left!! X-P

Mayed

Oops. Forgot I had a blog to update. :P Well, about 1.5 months have passed from my last post. Let's see what I have...

I finished my first semester this Friday. I have finals from Wednesday-Friday, with 5 classes left. My grades are nice, with only that darn Expression Workshop class giving me another 3 (3.6 this time). >_> Everything else (including, surprisingly, the language class) has a 4.2+ so that's good. Art History is kind of scaring me as the professor couldn't find one of my last reports, and I don't know how well i did on my final exam so...I should pass, but if he doesn't find that report it could be a severe hit to my note.

So now that classes finish, what do I plan on doing? Well, I bought www.mastastealth.com and plan on opening my own Freelancing graphic design site to start earning some cash (mainly, for next semester :P). Any extra will probably go into the Get-Myself-a-Cintiq-Fund. It costs about half as much as 1 Semester of my career. -_-

Mmm. I have been dabbling in some interesting sites that have helped through out classes. Quizlet.com is a nice site for flashcard/self-quizzing. Skrbl is a useful collaborative online whiteboard, for when you need to help someone in math or something, and words just aren't enough. Also, though it doesn't have to do with school, I have signed up for Twitter, an addictive little micro-blogging site. It's kind of like an advanced version of Facebook's status messages. You can follow more up to date info about me if you subscribe to my feed. Also, I've been using Google Reader the past few days as my my main RSS reader. A swap from Thunderbird, seeing as how I've heard it's awesome, and really, the only reason I use Thunderbird is for RSS (not e-mail, as it's mainly designed for :P) So with all of my e-mail accounts being from webmail services, I might as well swap my RSS reading to something in Firefox, and have one less program to be opening every morning.

Gaming has been sparse these past weeks. I've mainly been screwing around in Trackmania Nations Forever, completed another mission or 2 in Rhondo of Swords, and got the new Drone Tactics as well (the last 2 are DS games). Hopefully I can get back to owning my 21CW buds in Spring during summer.

Marched

Well, another month sneaks by, and yet a peep out of me! So what's the latest? Hmm...how about THIS:



OMG your eyes! Surprise! Yup, I cut head apart. Too bad, gotta wait some 6 months or so to get it back. ;)

What else...so far so good in college land. So far I have grades of the first "parcial" (Period? there's 4 of them in a semester) for 3 subjects:

Art History: 3.5
Design History: 4.1
Design Theory: 4.2

That's out of 5. Design Theory I almost nailed perfectly, if it wasn't for a little report I screwed up and should of handed in properly the first time 'round. Fortunately the professor let us (it was a team job) hand it later, but it lower our perfect 5 for that project. If you haven't seen my project, check it here. All that remains are my math (next quiz is this Thursday, then we combine the notes from the last and get the grade), Competetive Communication (Final project done, grades expected soon), and Expression workshop (No clue 'bout this one). So I think I'm doing pretty good overall, with those lower notes in classes I expected to not do so well in anyway. You need a 3.2 to pass, so I'm in the clear for now!

Now for more important things, I got and finished the short and sweet Apollo Justice: Attorney at Law. Capcom sure knows how to make some good story, these games keep me hooked until I finish them. Unfortunately it seems this one was a bit shorter than the Phoenix Wright games, with only 4 cases to enjoy. Oh well.

Yesterday Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out, and if you have a Wii you will have to buy it, or give up your rights to own that console. I'm praying that Tronixweb will have them in stock tomorrow so I can get me some 3-Day Fedex and that stuff and get it in time for "Holy Week". I will have all next week off school, and with none this Friday, or the following Monday, I have a total of 11 days to unlock everything in Smash, assuming it gets here in time. ;)