Skip to content

Recent Articles

17
Nov

Amazon’s Give 1, Get 1 OLPC XO program now live

You know the drill: for $399 you buy one OLPC XO laptop and a second is sent to a child somewhere in the developing world. Same deal as last year only now with the help of Amazon’s powerful retail reach. Devices begin shipping in about 30 days — a bit longer outside the US. Naturally you can also just gift the $199 laptop direct to a kid of OLPC’s choosing. About the quickest way to become a donor short of meeting a hotel stranger in possession of roofies and a bathtub full of ice. 
Read US site


New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!

17
Nov

Got a free $10 iTunes Gift Card!


Today, I got a free $10 iTunes Gift Card in the mail, with thanks to MoFuse!
About a month ago, there was an survey from MoFuse, with the first 50 survey respondents getting a Gift Card, which I did! I completely forgot about the survey until today.



I use MoFuse to “mobilize” my blog. If you want to visit Josh’s Blog on your Phone, visit here:
http://joshsblog.mofuse.mobi/
or for iPhone: http://joshsblog.mofuse.mobi/iphone


New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!

17
Nov

ASUS P565 phone is the most powerful WiMo yet

ASUS’ P565 has been pretty much unofficial until now, though we did see some alleged photos and specs of the device not terribly long ago. The phone has just been officially listed on the ASUS site, however, and we’ve got a quick rundown of its stats (which are pretty much exactly what we’d seen before). The Glide UI-sporting, HSDPA smartphone — which ASUS claims is the “fastest business PDA phone” in the world — runs Windows Mobile 6.1, has an 800MHz Marvell CPU, a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, 256MB flash memory and 128MB of DDR SDRAM, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and a microSD slot with SDHC support. Like we said, none of this is a big surprise, but it’s the first official look we’ve had at the handset, though we’re still waiting on word about pricing and availability.
New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!
16
Nov

Intel Core i7 CPUs reappear on NewEgg



Remember those Core i7 processors that showed up – ever so briefly — on NewEgg a few days ago, only to promptly disappear, leaving us to ponder what we’d done wrong? Well, even though they’re not slated to officially hit shelves until November 17th, we’ve heard from a slew of vigilant tipsters (hipsters?) that they’re back. The prices are the same as we saw before, but you might want to check ‘em out yourself right away, just in case they disappear again and you’re forced to wait until tomorrow.



New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!

16
Nov

Mac Pro with Core i7? Q1 2009

Digitimes reports that Intel is planning on launching the Xeon 5500 and Xeon 3500 series of server CPUs in the first quarter of 2009. These new processors are based on the Nehalem architecture which has been officially branded as Core i7.

According to Digitimes, Intel will launch ten CPUs for the Xeon 5500 series with the high end topping out as a quad-core W5580 running at 3.2GHz. Processor speeds of the remaining 9 models range from 2GHz to 2.93Ghz.

Apple has traditionally used the Xeon server-class processors for their Mac Pro line. The current Mac Pro uses the Xeon (“Harpertown”) 5400 series processors and is due for an update. Despite comparable clock speeds, the Nehalem-based processors have been shown to offer clock-for-clock performance improvements up to 29%.

16
Nov

MacBook to a Mac Pro Ultra mini?

How I converted a “dead” Apple MacBook to a Mac Pro Ultra Mini
 A Little Background:  I was given a “dead”  13″ MacBook that had water poured on it.   After taking it apart and testing I found that the motherboard was still good but everything else was dead.   The screen, dvd drive, battery, hard drive, ram, left speaker, CPU fan, top case / keyboard all were fried.  Water seems to be a very good tool in making an $1,100 paper weight.A few hours of solder / hot-gluing I got it up and running with new ram and a new hard drive.  I re-soldered the cooling fan and the right speaker to get them working. The left speaker connection was dead on the motherboard.  The airport card “sees” wireless networks but fails when trying to connect, but the Ethernet port worked.  I ran the unit for a few weeks with an external monitor with no problems.  It works great as a multi-media machine for my LCD TV.Browsing the web I found a Mac Mini Mod to make it look like a Mac Pro.  I started thinking it might be fun to make 20% of a MacBook look like Mac Pro Ultra Mini.  Looking at the motherboard I found it was slightly larger than a full sized hard drive.  Next I found a few external hard drive cases that looked like a Mac Pro.  The first one I found was the iomega UltraMax Pro 33744 Hard Drive.  I couldn’t find a retail site  that sold just the case and at almost $450 was not an option. Then I found the Macally G-S350SUA Aluminum External Enclosure for only $40.It looked like a Mac Pro, front mounted power button, & all aluminum case.
The PDF manual and all the specs I could find listed did not specify the overall case size.  I enlarged the PDF to the actual size scale using the FireWire port to judge scale.   The MacBook’s motherboard is  4.83″ x 7″ inches and doing an estimation I found that the board just might fit in the case.  I also found a Flickr set that had these images.  Looking at the construction I figured I could mod the case to support the motherboard and still have it open up if needed for service.
Once the case arrived (UPS lost it for a week) I set to work taking it all apart and seeing what I had to work with. Click on the images for a larger view 


What i've got to work with HD frame What i've got to work with HD frame
DSC_4913.JPG
Size Problem Current Sata HD control Board
I quickly saw the motherboard wasn’t going to fit without cutting off the bottom of the HD case.  I did see that the case would be tall enough with the legs to house the motherboard.  I also measured for thickness to see if  the notebook hard drive would fit once the motherboard was mounted.  Next I cut parts off of the inner hard drive mount so that all ports would be accessible from behind.  After a few extra cuts and grindings I was ready to attach the motherboard.
Looking at the old Macbook case all the motherboard support mounts were molded into the plastic case.  I decided to reuse some of the plastic, removed all of the metal frame, and cut it down to size. Next I placed small holes in the plastic near the hard drive mount holes on the external hard drive mount frame.  I then zip-tied the old case to the frame.   I was going glue or screw it in place but this gave me some adjustment room if needed.  You can see the cut case and frame below.


Old macboook case attached to Extranal HD Case Frame Reuse old Macbook case for screw mounts
Old macboook case attached to Extranal HD Case Frame Old macboook case attached to Extranal HD Case Frame

 
You can see the first dry fit below

 Tight Fit

Next came cooling.  I placed 3  1/2″ holes on the top for the cooling fan.  I placed the metal on a wood box to support it while drilling with the drill press.


Cooling fan hole location Holes for cooling
Mother Board Mounted  

Once all was aligned I tightened the zip tie and tested for strength.  Finding all was well I moved on to the next step of the power button.  You can see in the images below a small ribbon cable.  The cable runs to the keyboard / track pad / power button / and top-case.    Tracing the power button leads back to the ribbon cable was done with a voltage tester.   I found that if you went from the ground to the fourth pen from the left it would bring up the shut down message box.  This is important because I had the power setting set to “power up” after a power failure.  If I had ever done a shutdown instead of a reboot I couldn’t have powered the notebook back up.  Finding the leads was easy compared to connecting  them to the power switch on the front.  As you can see below they were very small.

Ribbon Connecton under touch pad Ribbon Keyboard / Mouse / Power button Connection to MB
Ribbon Connecton under touch pad  
Carefully removing the ribbon connection under the track pad and then removing the extra pins,  I soldered the red lead to the 4th pin.  I then scraped off some of the protection coating and soldered the black wire to the ribbon’s ground wire.  I did not connect the green wire which powers the blue LED built into the power button. The LED is much too bright when the lights are out in my living room.

Modified Power Button
 
After covering the connections with a hot glue gun I did several tests insuring  a good connection and that no short-circuits were occurring on the other pins. Side note:  I solder about as well as I weld, both are not pretty but they hold :)

Next step was to mount the hard Drive.   The original configuration used a long cable for the SATA connection so I had some options.  My first thought was about heat so I did not want to mount it above the cooling fan.   Looking at the old case the hard drive is stored inside a metal frame.  Removing  just the “cage” I made a few holes in it.  I used longer screws in one of the CPU heat-sink and the wifi card.    I added some hot glue to the bottom where any contact might be made to prevent shorting.  This still allowed the unit to slide into its  housing while providing a strong mounting spot.   I ran before and after temperature tests using Hardware Montior and found the new configuration runs just a few degrees hotter.


HD frame mount close up HD Mounted


HD Mounted 

 
 You can also see I mounted the magnetic power connection on top of the Ethernet port.  I also temporarily added electrical tape to the top of the ram and board to keep down the chance of electrostatic sparking from the desk.  The working right speaker & “sub woofer” are also mounted up front.   The IR and white LED where damaged by the water.
Last I slid it back into the outer case and put a small bar with a screen on it in the center of the back of the case to keep the outer and inner case parts from moving.    That was it!  I now have a Ultra Mini Mac Pro.   I’ve watched a few HD Movies and did some stress test to make sure it would not over heat and all is well.    After a  week or so I’m going to take the out case down to the local high school and use the laser etcher to place an Apple logo on the side.   I will post the finished photos here along with more shots of the finished case.

All Done!All Done!
 
Some might say this is over kill but it could be worse.

16
Nov

How to: Enable 4 Finger Gestures on pre-October 2008 MacBooks

I can confirm the four finger gesture is possible on pre-October 2008 laptops, and I currently have four finger Exposé and Application Switching working on my January 2008 MacBook Air.

(This required hacking Apple’s installer to ignore machine checks to avoid the “Mac OS X cannot be installed” obstacle. The method to do that is here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=371302 )

This got the latest, slightly updated 10.5.5 system (with the energy efficient bulb in the System Preferences) on my first generation Air.

However, I was disappointed it didn’t show “Four Finger gestures” in the Trackpad system preference, just the old standard gesture. I had a hunch it was possible though, so…

I then examined the kernel extension “AppleUSBMultitouch.kext” (the one installed with the new 10.5.5 unibody OS X).

This Info.plist of this kext contains several entries for what looks like different makes of trackpads. I noticed that some of them had two keys that the others did not:

TrackpadFourFingerGestures


TrackpadSecondaryClickCorners

I didn’t know which model trackpad my Air has and it didn’t really matter, as I copied those keys to all entries.

Once the AppleUSBMultitouch.kext was modified (and permissions restored), I rebooted and, hey presto!, there is the Four Fingers entry in the System Preferences.

Four finger Exposé on my January 2008 MacBook Air now works just as it does on the unibody MacBook.

(Secondary click, where you click the bottom right corner of the trackpad to get a right-click, is also there, but only seem to work in combination with the Air’s physical button – haven’t worked that one out yet, and don’t really care as I am used to soft two finger clicking for right-click.)

I suspect this would work on all later model multitouch trackpads. 

Source: MacRumors Forum

15
Nov

Asus R50A UMPC finally arrives



If you’re looking to drop nearly $2,000 on a UMPC, well, first of all, you’re nuts, but second of all, you’re in luck, ’cause the Asus R50A is shipping at €1,475 ($1,878). They weren’t kidding when they said it would be above $500, but for the price you’ll be running Windows Vista on a handheld with a 1.33GHz Intel Atom processor, a gig of RAM, a 32GB SSD hard drive, a 5.6” screen at 1024 x 600, three USB ports, a microSD slot, a wireless keyboard, and an external DVD reader / writer. Connectivity options include 802.11 b / g WiFi, Bluetooth, and 3G. These specs aren’t all that different from what you’d find in a netbook (save for the SSD), except you’re paying more than twice as much and you get to look like you’re playing games on a GP2X while you’re using it on the train. Maybe it’s supposed to be a status symbol?

13
Nov

Dell’s Mini 12 netbook is ready for US orders

It was bound to happen sooner or later. We received the birth announcement, we read the reviews, and it looks like Dell is finally set to unleash the Mini 12 upon us lowly North Americans. The 12-inch netbook is pretty much what we expected specs-wise, starting at $549 for a 1.33GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory, 40GB hard drive and standard 3 cell battery. Perhaps $758 is a little steep for a netbook, but if you’re game the top-end machine sports a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 80GB hard drive and a 6 cell battery. All configurations should be shipping with Windows Vista Home Basic starting sometime in early December.

13
Nov

HTC Touch HD review roundup



The HTC Touch HD isn’t in Hong Kong yet, but it certainly hasn’t been making itself shy overseas, where it has beenunboxed, examined, and given the early review treatment. Now that it’s readily available in the UK, there’s even more reviews of the phone cropping up, which seem to mostly agree that while it’s not a phone for everyone, it definitely impresses. Among those completely blowing things out is Phone Arena, which, as you might expect, was especially impressed by the phone’s screen, and describe it as “the phone for document viewing.” Pocket Now was equally impressed by that “HD” display, as well as its overall performance and battery life, which they were pleased to find was about on par with the HD-less Touch Pro. CNET was even more effusive in its praise, saying that, despite its drawbacks, it is “HTC’s best Windows Mobile phone yet.” Windows Mobile, and HTC’s GUI, proved to be a point of contention for the folks at Slash Gear, however, who say the phone would be even better running a next-gen version of the OS, or possibly even Android (a sentiment also echoed by Phone Arena). Other drawbacks include the phone’s sheer size, some poor performance from TouchFLO 3D (despite an update) and, of course, it’s lack of US 3G bands, which presents a bit of a problem for folks considering importing one. Still undecided? Then dive into the links below and watch the time slip away.

Read - Phone Arena
Read - Pocket Now
Read - CNET
Read - Slash Gear

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »