But this tool requires an USB floppy drive, as seen on Mydellmini forum. Being this hardware quite hem… legacy+unuseful I managed to create a USB pen drive image that will restore the netbook with the very latest A05 BIOS.

• Download the USB pen drive image here and unzip the file.
• Copy the A05.DD image to your usb pen, using dd on linux:
  dd if=A05.DD of=/dev/sdX
  replace X with your correct device, of course. Haven’t tried, but this may work also with dd for windows.

Then start the recovery procedure:

• Remove battery and power adapter;
• Confirm USB pen drive is plugged in;
• While pressing and holding Fn & B keys, attach power adapter plug. The power lights will momentarily blink and your Mini will beep once;
• Continue to hold Fn & B and press the power button;
• Release the keys once USB pen drive begins reading (your pendrive led starts blinking);
• Your Mini will beep continually until the flash is completed and reboots.

Note:  the display is not available during this process.

1. edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
2. find the <string>/usr/…/syslogd</string> line
3. below that add:
   <string>-bsd_out</string>
<string>1</string>
4. Type: echo '*.* /var/log/syslog' > /etc/syslog.conf (open /etc/syslog.conf and make sure that you have *.* /var/log/syslog without any extra characters)
5. Type: launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
6. Type: launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist

And now you have an awesome /var/log/syslog that contains NSLogs (and I think stderr) from your application.

Remember, to see the output open SSH and type: tail -f /var/log/syslog to see all the output.

Source of these info: TheBigBoss website, and originally from Saurik.

Here’s an output example… frack!

Mar 23 09:56:37 iPhosk com.apple.locationd[198]: 259491397.100,static void CLFileUpdate::onDownloaded(CLFileDownload*, bool, void*): could not download from https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps to /var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/clients-b.plist.temp

Making a DVD Image

Step 1. Insert the retail Mac OS X Install DVD into your drive.

Step 2. Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities).

Step 3. In Disk Utility, you will notice a white pane on the left hand side. In the pane, select the Mac OS X Install DVD by clicking on it once.

Step 4. Click New Image on the Disk Utility toolbar.

Step 5. A dialog box will appear. Give the new image a name. I used ‘Mac OS X Install DVD’. Select the destination where you wish to save it. Leave Image Format at Compressed (default) and Encryption at None (default).

Step 6. Click Save to begin creating the image.

Step 7. Once your image has been created DO NOT mount it. Leave the image alone and proceed to the next section.

Burning the Image

Step 1. Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities).

Step 2. Click Burn on the Disk Utility toolbar (upper left).

Step 3. Navigate to where you saved the DVD image created in the previous section. Click on the image file, then click the Burn button. Do not drag and drop the image file into Disk Utility during this step.

Step5. Insert a DVD when prompted and proceed to Burn it. (Use good quality media).

Done :)

Classic wireless hot spots commonly allow two protocols: ICMP and DNS (UDP/53). ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is used to report errors and warning to the client and DNS is mandatory to resolve hostnames. While ICMP can also be used as a transport protocol (see PTunnel), firewalls may block unusual ICMP packets (ex: suspicious big packets). On the other side, there are often less restriction regarding DNS traffic.

In the following tutorial, we will use the tool dns2tcp written by two guys working for HSC, a French security company.

Required components

• An official registered domain name. Example: mydomain.net
• A server with a public IP address not running any DNS service. The server must run UNIX[1]. Example: my.public.server.isp.com

[1] I successfully tested dns2tcp on Linux and client also on iPhone.

Domain name zone configuration

Choose a subdomain name for your domain. In this example, we will use a subdomain dnstunnel.mydomain.net. Add the following line in your zone file:

dnstunnel    IN     NS your.public.server.isp.com.

Don’t forget to increase the serial and to reload the zone. If you don’t manage the zone yourself, ask you ISP or hoster to do this for you.

Server configuration

(these operations are performed on your public server)

Download the tarball and compile the binaries:

# cd /tmp
# tar xzvf dns2tcp-0.3.tar.gz
# cd dns2tcp-0.3
# configure
# make install

This will create two binaries (dns2tcpd and dns2tcpc) and their respective manpages. Now, we will create a configuration file /etc/dns2tcpd.conf:

# cat >/etc/dns2tcpd.conf <<EOF
listen = w.x.y.z
port = 53
user=nobody
chroot = /var/empty/dns2tcp/
domain = dnstunnel.mydomain.net
ressources = ssh:127.0.0.1:22
EOF
#

Be sure to replace the domain and the IP address with your own values! The port must be 53!

Now, start the daemon:

# ./dns2tcpcd -F -d 1 -c dns2tcpd.conf

“-F” means to run in foreground and “-d 1? enables debugging.

Client configuration

Perform the same operations as on the server side. (configure && make install). Then create the client configuration file/etc/dns2tcpc.conf:

# cat >/etc/dns2tcpc.conf <<EOF
domain = dnstunnel.mydomain.net
ressource = ssh
local_port = 2222
debug_level=1
EOF
#

Be sure to replace the domain and the IP address with your own values! The local port must be free and above 1024 to be binded by a non-root user!

Now, check if we can communicate with the server:

# ./dns2tcpc -z dnstunnel.mydomain.net <dns_server>
Available connection(s) :
	        ssh

The dns_server can be your public server or, if you are forced, the local DNS.

Start a SSH session

Now, we are ready to start a tunnel with encapsulated SSH packet:

# ./dns2tcpd -c -f dns2tcpc.conf
listening on port 2222
...

Now, start your SSH session:

# ssh -p 2222 user@127.0.0.1
...

Here we go! You’ve a session on your public server!

If you start your SSH as a socks proxy with the “-D” and configure your browser to surf thru this tunnel.

You can create as mush resources as you want on the server but packets send thru the DNS tunnel are not encrypted so SSH is recommanded as the best solution.

Windows Vista SP1 (virtualized in Parallels)

http://dromaeo.com/?id=27872,28106,27880,27933,28169

Google Chrome pwns all… it’s the 1st column, wrongly reported by dromaeo test as “Safari/525.13“. Firefox 3.01 is four time slower, and Opera 9.51 and Safari 3.2.1 for Windows (reported as “Safari/525.21“) are closer. And oh, IE simply crashed running the page ;(

Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard

http://dromaeo.com/?id=28303,28286,28266,28228,28392,28439

Firefox 3.0.1 wins, but Safari 3.2 made very similar points… Opera is a bit slower than in the windows counterpart… (Good ‘ol) SeaMonkey and Shiira (reported as “Firefox/2.0.0.16″) are four times slower…

Linux Kubuntu64-current:

http://dromaeo.com/?id=28540,28522,29158,29213,29286

Galeon (linux only) is the fastest browser after Chrome, but Firefox 3.0.1 is very near. Konqueror 4.1.1 and Opera 9.52 make decent figures, SeaMonker as usual is the last ;D

Now some inter-OS speed comparison:

Firefox 3.0.1: http://dromaeo.com/?id=28106,28286,28540
measured exactly the same speed on ALL os!

Opera 9.52: http://dromaeo.com/?id=28169,29286,28303
is a lot faster on Windows than Linux or OS X.

Seamonkey 1.1.11: http://dromaeo.com/?id=27933,28439,29213
is slightly faster on Linux than Windows or OS X.

EDIT: Google Chrome vs all memory usage screenshot here.

options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3

Reboot for changes to take effect.

Now enable your speakers. Right click on the volume control icon in the notification area and select “Open Volume Control”

Under switches, tick the box next to “Speaker”

And that’s it, you should now be able to swing to your favourite music.

I believe these are the installation steps for a particular DJ equipment. Now I know why there are so many DJs around using MacBooks.

I searched around a bit, and I eventually found HFSExplorer, an opensource (relased under GPL, v3) Java app designed to let you browse the contents of any HFS+ drives and partitions installed in your system. In addition to viewing the contents of said partitions, you can even extract files to any Windows writable disk. This is almost exactly what I was looking for, although there isn’t any HFS+ write support.

Linux users should not need HFSExplorer for browsing file systems on devices (have you already modprobed hfsplus?), but you might find this app useful for opening .dmg files.

Let’s look at how you can take FULL control on NTFS partitions from your Mac.

This is actually very simple. Install the following apps in order.

1) MacFUSE – http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
look for MacFUSE-Core-10.5-1.5.1.dmg if you’re using Leopard, and MacFUSE-Core-10.4-1.5.0.dmg if you are using Tiger.

2) NTFS-3G – http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
the latest blog post should provide you the very latest version with download link, i.e. the latest version is 1.2531 at time of writing.

The installation for both of these apps should be plain simple and straightforward.

Whoa-la! After installing both these apps you should be able to Read and Write data onto your NTFS partition.

Notable limitation of the NTFS-3G partition: deleting stuff will not move them to the Trash, you will be prompted to permanently delete them.

Some carbon fiber effect added to make the pic in tune with default dock style.

I did it for teh lulz

In the case of the iPhone we will be using EDGE to get online. Its not fast but it will do the job.

On your iPhone:

1) From Installer.app install the program called Tinyproxy;

2) Navigate to the settings menu then to the wifi menu. From here select your newly created network. Then press that little blue arrow to the right of the network name;

3) Change the IP Address to Manually and enter “192.168.1.1″ in the IP field and “255.255.255.0″ in the subnet field. Leave everything else blank.

On your Macbook:
1) Open up System Preferences from the Apple Menu and navigate to the Sharing tab;

2) Click on the Internet tab once in there. Select Share your connection from Built in Ethernet. Then select Airport as your method of sharing. Under Airport options you can name and secure your computer in the manner you prefer;

3) Head back over to system preferences and open up Network settings. Its best to create a new location for this but you really dont have to. Select Airport off the list and hit the TCP/IP tab;

4) Configure IPv4 Manually and set your IP to “192.168.1.2″ and your subnet to “255.255.255.0″, you can leave all the other fields blank;

5) Now click on the proxies tab and turn on your Web Proxy, to the right of that you will enter your web proxy address enter “192.168.1.1:8080″. You can also turn on the same settings for secure web proxy if you would like. Hit Apply Now.

If you did everything right you are now connected to the internet through your iPhone. It’s slow but it gets the job done. Enjoy!

Main Screen

The first screen that you see is the main menu for the field mode. This presents you with the following choices: Network Information, Cell Information, GPRS Information, PDP information, Call Information and Versions. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Network Information

The network information screen shows a large number of technical details on the cell phone network you are connected to. The particular things of interest for everyone are RX LevFull, which shows the received signal strength if you are in a call. TX Powr would seem to be the transmitting power, but it isn’t clear what that number means.

Cell Information

This is an interesting one: cell information shows the details of the cell phone towers that the iPhone can currently see. The items listed by each cell site are RX (the received signal stength), the FQ (frequency band), ST (station id), CI (the cell tower ID), N (the network ID) and # (a status code).

You can click on any of the listed cell towers to get more details, such as the network ID (here’s the one of an Italian carrier, and no, that’s definitely *not* I FOSK, lol), the cell ID (each tower has a unique ID) and the strength of the signal it is receiving from that tower. That’s wionderful, you can use this data to look at what cell towers are nearby and how strong the signal is! Can’t wait to try this in roaming mode and during GMS handovers!

GPRS Information

The GPRS information screen shows you various technical details of the state of the GPRS connection to the network.

PDP information

PDP is short for Packet Data Protocol, and refers to the way that the iPhone (and other phones) send Internet data over the cell phone network. This screen shows you the type of connection (which should always be IP), the name of the APM (Access Point Name) that your iPhone talks to on the GSM network, and the IP address of the iPhone.

Call Information

The Call information screen shows the details of the call that you are currently in, including the codec that it is using to compress your voice. On this example, we see that the iPhone is using the v3 AMR full-rate codec; there are several different codecs that can be used that use different amounts of bandwidth and offer various levels of voice quality.

Versions

This shows the basebans firmware version of the iPhone (note the misspelling of firmware: Apple aren’t perfect after all) and the LCD panel ID. This last one is interesting; it seems to be unique to each iPhone, and presumably identifies the individual touch panel. Why apple would do this isn’t clear, but they may want to track this information for quality control purposes.

There are several “0dB” cards on the maket, built from both nVidia and ATi. From what I understood the latter ones, from series HD2×00 and HD3×00, have an onboard audio decoder that can directly be used as an audio output. That is nice because I plan to use as a second monitor a 32″ LCD TV linked via DVI (with a DVI–>HDMI cable). So that DVI/HDMI cable can be used also to transmit the “sound” avoiding me to use another 3,5″ jack only for this. Then I read some benchmark comparison from an HD3400 and a nVidia 8600GT… uhm better to stay with nVidia!

Even if the nVidia counterpart has not this onboard sound decoder, some card manufacturers that don’t use the reference nVidia PCB design had implemented an S/PDIF pass-through connector. Bacause, trust me, the audio signal that can be transmitted on a HDMI cable is the good ol’ stereo S/PDIF! (yes left/right only, no 5.1 dolby, LOL).

So I was searching for fanless, nVidia and with S/PDIF pass-through. The GPU for my budget was a 8600GT 512MB class.

My first, unlucky bought was a MSI NX8600GT-TD512EZ/D2.

This card is clocked at stock 540Mhz, with 512MB of cheaper 800MHz DDR2 memory (on a 128 bit interface). It’s a nice card with good temperatures due to his big heatsink, copper based.

But it simply won’t fit on my Coolermaster Cavalier 2 HTPC case, with these two heatpipes being too high in the case profile.

As a second try: ASUS EN8600GT-SiLENT (Gpu-Z result). This card has 2 main advantages in comparison to the MSI above: it runs the same amount of 521MB of RAM but it’s the faster DDR3 running at 1.4GHz (700MHz DDR3) instead of 800MHz DDR2 (400MHz), but more inportant for an HTPC use, it supports HDCP.

And, for my personal point, fits perfectly on my case, due to the fact that the heatsink is taller than the MSI one even if, in the counterpart, is thicker as it waste the PCI express slot near the slot of the card.

Oh, and this is my old SPARKLE 7600GS, a good fanless card even if I already sold it, bye bye :D

In more details, this Applescript gets the location of the front-most Finder window and opens a second instance of Finder with the same path and view. If there is no Finder windows at the present when this script is executed, it launches a new Finder window at the system root directory (or any other pre-defined target path).


tell application "Finder"

end tell


Copy above script and paste it to the new project window opened via the “Script Editor.app” (Applications/AppleScript/), then choose “application” as the “File Format” and then save/compile the project with a meaningful name such as “CloneFinder”. Once that is done, drag ‘n drop the newly compiled CloneFinder.app on to the Finder tool-bar for quick access.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type tif
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type psd

By the way, here is a list of short-cuts for making a screenshot quickly:

Screen to file:

Command + Shift + 3

Screen to clipboard:

Command + Control + Shift + 3

Crosshair screen selection to file:

Command + Shift + 4

Crosshair sceen selection to clipboard:

Command + Control + Shift + 4

Window to file:

Hit spacebar after invoking “Command + Shift + 4″, then click the appropriate window

Window to clipboard:

Hit spacebar after invoking ‘Command + Control + Shift + 4? then click the appropriate window

Being this HDD quite expensive (due to the shortage in production) how much it improves seek/read time? I can confirm that power consumption and noise are the same as the stock unit, and that is wise to buy the 100 or 200GB models with an higher storage density per disk face in comparisono of the 160 GB unit.

Here there are some benchmark between a 200GB 7200rpm Hitachi 7k200 running a 3,1 macbook (2.2GHz Merom based, 4GB ram) and the stock 160GB 5400rpm Fujitsu on a 4,1 macbook (2.4GHz Penryn, 4GB ram). So sorry but no HFS+ bench, I can’t find any decent benchmark app for OS X: Xbench is extremely old, and Geekbench 64 told me absolutely random crap marks on the new Penryn, reporting a numerical result more or less the half in comparison of the “old” Merom one!?!

FAT32

5400rpm

7200rpm

NTFS

5400rpm

7200rpm

UPDATE:
Crappy vid: Leopard boot time (RIGHT: 7200rpm, LEFT: 5400rpm).
Consider both have a 5 s timeout due to rEFIt.

Eh?

So, can this Apple thingy work with blue&me that – beware – runs Windows Automotive?

Fortunately the reply is yes, only the SMS read function won’t work, but this is also true for all but some SE and Motorola phones.

N80 specification are… known: symbian 3rd, wi-fi b/g, 3 mpx camera… bla bla…

LD-3W has a SiRF 3, a car charger and replaceable battery.

If interested, feel free to contact me :D