Update on Dell Mini 9 – Hackintosh
I’ve been quite pleased with my little Dell Mini 9 – loaded with Apple Macintosh OS X.
The couple of little things that bothered me, namely the smaller keyboard, and the lack of the standard Macintosh two-finger scrolling and two-finger right-click.
Well, this week I did an update to the OS X operating system to the latest 10.5.7. It totally crashed the little guy… until I went online and learned a couple of ‘tricks’ on how to let the software/hardware find itself all over again. Now we’re fine!
In addition – and to my great surprise – I also found the latest drivers that allowed me to make the little Hackintosh’s trackpad act just like a real Macintosh! I now have two-finger scrolling and two-finger right-clicks working. Yea!
No software is going to make this little keyboard get bigger all of a sudden – so I guess I’m stuck with that.
The little Hackintosh makes a great second computer. I take it on all my trips. I’ve pre-loaded the 64GB Solid State Drive with a bunch of TED Talks, Movies, etc. so it’s a small little lightweight entertainment device for use on the plane.
In addition, it has an SD slot on loaded with even more movies on a 16GB SD card.
This has been a very fun little project!
On her trip to NYC with the High School Fashion Team, my daughter used it as in-flight entertainment, and to check her e-mail and update her facebook page during the trip. (WiFi in the hotel worked great)
Since I’ve got all my ‘important’ stuff like Calendar, Contacts, E-mail, etc. all sync’d to Mobile Me – it was a simple exercise to get the Hackintosh to also sync to Mobile Me. Now it is a nice ‘backup’ laptop if anything happens to the ‘big brother’ (my main machine – the Macbook 13″ Unibody).
And for everyone reading this – Backup your data today!
(a quick message brought to you by our sponsor… Your conscience)
If you’d like your own Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh, just drop me a line and I do my best to help out.
From my Twitter posts – http://twitter.com/keithparsons or @keithparsons Dell Mini9 Hackintosh *lives* once again. Just had to do a bit of ‘tweaking’. Yea! – Instructions here http://bit.ly/EUes4 Hackintosh is even better than before! Now with 2-finger scrolling, and 2-finger right click! Yea! Instructions here http://bit.ly/oQLpw
Which Graphic Explains Co-Channel Interference Best?
I’ve been teaching WiFi for many years now. And one concept folks seem to have a hard time with is co-channel interference. Not that there *is* interference, that’s pretty obvious, but at what level does co-channel interference actually start to ‘hurt’ the Wireless LAN?
I’ve started to call these areas ‘Want’ – ‘Don’t Want’ – ‘Don’t Care’ – but the concept is still the same.
Question: At what point does another device on the same channel equate to a ‘collision domain’?
So I’m asking for the reader’s help in deciding which of the following graphics make more sense?
Which should I use in classes?
Thanks for your help!
Keith
_____________________
A – Multiple small circles
B – One large circle
C – Multiple large circles
D – Wedges
Gap-Minder – World Statistics
I was watching a TED presentation this evening on my computer and experienced a new ‘view’ of the world’s AIDS epidemic, but shown graphically – with animated data. It was very enlightening!
The FULL data set, not just AIDS, but education, life expectancy, income, births per woman, and many many others are all available. But best of all there is an easy-to-use interface that allows one to pic the variables, and then watch how things in the world have changed over the last 200 years.
This is a *fantastic* tool to learn and understand differences in countries, cultures, and how we all fit in this world. It’s amazing to see how the world has changed over time.
There is something about having the freedoms, liberty, captialism, etc. that has allowed this ‘winning’ way. The US is NOT the best at everything – this data from world statistics shows that. We have problems and issues – that’s true – but I’m pretty glad to be an American anyway.
Please spend some time learning – and I mean that – LEARNING from the historical data and statistics at this site. It will be good for you to think about the ‘whys’ of some of these.
Here’s the site.
A couple of places to start – AIDS -vs- Income, Number of Children per Woman -vs- Income, Life Expectancy over time, just to get you started.
Enjoy – and please share your insight you learn from evaluating this information. Why does the world work like this?
Some TED Talks that might help
Best Stats You Have Ever Seen
Insights on Poverty
Truth about HIV
