Land of the Hornbills.
I’m heading for a short trip to the land of pedobears horn-bills to visit my pedobear friend, Sie Khai.
So this shall be the last post of the month! =) . Adios amigos.
Samsung T400 dissected-Part2 (Surgery)
Few weeks ago I wrote a post regarding the Samsung T400 dissected and the screen was brought back to life. However as posted there, the keypad of the phone was slightly cranky and had to be modified a little. Well modifications don’t really match the quality of a real working unit.. The keys were still a little hard to press and each key would require different amount of pressure to make the input work.
Oh anyway, let’s get to the point. I managed to get the replacement unit for this phone at a local flea market. The phone was pretty much screwed up with its flipping parts broken into 2. LOL. The unit was from Vietnam though.. (says the firmware when it was booted up).
Ahh, the two keypads together. Look at the hinge where the other phone broke. *ouch*.
(“new” and old)(rev 3.3 and rev 3.2)
The two mainboards together. The keypad of the phone was actually soldered on the main board of the phone so it would be a little messy if the keypad was replaced. Instead, the easier way was to simply swap the main boards and plug everything back in. The “new” board was a rev 3.3 board while the original one was rev 3.2 . Didn’t notice any difference in performance though. I accidentally broke the volume button ribbon during the brain transplant. Such a waste, no more volume control for the phone but then the other functions works good. If there’s a need for the volume control in the future, I shall perform another surgery to transplant the volume control ribbon from the working unit.
Now the phone is working great. Time to get another sim card and get it back to duty.
Total cost of repair: RM2.
VNam Kitchen Restaurant @ Ipoh
Craving for Vietnamese cuisine in Ipoh? Perhaps VNam Kitchen Restaurant is the place to go. As far as I know, it is the ONLY restaurant in Ipoh which serves Vietnamese food. Hahaha not bad not bad.. =P.
Located at the “business area” of Ipoh, this shop is not too hard to find. Simply walk along the lane which has the buffet steamboat restaurant and Soon Fatt restaurant. Its right in the middle.
As far as I know, VNam Kitchen Restaurant originated from the Klang Valley where the original owners started their business there. Now their business in the Klang Valley has been taken over by their children and they decided to come back to Ipoh and start another restaurant. (The one in Klang Valley is called another name). VNam Kitchen restaurant has another stall in Vooley Food City at Ipoh Garden. Of course, the variety of food served at that stall are much lesser than the real shop itself.
Hmm, considering that I have not tried Vietnamese coffee so I thought erm. let’s order this.
The coffee came like this, hot water kept at the top of the stainless steel container slowly dripping through the coffee beans. It was really sweet though. They provided free additional hot water thought if you’d like a refill.
Here’s the appetizer. It comes in a plate of 3 different types of meat fried in different style. There’s the Vietnamese vermicelli(Mong) and fried spring rolls. It comes with rice paper thingi which is supposed to be used to wrap the ingredients a.k.a. popiah.
Failed attempt to wrap~
Here’s the lemongrass chicken chop rice. Supposed to be the best seller here. There’s another version of this also, pork lemongrass chop. It surely did not fail to live up to its best seller status =P.
Vnam Kitchen also serves other Vietnamese food, such as the famous Vietnam’s Pho Bo or beef noodles, chicken noodles or Pho Ga, and spring rolls wrapped with sheets of rice paper. I ordered the Pho Bo only though.
Plenty of beef inside. However, I still prefer the beef noodles served at Sri Maju. I know they are different, but I like the soup in Sri Maju’s beef noodles more.
Getting to this place is easy but then be aware that the chances of getting a parking lot near to this shop is very low. Be prepared to walk alot..
Demonoid Invitation “Giveaway”
I have ONE invitation code for the Demonoid torrent tracker site.. Yes only ONE.
Anyone wants it? I’m told that I’m not allowed to sell this but then you could always BE GRATEFUL and send in some donations to my paypal account. After all, think of all the benefits of getting a Demonoid account.
- You’re downloads would be faster than ever!
- Be the first few to download those new rips!
- Getting to be the coolest person around having the latest downloads! (in a way =P )
Come get it. Submit your interest here at the comments area.
Guide: Running Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion 3.01
Alright, so you have a running Hackintosh or a real mac but then you still need those applications that run on a Windows machine just because your boss uses it and he wants you to use it too.
There are several options out there like Parallels and VMWare Fusion or the usual, BootCamp. However BootCamp does not allow you to run Snow Leopard and Windows 7 simultaneously. So we’re down to Parallels and Fusion. Honestly, I went for Parallels first because it sounded better *winks* . But then, switched back to Fusion after my failed attempt to get it running simply because my budget Intel E5200 processor does not support hardware virtualization. Parallels is pretty picky about the processors you use but Fusion allows the installation to be done only on the 32bit version of Windows 7 if your processor does not support Hardware VT. The slightly newer budget E5300 does support this function though (reported by Sie Khai).
So, what will you need to get this Windows virtualization running:
- A quad core processor (if possible). Otherwise, a dual-core processor. Single core? Find a job and get a new rig.
- More than 4GB ram (if possible). If you have 4, 2 gb shall be allocated for each OS respectively.
- Sufficient hard disk space.
- An ATI 2600 or better / NVidia 8600M or better is required for Aero. If you can run Snow Leopard with full qe/ci, you wont have any problems here.
- A retail Windows 7 installation cd.
- VMWare Fusion 3.01
After that, the procedure is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly easy.
- Install VMWare Fusion
- Choose the Easy Installation if you are lazy. Otherwise, choose the manual option.
- Select your Windows 7 source : I’ve selected mine from a image file. There’s an option to select from a DVD too.
- Click next next next.. next until it finishes.
- Startup the virtual machine, boot into the usual Windows Setup and wait.
- Go grab yourself something to munch and probably after 10mins, you’re done!
- Click on settings at the Fusion tab and configure the settings according to your liking, stuff like choosing the number for cpu cores Windows 7 should use, the amount of hard disk space allocated, cd rom drives, usb.. etc. I allocated 1.5gb of ram for my Virtual windows 7.
- Next, get the Windows Experience Rating test done. Compare the results with your usual PC and sigh out loudly that now you have a slower system! Its not that bad for a virtualized system with Aero graphics and stuff. The virtualized OS is very responsive and it feels like you’ve natively booted it up. I’ve not installed any games to test it out yet though. Sound and networking works just like that. USB plug and play too.
- Then, get curious and play around with the other settings. There’s the Unity option to select and once selected, Windows 7 would be “fused” together with your Mac OS. You would be able to launch your Windows7 applications on the Mac dock etc. In this mode, Aero graphics only works on windows applications. Once your app goes out of the box, the Aero doesn’t work.Can’t explain much on this though. Have a look at the screenshot.
There you have it. Windows 7 running on a Mac simultaneously. I doubt this can be done on a Windows PC =P.
Finally I can run my Windows Live Messenger..
Messiness.
Let’s start this post the Sie Khai way.
What is messy? What is Messiness?
mess·y
adj. mess·i·er, mess·i·est
1. Disorderly and dirty: a messy bedroom.
2. Exhibiting or demonstrating carelessness: messy reasoning.
3. Unpleasantly difficult to settle or resolve: a messy court case.
Alright, I’ve not been cleaning up my room and table this holidays and look what it has became~
Tabletop filled right up to my keyboard. Leaving just a little space for my mouse movements and keyboard. Urgh..
Mouse over the picture for some tags! I’m testing a new feature here =P. (à la Facebook)
Hugo Boss sent me a gift..
W00t~ the first gift I received today was this! LOL from Hugo Boss.
Argh, I’m getting old..
p/s : Aiyean, where’s my gift from Great Eastern?!
Guide: Snow Leopard 10.6.2 on Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L and HD4670
Retail Snow Leopard Installation on Gigabyte GA-G31-ES2L with ATI HD4670 QE/CI.
- A simple guide on how to get Snow Leopard running on your hackintosh.
Unlike others, this method does not require a Mac machine prior to installation.
What you’ll need.
- A retail Snow Leopard $29 DVD Disc
- An Intel Core Duo/Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad/Core i5/Core i7 processor
- Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Rev 1.x F10
- >1 GB RAM (you wouldn’t want to run it if you have less than this)
- Sapphire ATI HD4670 card
- SATA HDD
- Prasys – Empire EFI v1.085
- 64bit VoodooHDA drivers (for 2 channel sound)
- Netkas EFI 10.5 bootloader
- Mac OS X 10.6.2. combo update
- Beta Universal 46xx drivers
and all the other necessary drivers for your other devices.
Let’s get started.
- Download the Empire EFI iso and get it burned onto a rewritable/writable CD.
- Assuming that your pc has the HD4670 in it already, boot up the Retail Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD by replacing the Empire EFI cd with it and press F5 to refresh the bootloader. Boot -x because you’ll get a kernal panic if it is booted normally.
- Load up the setup and format your hard drive with the GUID partition. Proceed with installation until it comes to halt where it says there’s something wrong with the startup disk. Ignore that and reboot.
- Boot up the Empire EFI disk again because we have yet to install Chameleon. Start -x and configure your hackintosh. After configuring, switch it off and pull out the HD4670. We’ll use the integrated GMA 3100 now.
- Start the pc and boot up normally. Install the 10.6.2 update. Then run the “Post-Installation” folder in the Empire EFI disc then run MyHack. Select “com.apple.plist , graphics enabler, legacy apple rtc, nullcpupowermanagement,open halt restart, platformuuid. Install that and then replace your boot file with netkas boot file. After that, install the beta universal 46xx drivers. Shut down. Fix the HD4670 back into position.
- Now with Chameleon installed, you’ll no longer need the Empire EFI disc. Keep that aside for future usage. Boot up with -pci1 . Notice that now Snow Leopard is able to boot up with the ATI card showing only 256mb and no qe/ci support. Fixing disc permissions could solve this issue but you could also do this method below
- Launch terminal and key in the following
sudo -s
(type password)
cd /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R root:wheel *
chmod -R 755 *
kextload ATIRadeonX2000.kext
kextload ATI4600Controller.kext
- Reboot with -pci1 and now you’ll have full QE/CI support with Snow Leopard displaying 512MB video memory.
- To enable 2 channel audio, add the VoodooHDA.kext file into /System/Libary/Extensions and then do this in terminal.
- sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
sudo chmod -R 755 /system/library/extensions
sudo diskutil repairpermissions /volumes/NAMEOFHDD
sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
- sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
- Run the 64bit prefpane and reboot.
There you have it, a fully workable hackintosh PC. I know there are many other shorter methods out there, but this is how I’ve done mine and it works. Basically, this is a compilation of the many many methods available with trial and errors.
This guide only brings you to a workable Snow Leopard but you’ll have to figure out how to enable 7.1 surround and make this thing sleep. Yes, its on steroids now and once you set it to sleep, it sleeps forever. Perhaps installing sleepenabler.kext would work, but I’ve not tried that yet. Note that there is the CMOS error when it is booted up. Messing with the DSDT will fix this problem. It won’t be explained here though.
Here’s a benchmark I did on this rig. You can compare the results with the other macs here.
Nowhere near the MacPros though =P
And a video of the hackintosh performance. You’ll notice that it starts to suffer when more than 100 web browsers are fired up.
Hackintosh on a $300 pc
Oh yeay! Finally, a real hackintosh Snow Leopard running on my $300 desktop pc. QE/CI on the graphics card works perfectly here, we have sound, wifi, etc. Performance wise? Between the 21.5″~ 27″ iMacs. The real iMac’s costs $1199 (the cheapest). I’ll post up a guide on the installation soon.
My specs:
3.2ghz Core Duo (yeay!)
4gb 1066mhz ram
500gb 7200rpm hdd
512mb ATI HD4670 (256mb more!)
Cheapo USB Wifi
6 USB ports (yeay! we have more than the iMac)
Razer DeathAdder
A real iMac specs? here!
Well, in the screenshot it shows there 800mhz ram. Its actually running at 1066. Have to fix it..
Sound output is at 2 channels currently. Don’t intend to get 7.1 running unless I have the speakers..
and all I need now is an Apple Cinema Display… =P
Photo of the day – Rusty Swing
f/5.6
1/15s
ISO 100
You can’t find these kind of swings often nowadays.. =)