Mac on my PC – LEO4ALL

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, internet, iPhone, iPod, Josh's Rambling, mac, semi-legal, software, tutorials

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

iPhone Developer Network

By Josh Highland in internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling

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I have started a new site, iPhone Developer Network. The vision of the site is to create a place where people interested in creating iPhone applications can get together and share knowledge.

I actually started making posts back in August, but stopped shortly there after. With the looming release of the official iPhone SDK, I feel that its a good time to start getting the word out about the iPhone Developer Network.

Come join us!

iPhone + Gmail IMAP = Awesome

By Josh Highland in internet, iPhone, software, tutorials

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If you read my blog, then you know that I love my iPhone, and I love Gmail. However, out of the box, paired together, I just didn’t like how they worked.

My problems come from the fact that Gmail has been using the POP (Post Office Protocol) for accessing email outside of their Web client. POP is lame if you check the same email account on multiple devices. The Emails are downloaded onto the device that checked the mail. Copies of sent and received emails end up in your inbox and read emails aren’t synced to the server, so if left unchecked the number of unread emails in the Gmail boxes on your iPhone grows rapidly. It got very confusing when responding to emails on the go also.

Recently Gmail opened up IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to their users. IMAP keeps your devices, computers, and Gmail all in sync! If you send an email from your iPhone, it will be in the sent box of all your other devices, read something, its marked as read in all the other devices. It’s the ultimate in email protocols. Trust me, once you’ve gone IMAP, there’s no going back!

To get your iPhone hooked up with Gmail, Google has released some instructions (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77702), and a youtube video

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Trying to photoBlog from my iPhone

By Josh Highland in internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling, software

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I like my iPhone, and I like Flickr, I also like to blog and photoBlog.

The iPhone has a really good camera and a constant internet connection and real web browser. It sounds like the ultimate photo Blogging tool, right?

Problems

  1. There is not file access to iPhones pictures through the web browser, so forget uploading pictures directly to Flickr
  2. It’s possible to email pictures to Flickr, but AT&T has a hidden back door charge of $0.50 for ever picture emailed via the iPhone, so uploading 20 pictures would cost me $10 extra! forget that!

I modified my iPhone a while back, and there are two applications currently that get around both of these problems, iFlickr and Pushr

iFlickr sucks because you have to take the picture using their application, and you cant upload any existing pictures on your IPhone.

Pushr is closer to what I want. You take pictures with the default camera application, then fire up Pushr. Pushr will push ALL the pictures you have on your phone to Flickr. This sounds good in theory, but what if you don’t want to push all your pictures to Flickr? You have the option to de-select the pictures you don’t want to send. So if you have 100 pictures, and you only want to upload one, you will have to de-select the 99 you don’t want to send. The whole de-select process seems counter intuitive. I think you should be able to select the pictures you want to send and just push those.

Because of the current limitations of both iPhone Flickr related apps, I am with out a good way to send my pics to Flickr.

I decided to send an email to Chris Lee the creator of Pushr and ask for a change in the software…

Josh Highland to Chris Lee:
Is there a way to make Pushr work in such a way that a user selects what pictures they want to send to flickr, rather then picking the photos they dont want to send?

example : I have 100 photos on my iphone, and i only want to send one of them to flickr. I would liek to select that one photo to send, instead of removing the 99 photos to not send

Chris Lee to Josh Highland
Hi Josh,
Currently, there is no way to do that. However, it’s a feature request
I’ve gotten, so I may add a preference for it in a future version.
Thanks for using Pushr!

So at least a change like that is on the radar of the developer of Pushr. I hope it gets implemented soon. Until then I’m stuck having to wait until I get to a computer to upload all my cool pics to my photo blog.

If you know of a good solution to my iPhone + Flickr problem, please let me know!