Assorted
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Sidearm Connect
May 3rd, 2009
About a month ago I started really digging into social media to promote Sidearm and reconnect and stay connected with my contacts and friends. So I’ve started to revamp the Sidearm Facebook and MySpace pages, I’m posting links and tidbits on Twitter, and I’ve added a newsletter to Sidearm. The first newsletter will be coming out this week, so if you haven’t signed up make sure you do. The newsletter signup and all the other social networking info about Sidearm can be found in the “Connect” sidebar area.
You’re probably sick of hearing about it from everywhere else, but I would like to suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t. If the prospect of 140 character messages seems annoying or boring, consider that you can get jokes from Michael Ian Black , Michael Showalter , and John Hodgman – for free! The jokes alone are worth using it. Oh, and be sure you follow Sidearm .
Update: the newsletter is going to have to wait because I have too much to do before I take off for Spokane early Thursday morning.
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100th Post Giveaway
April 3rd, 2009
Hello dear readers. I’ve been blogging here on Sidearm for about ten and a half months and this is my 100th post! To show my appreciation, I’m going to give away a Sidearm shirt. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post with your full name, your email (in the email box, not the comment), and what kind of posts you enjoy most from Sidearm or what you would like to see. Giveaway ends next Friday the 10th of April at midnight (PST).
You can check out the three shirts that are up for grabs (sorry not the hoodie) in The Armory which has a new look in addition to the new name. Sidearm will be undergoing some changes, so please let me know if anything is busted.
Update: This giveaway is over. The winner will be contacted by email on Monday.
Update: The winner is Jason Navarrete!
Thanks again dear readers!
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Follow Sidearm on Twitter
April 2nd, 2009
I finally caved. You can now follow Sidearm on Twitter. I’m planning to use it to replace minor posts or links so as to keep the blog focused on original content. By strange coincidence, ISO50 took the plunge today as well. Tweet!
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The Ghost and The Grace Vlogs
March 26th, 2009
Dan’s been doing a great series of video blogs over at theghostandthegrace.com . In each video he talks about a different song from the upcoming album, plays clips, and talks about the meaning of the lyrics and the influences that inspired him. If you’re interested in the band, or how a professional musician works, this is well worth watching.
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Success!
February 2nd, 2009
I just received my GeForce 7200 GS in the mail and it is working perfectly in OSX 10.5.6. I also found a fix for a really annoying audio pop on the ALC889a. Now that my Hackintosh is running like a real mac, it’s time to get some work done.
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Delays
January 30th, 2009
This weekend I was planning on releasing my 7th single, but yesterday I accidently scratched the canal and possibly drum of my right ear. I’m fine, but the incident has left me with less than perfect hearing from the swelling and damage. Needless to say, I can’t mix/master a song without both ears. To make up for this lapse in song making, I will be releasing a two (possibly three) track EP in the month of February.
For those wondering about my installation of Snow Leopard (the upcoming version of OSX), I have been unable to get it running. However, others are reporting that the ATI 4800 series is now supported in the latest Snow Leopard build. Without a release date for Snow Leopard, and with dwindling hope for a 4800 series driver in Leopard, I’ve decided to get a cheap secondary graphics card for OSX. I settled on the GeForce 7200 for $23 from Newegg. It should arrive Monday. I’ll post the results.
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New Computer
January 13th, 2009
My officeI have a new computer sitting in my room!
I started with a Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R motherboard with 4GB of Crucial DDR3 ram (in a 2x2GB configuration so I can upgrade to 8GB later), and a Core 2 Duo E8500 (stock speed 3.16Ghz). For graphics I went with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB card which can plow through almost any game on the highest settings (Crysis topped it out on “High” settings while there is the available “Very High” setting) and will kick serious ass in Snow Leopard with OpenCL. Added in a 1TB hard drive, DVD burner, Apple keyboard, and Corsair 520W modular power supply and stuffed all that into an Antec P182 case. The P182 is designed to be very quite with 3 120mm fans and rubber grommets and stripping to reduce vibration. The whole system cost just under $1000 including shipping from 2 suppliers.
I’m dual-booting OSX 10.5.6 and Windows 7 Beta (build 7000). Unfortunately, OSX doesn’t fully support my HD 4870 so over the last week I’ve installed all the standard flavors of Windows so that I can access all that power (and play some games). I got a stable install of XP SP3, a pathetic Vista install, and, surprisingly, a solid-as-a-rock Windows 7 beta install. I’m so blown away by Windows 7 that I’ve gotten rid of my other Windows flavors. It’s fast, clean, and unintrusive. The only problem I had was installing Daemon Tools for disc mounting (Note: as of this writing, Daemon Tools cannot be installed on Windows 7). A quick search revealed another free program PowerISO that does the job.
OSX installed with only 2 fixes. One for my onboard audio, and another that fixes Restart/Shutdown functionality. Other than those, I have a Vanilla (unmodified) installation of OSX running on this machine. No word yet on when to expect mac drivers for the HD 4800 series.
Crysis running on Windows 7While I still prefer OSX, Microsoft has a strong offering in Windows 7. Of course, I might be giving them too much credit just for having a functioning OS. This is what Vista should have been.
In the course of building this computer and getting everything installed I learned some things that might be helpful to fellow Hackers:
- - The Gigabyte board I got works well and is mostly compatible with OSX right out of the box.
- - Don’t get an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series card unless you’re willing to wait for OSX drivers to show up.
- - If you get stuck, use Google. Search for your hardware (motherboard, graphics card, etc.) with the terms “hackintosh” or “OSx86”. The Hackintosh community is huge, if someone out there has your hardware they probably have the same problems.
If you’re interested in Windows 7 beta, Gizmodo has an excellent article on getting it up and running.
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Upgrades
December 3rd, 2008
In my Christmas list my top item was the new 13” MacBook. I’ve decided to wait on buying a new computer, and instead I’ve been upgrading my current CoreDuo MacBook to get some extra mileage out of it.
First of all, I’ve been having problems with my Airport card ever since upgrading to Leopard. Subsequent updates to Leopard have not fixed the problem so when I found this tutorial I decided it would be worth opening up the MacBook to replace the Airport card and upgrade to 802.11n while I was at it. The replacement card was purchased on Ebay for $25 and arrived about a week later all the way from Hong Kong (with free shipping). It was a little bit difficult and nerve-racking to install, but when I put it all back together it ran perfectly, as if I hadn’t changed a thing. Except that I can use the internet while away from my desk, and stream high-quality video over our home network.
The second upgrade was to switch out the 80GB hard drive with a new 320GB drive from Mwave for $75 with shipping. Remove the battery, 3 screws, slide the old drive out, the new drive in, and your done.
The third upgrade wasn’t to the laptop itself. One of the most common problems I run into is running out of screen space for projects like book design. To remedy this, I went Dell to purchase the 24” LCD monitor from my Christmas list for $530 with shipping. The screen boasts a resolution of 1920x1200 which is 225% larger than my laptops 1280x800. This monitor costs a bit more than other 24 inchers, but for good reason. It has pretty much every input you can imagine: VGA, 2 DVIs, Composite, Component, HDMI, and Display Port. Tack on to that a 4 port usb hub, and 9in1 card reader.
All in all, I ended up spending about $650 instead of $1400 or potentially $2100 for the MacBook or MacBook Pro, respectively. I could still use a bit more power, but I’m hoping that with Snow Leopard the second core in my CPU might get utilized a bit more.
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