fosk.it! 2.0

After a bad BIOS flash (or better, a flash of a bad BIOS, ghgh) on my Dell Mini 9 I started searching for a recovery procedure using Phoenix BIOS Crisis Recovery Disk.

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.

You can no longer debug output in 2.0 by launching your app from SSH. So how do you get those NSLog outputs? The answer is to enable the syslog and then you can use tail -f /var/log/syslog to see all the output. Here is how:

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

The following steps will help you create a perfect working (i.e. also bootable, indeed ) DVD copy of Mac OS X Leopard. I successfully followed this tutorial to backup the two InstallDVD that come in bundle with my MacBook.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever found an open wireless access and when opening your browser you get a nice login screen asking you a credit card number (a captive portal)? What’s next? Make your choice: fill the form with the magic numbers or try to bypass this security mechanism!

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.

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Test done with Dronaeo website (a collection of some JS benchmark script done by Mozilla foundation) on a 2.4GHz Macbook w/ 4GB of RAM.

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.

First add this line to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/options

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.

While surfing MacTalk forums, I saw a thread with pictures that I find both funny and true.

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 have heard about MacDrive, which is probably one of the prettiest and most well-integrated solutions to read and write HFS+ partitions under Windows, but is $40 to $50.

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.

This tip is pretty much noob-proof because it does definitely not involve any system hacking, it is just about installing a few apps. I have done my test and have been using this solution for a few months now on my two external hard disk, which are two Lacie Bigdisk 500GB.
This tip has been fully tested to work under Mac OS X 10.5, however it should work fine in older Mac OS X’s. You just have to install the appropriate app version.

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.