Tag: hack

Mac: use a Windows ATi Radeon 4870 in your Mac Pro

The price for Windows 4870 cards is substantially lower than Apple’s.
The Canada Apple Store currently
lists one for $420,
whereas
Canada Computers has one for $210.
In
this MacRumors forum thread
people are discussing how to do this and what the pitfalls are.

Basically, download and flash the ROM from
RapidShare.

One person said:

I just tried it on my Sapphire HD4870 (the 1st gen one, based on
ATI’s ref design).

I flashed using freedos and the following command line:
atiflash.exe -p -fs -fp 0 4870.rom
note: -fs and -fp are used to ignore SSID and P/N mismatches

And it works!

EFI driver is initialized correctly, (I don’t have the leaked MacOSX
drivers for this card, so I can’t tell if this one works too), and
bootcamp stil works (currently writing from GNU/Linux on my 2006 Mac
Pro).

Only problem is : only one output is active, no dual-head, it seems
(at least using ATI’s linux driver)

I should note that doing this seems to make the analog output (SVGA) not work. DVI is fine, though one person reported the “top” port as only going up to 1024×768.

Be careful out there. Read the thread for info on which cards work, and what possible side effects there are.

YMMV.

Reid

Jailbreak: replace iTunes

Some apps that let you liberate your iPhone/iPod Touch from iTunes and Apple’s renaming obfuscation:
dTunes,
PwnPlayer,
and MPlayer
make a pretty potent combination.

MPlayer is probably the weakest of the bunch; playing video skips frames and sometimes has no audio.
I would expect it to get better over time though.

Just a few more reasons to JailBreak. :-)

Firefly—an iTunes server for AppleTV


Firefly
Screenshot from Firefly, a daapd server for AppleTV and Mac OS X

I found this on the ‘Net today, downloaded it, and set it up.
It’s running happily, and I have a screen
session busily copying all my mp3’s from my Mac Pro downstairs to
the 1TB external drive hooked up to the AppleTV.

This is a great solution, since it means we can have a music server available all the time
without having to keep my power-hungry, 4-core machine on all the time.

Apparently there is another AppleTV plugin that does BitTorrent,
so I may at last be able to turn off my computer at night!

4 Really Good Reasons to Jailbreak Your iPhone

ssh
Installing OpenSSH Allows you to login to your iPhone on the command line.
You can do all sorts of things like
using
your iPhone as an internet router.
AppleShare
ssh is a bit geeky, so you can AppleShare instead.
Browsing your WiFi will show the iPhone as plain as day.
It’s the next best thing to the “disk mode” that old iPods have.
video recording
Either live over the internet via Qik,
or locally using
Cycorder
or “VideoRecorder for iPhone”.
playing old arcade games
There are now both an NES (non-super Nintendo) and Gameboy Advance emulators for the iPhone.
I wonder why
MAME
hasn’t been ported yet?