Mac Geekery

Can i install my Leopard OS onto my PC?

Yes. The current solution is to use a piece of software called simply “PC-EFI” that emulates a Mac firmware environment. There’s some instructions out there already for how to get this done.

Hello, I am looking for information regarding how to boot a iBook,G4, with linux on a USB flash drive…

You cannot boot a G4 iBook from a USB drive of any kind — only FireWire or internal drives.

On my iBook G4 14’ when I run openSUSE 10.3 I noticed (for some time now) the white led blinks when the hard drive is accessed. There's more »

If you move the Leopard dock to the side of the screen you get a dock with a gray background rather than the glassy surface. If you want that dock on the bottom of the screen as well, simply run the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

This sets a hidden default on the Dock and then forces it to restart.

There are a plethora of hacks to change the translucent menu bar in 10.5. While I doubt the sanity of the UI designers at Apple with this release of the operating system, it is relatively easy to change this behavior without installing third party hacks. There's more »

Welcome to yet another series of short answers. I’d write something larger but there are two factors preventing that:

1. The lack of time to actually write it, these days.
2. The lack of geeky questions in the queue to fuel my desire to slack off on real work and write something fun.

It’s not you, it’s both of us. It’s just not working out. However, I think with a little effort we can get this going again.

So, with that in mind, let us go forth in my effort to reduce the size of the queue in my search for something to write a long and heavy article about… There's more »

This is entirely pointless if you have an iPhone. However, if you’re locked into a Sprint contract until next October, sometimes it’s nice to see how the other side lives.

The iPhone redirects RSS requests through reader.mac.com with a special URL: http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http%3A//domain.com/feed.xml. However, going to that directly on a Mac gives you the “You’re not an iPhone” message.

Curious as to what I was missing, I grepped MG’s logs for iPhone browser user agent strings (we’re well-read in the Bay Area, it appears) and found some. So I made a modified attempt:

curl -A “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; OS X Leopard 9A365; en) KHTML” http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http%3A//www.hopelessgeek.com/rss.xml > foo.html There's more »

I was having quite the problem with trying to install programs from the command line: Bash would complain I didn’t have libraries installed that I most certainly did, and pkg-config was no help, since it apparently wouldn’t talk to X11 or Bash at all. Nice. Those are hours of my life I’ll never get back. There's more »

My new MacBook Pro needs to go in for warranty service. I made two full backups to external drives using SuperDuper. Unfortunately, system software for an Intel machine won’t boot on an older PowerPC PowerBook. Is there any way to make a universally bootable system? Not being able to take a drive and boot it on multiple machine architectures seems to me to be a huge oversight by Apple.

Yes. There's more »

Mac OS X stores the current marketing OS version (i.e. not the kernel revision number) in a property list in CoreServices. You don’t need to parse the plist to get it out. There's more »