Apple Airport Extreme

As you are probably aware, only a few days ago I got the Airport Express to bridge my upstairs and downstairs network. I liked the device so much, I bought a second one so I could have an Airtunes device in the kitchen.

I was going to by a 3rd, but though it would probably be best to just replace my Netgear DGN2000 and Airport Express in the front room, with an Airport Exteme.

After looking at the specs, it’s essentially a Time Capsule without the built in hard drive, and I could bridge the two 5Ghz  wireless n networks together

As with the Time Capsule, and Airport Express‘s, you just plug it in, and it works. Airport Utility fired up on my macbook, followed the onscreen prompts, and bridged it with my Time Capsule and jobs done !

I’ve now moved my 1st Airport Express into the bedroom so I can steam music in there too…..Gotta love Apple.

As always, unboxing picks are below.

Tags: airport express, AirTunes, apple airport, bedroom, capsule, device, DGN, downstairs, drive, Express, Exteme, Extreme, few days, Gotta, hard drive, jobs, kitchen, love, love apple, macbook, music, Netgear, Network, onscreen, steam, time, time capsule, upstairs, Utility

Create Channels for you Wii Games

If you are like me, and got very lazy and modified your Wii so you could play your games from a Hard Drive, then this takes laziness to the next level.

Even with the mod, you had to fire up the homebrew channel, or fire up the CoverFloader, or WiiCoverFlow or whichever channel you had for accessing your hard drive, then select the game, then load….you can now remove a step, and have your games as channels, and below I’ll show you how.

Assumed prerequisites.

You have a Wii

You have a homebrew channel installed

You have your games installed to a compatible hard drive connected to the Wii

Assuming you have the above, lets continue.

Download the latest version of WBFS Manager if you don’t already have it installed.

Download the latest version of Loadstructor (Torrent link here)

and finally the common-key.bin (Torrent Link Here)

Once everything is installed, connect your hard drive to you PC. This should appear in my computer but you won’t be able to access it, this is normal.

Fire up WBPS Manager, and select the external hard drive with you games on it from the drop down box, and click load. You should see a list of your game, if so move onto the next step.

Unzip the Loadstructor zip file and copy the common-key.bin into the root of this folder.

Run the Loadstuctor.exe and you should be met with the below screen.

I personally left all the setting as default.

Click on Add from WBFS, and select the game you want as a channel, using the CTRL key you can select multiple games

Once you have your games selected hit the RUN! button, this will create the wad files on your chosen output folder.

Once complete (took around 20 seconds a game on my machine) you will have a number of wad files in the above folder. Copy these to your Wii SD Card into a folder called wads on the root.

Now we head back to the Wii, take your external hard drive and SD Card with you and plug them into your Wii

Fire up your homebrew channel, then run WAD Manager (assuming you still have this on your SD Card from installing your homebrew channel, if now version 1.5 can be found here or here

Select the newly created wads, and install, that’s it, jobs done ! You will now have Wii Channels for all you favorite games

Final Note :

If your game won’t load and you sat looking at a screen saying Loading ISO, try disabling the Fix 002 Error, as not all games need this, and it seems to be switched on by default, and secondly, I’ve found that I have to completely power off my Wii between games, I can only assume something gets cached.

Anyway, hope this of some help. If you get stuck, drop me a comment and I’ll give you a hand.

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Hackingtosh FTW

A couple of years ago I discovered, it was possible to run the mighty Mac OSx operating system on hardware that wasn’t Apple.

As the versions of Mac OSx have come out, newer of the custom install disk have been released, the community has grown, and custom drivers have been written for the non-Mac hardware.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve tried multiple disk and had varied success….however, I’ve finally cracked it ! Last week, using the disk iATKOS_v7, and after 6 attempts, I was finally able to install, and run Mac OSx version 10.5.7.

The issue that I’ve had over the past couple of years, is that Apples tend to run on the Intel based chipset and processors, but as you can see from the below, my machine couldn’t be much further from a mac specs. Having an AMD Processor and ATI motherboard was the probable cause for my 2 years of failing.

Current Machine Spec.

AMD 6000+ Processor
4Gb Ram Memory
1 x 500Gb Western Digital Drive (SATA)
2 x 250Gb Western Digital Drives (SATA)
1 x PIONEER DVD-RW  DVR-112 (IDE)
ATI HD2900 1Gb PCI-e Graphics
Asus M2R32-MVP :-
Onboard AL1988 SoundCard
ATI SB580 Chipset
Marvell Yukon 88E001 Gigabit Network Controller

Peripherals

Acer AL2216W Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Logitech G15 Keyboard
Razer CopperHead Mouse

I had to switch out the DVD drive, as this caused problems with earlier version of the DVD, where I would get a kernel panic while trying to initialize the setup.

Anyway, back to the success story. The iATKOS_v7 DVD booted like a charm and took me into the setup, went into the Disk Utilities and Erased my drive to Mac OS Journal

Back to the installer, next, next, next and Customize.

On the working attempt I selected

Voodoo kernel 9.7.0
AMD Chipset Drivers
Azalia Audio drivers

that was it.

The previous attempts, I used the ATI Video drivers, the Marvell Yukon Network drivers, but no joy.

Once the install had finished, I was presented with the standard OSx welcome screen, entered my name. Due to having no working network card, I had to manually enter my details, as these would have otherwise been populated with the associated details on my apple account, after these Tada ! MAC OSX Desktop.

The video was only in 1024×768 and the was no network but we were getting there.

Downloaded the Marvell Yukon Driver from here, and followed the instructions

Downloaded the ATI HD2900 from here and followed the instructions.

Restarted, and I had full working gigabit network, and my 22″ Widescreen monitor running at 1680×1050 and 19″ monitor running at 1280×1024 !

As I was feeling brave, I decided to click on the Software update version, it downloaded and installed all the updates, and even took me to version 10.5.8 !

To get the LCD working on the Logitech G15 Keyboard, Logitech are kind enough to provide Mac Software found here , As my keyboard is a Microsoft UK layout, the ” and the @ were in the wrong place, so downloaded the Microsoft British driver from here

Finally, I couldn’t get used to the acceleration Apple implement to their mouse drives, and wanted to have the old boring 1:1 ratio, no matter how fast I moved my mouse, I found a little util called SteerMouse, which can be downloaded from here

All in all, that’s it, I now not only have my MacBook Pro, I also have a fully working Mac Pro.

Below is a list of useful software I’ve found

Adium for all your instant messenger needs
MenuMeters for all your monitoring needs
NeoOffice, a Mac only version of Open Office
Skype, mac version

Hope this was of some help to somebody.

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