My cousin has a 4 year-old iBook G4 that died recently... When I took a look at it, it was pretty evident that it was a hard disk failure. My cousin didn't have a backup and the iBook wouldn't boot at all, so I held Command+S to boot in single user mode and see what was recoverable. Everything seemed fine.

The longer I used the iBook, the more "ls" and "cd" hung... That's never a good sign. I plugged in my USB disk and tried to dd the iBook's disk over, which did work but at 5KB/s. That comes to roughly 72 days to copy the entire 60GB disk! I've heard the stories about people freezing their hard drives to get some data off, so figured at this point there was nothing to lose and it was worth a try. I stuck the Mac in the fridge for an hour and went to buy a 6-to-6pin Firewire cable.

When I got back, the Mac was nice and cold. I connected the iBook to a working Mac with the Firewire cable, connected my USB disk to the working Mac and finally, booted the iBook while holding "T" (for target disk mode - it makes the iBook act as an external disk).

To my surprise, not only did the iBook turn on (screen working and all), but the working Mac I had connected the iBook to recognized the iBook's hard internal disk! I was able to start running dd and then thought "that's great and all, but who says it's not going at 5KB/s again?" Well, a quick "kill -s SIGINFO $!" revealed that it was copying at over 5MB/s... Not bad!

The verdict? The freezer myth is true. I kept a ziplock filled with ice cubes around the area where the disk drive is on the iBook, and it kept up the 6MB/s rate for over 8 hours now, save for a few spots where there were bad sectors or funnily enough, when the ice melted! If you'd like to try this procedure, here's the condensed version:

1) Make sure you have a partition that supports large files (ie, FAT32 won't cut it - we're making a disk image the size of the hard disk you're recovering). In my case, I used a 100GB HFS+ volume.

2) Place the dead Mac in the fridge for an hour.

3) Connect the dead Mac to a working one with a Firewire cable, and boot the dead Mac while holding "T" on it's keyboard. You should see the Firewire logo appear on it's screen after a moment.

4) On the functional Mac, open Disk Utility again and you'll see the "Macintosh HD" volume from the dead Mac on the left pane. Select it and do File > Get Info to determine the partition identifier. It should be diskXsY, where X and Y are typically numbers under 10.

5) Open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and enter:

    dd if=/dev/diskXsY of="/Volumes/VOLNAME/dd.img" bs=512 conv=noerror &
    pid=$!;while true;do kill -s SIGINFO $pid;sleep 15;done

Remember to replace diskXsY with the identifier we found for the dead Mac's "Macintosh HD". Replace VOLNAME with the volume name of drive you'd like to save the image to. It could be a networked, internally, or externally attached volume. For example, I used a volume on my external USB disk which had the name "BACKUPS". I had typed:

 

These commands will clone the dead Mac's hard disk partition, effectively creating a .dmg disk image of the dead Mac's drive. Once dd has finished, you'll find the image saved as "dd.img" on the volume you selected. dd will skip any bad sectors it encounters, so some data may be lost but if you're lucky you'll be able to get a good chunk out (in this case I was able to recover ~90% of the data). Statistics about the transfer progress are printed every 15 seconds - Once the disk copy is done, you can hit <ctrl+c> and quit the terminal to stop printing them. I hope this is able to help someone who needs data off their Mac!

I bought a low-end Logitech headset recently and it works perfectly in Linux but for some reason in Windows the volume was terrible. To make matters worse, it seemed like the drivers don't support mic boost and only the main "capture" slider is changable, the others such as Line-In are locked!

 

After a bit of Googleing I came to relatively simple fix to the problem. If you're looking for a way to bring up your mic's volume, follow these steps:

1. Update to the lastest drivers available from the Realtek website. 

2. Browse to C:\Program Files\Realtek\Audio\InstallShield and run the program named MicCal.exe

3. Follow the on-screen instructions and when promted with a slider, bring it down to zero, leave it there for a few seconds. Raise it to 100% and be sure to click Next right away. Continue with the on-screen instructions to finish the wizard.

4. Open up "Realtek HD Sound Effect Manager" from the "Sounds, Speech & Audio Devices" control panel category. You'll notice under the Playback knob on the left, you have a litte wrench/tool icon - Click it and make sure Rear Pink In is checked off.

5. Now, (use the arrows as needed) click the small button labeled .. (the "Advanced" button) under Rear Pink In. There, hidden, is the options for Mic Boost!

 

References:

johnnygoodface's post at techspot forums

I like the Matrix trilogy more every time I watch it... There's some pretty cool ideas in the movie. With the capabilities of technology growing every day, I don't believe we're going to be imprisoned by machines anytime soon but I do believe that the idea of a computer-generated "reality" will become, well, a reality pretty soon. 

 

What is real? It's going to be interesting to see how reality (both the word's meaning and the experiences we all retain from this "reality"), will change. If computers can interact with the nervous system, how will we be able to tell the difference between the current and computer-projected realities? In theory, the two would be indistinguishable and as with all other digital technology, chances are the digital projection of reality would be even better than the real thing. Either way, linking human brains to machines is going to bring about both new possibilities and vulnerabilities... Ad-hock networks of brains would be something very cool - imagine swapping digitized memories, complete with a sense of smell, touch, etc that you could replay any number of times. Work experience/skills could be transferred as well, which would make education easier and quicker. The gaming industry would be revolutionalized... You wouldn't play games anymore, you'd experience them. Interact with them.

 

On the other hand, I bet it won't be long before brain-malware (brain32.mydoom O_o) appears too. But that's a whole other topic...

I realized that I had made this web coding tutorial a while ago but forgot to publish it officially... It covers some common HTML skills and tags (including tables and frames) and introduces some basic CSS.

 

It's still not complete, but I promise I'll get a new revision online soon. Enjoy!

Apple has been in my good books for a long time because as their computers have no problems. Nearly no viruses, popups or adware at all. No additional software needed. Their computers 'just worked', right out of the box. I'm seeing more and more things in Apple that I don't like, things that I stopped using Microsoft's products for. Apple's products work wonderfully, but in many cases only with other Apple-based products. iPhone. iPod. iLife. iMac. And even then I find they don't work that well all the time.
 
A perfect example is recently when I was creating a slideshow using music purchased from iTunes. The iTunes Plus tracks worked flawlessly - Drag & drop, that was it. I'm happy Steve Jobs supports it and I really hope the industry moves DRM free... But I'm getting off track. I try the regular iTunes tracks (DRM encumbered) and turns out they refused to be added to the iMovie slideshow claiming the computer wasn't authorized. I entered my password, authorizing from iMovie which didn't work so then from iTunes too. I even deauthorized and reauthorized the Macbook in iTunes to make sure. Then I tried playing the tracks in iTunes - It worked. I switched to iMovie and what d'ya you know, same results. In the end I burnt all the songs to two CDs and then ripped them. Another two hours of my time wasted. Apple's FairPlay doesn't seem too fair at all - I couldn't use it on the very same computer I had purchased the songs from, and forget even trying to play them on another computer. I don't even know if you can put songs purchased from iTunes onto non-iPod players without having to break the DRM first (which is illegal in the US).

 

This time, Apple has added encrypted firmware and hashes in the database which makes it near impossible to use a new iPod with 3rd party tools (see the article I posted at the beginning of this entry). To make it worse, the encrypted firmware makes you unable to run Linux (aka Rockbox) on it to workaround the database issue. One could say otherwise, but I don't see the advantage of encrypted firmware or hashes in the database to users... What do the 3rd party tools change from Apple point of view? Users have still purchased their iPods, and whether people update iPods from iTunes or GtkPod doesn't make a difference to Apple whatsoever.

 

 

DBA: Drivers before Activation.

 

I'll have to remember that next time I install XP, as after installing the Intel and JMicron RAID/SATA controller drivers Windows thought I had "major hardware changes" and required me to reactivate my machine... At which point it said I had reached the maximum number of activations (which really was only one, half an hour before, to be precise) so I had to call Microsoft to get that sorted out.

 

I wish I could opt out of all this genuine activation. 

It's been a while since I blogged, I've been pretty busy... As always, not much to say...

 

I went to see the Family Guy Live! show last month, it was really funny... If they come by next year and you're a family guy fan, make sure to come see it - It's worth it! 

 

I'm heading for my exams the next three weeks, so I'm not going to be around as much on fedoraforum, IRC and for programming... I'm working on feature requests for fwbackups RC3, so hopefully that'll be out in July when I have time to work on it again. Anyways the good news is I did my lab exam today and it was fairly easy.

I was repairing somone's computer today, nothing especially different about the job from others... I run a I wanted to make sure the RAM wasn't bad so I boot up memtest86++ and and it repeatedly hangs at Test #3 - And the fans start blaring like crazy... I open the box, and this is what I found in the heatsink.

 

 

 

I doubt this computer was more than 4 year old judging by the model and make of the parts in it.

 

Oh, and that's cigarette smoke and nicotine, not dust or dirt :/