The guys over @ Lifehacker have a good article posted on their website on installing Apple’s latest OS, Snow Leopard, onto your Hackintosh PC. The article is more or less the same instructions which can be found on InsanelyMac’s forums, but with some great screenshots to help you get going.

The article steps you through copying the DVD to a USB drive, a few terminal commands and the recommended BIOS settings. If you’ve previously run 10.5.x on your Hackintosh, this should be a piece of cake.

Recently with work i’ve found lately I am getting more tasks than I can handle, which put me on a quest to find a good to-do list application. As I carry around a macbook with me pretty much everywhere I go, I thought looking for an osx app would be the best. I looked around for about a month and wasn’t really impressed, until I came across The Hit List by Potion Factory.

To my suprise, MacHeist also had ‘The Hit List’ as an unlock app in their latest bundle. After the app was unlocked I decided to purchase the bundle and give it a go. To my suprise the app is close to perfect. I’ve had it for about 2 days and put in my todo task list and everything seems to be working well. I can have folders for different sections of my job, then have client based task lists in each of these folders with tasks that need to be completed. There are also ‘Today’ and ‘Upcoming’ for tasks that need to be completed soon (after you set a due date) and a nice ‘Learn the Hit List’ task list with some nifty shortcuts for every day use.

Not long ago I built myself a new PC and being a Mac OS X user for a few years now I decided to build myself another OS X capable PC. The PC I had for a few years up until this was built for the 10.4 transition to intel and worked like a charm. The only problem I had with it was the limited driver support, video glitches and just general all around non-smoothness. The specs of that PC where:

• Intel D915GUXL board
• Intel Prescott P4 CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 250GB hard disk

I put some research into getting a new PC and searched the various Hackintosh forums (insanelymac, hackint0sh.org, etc) and came up with the following:

• Gigabyte EP-45-DS3R motherboard
• Intel Q6600 CPU
• 6GB RAM
• NVidia GeForce 8600GT (512mb) video card

I went for the native install method of installing OSX and got through the process without a hitch. The nice part of OS X is that the 8600 GT card was natively detected and required very little messing around to get things working. The only thing I really had a problem with was the onboard network card on the gigabyte motherboard dropping out after a few days and decided to go for a $10 network card that worked out of the box. Upgrades etc seem to work fine and i haven’t had any issues yet and sound normally stops working after installing a new SU (10.5.x->10.5.x) and requires a bit of messing around with the .kext files to get it all happy again.

VMware works for using Windows when I need it and I haven’t tried gaming on it yet (i have an xbox360 for that), but it works relatively smoothly. Other than the occasional hiccup everything is working fine and it’s been pretty stable.

If there’s one thing that makes browsing the internet a terrible experience, it’s popup ads. You’re browsing the internet, minding your own buisness when all of a sudden an ad pops up, flashing lights, goes into full screen mode. You close the add, it pops up an OK button for confirmation, and that opens another window. An experience we can all share I imagine. As i’m an OSX user, my ad blocker of choice is Safari AdBlock which you can download from here.

As described on the website, Safari AdBlock is easy to use and works out of the box (or dmg image, in this case). Download the latest vesion, install, close Safari and re-launch. Once the browser has opened, open the Safari preferences and navigate to the AdBlock section if you want to configure any customisations.

From their website:

on a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.

Boxee is a port of XBMC which can run on the AppleTV. It combines social networking and media/content playback for the end user. Personally I can’t go past a mac mini running PLEX however that’s not the most affordable solution.

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Chrome product manager, Brian Rakowski, has told CNET that Google’s Chrome browser will be available for Linux and Mac in 2009. This is good news to Mac users as it lets us find out what all the fuss is about. Additionally, the next version of Chrome will also support it’s most requested feature: extensions.

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So you’re a Mac user who likes Safari, but want’s some customisation? Check out Glims. From the official site:

Glims adds a cocktail of features to Safari (Tabs, Thumbnails, Full Screen, Search Engines, Search Suggestions, Forms autocomplete on, Dated download folders, Type Ahead …)

The current feature list includes:

And, added to the latest version:

.. with VortexBox

VortexBox is a free, open source, quick install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy to use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files ,and download the cover art. Vortexbox will then serve the files to network Media player such as Logitech Squeezebox. The music files can also be streamed to a Windows or Mac OSX system.

Features

Convert an old PC to a CD ripper / jukebox / NAS in 15 minutes.
Based on Fedora so it’s easy to modify.
Automatically tags all files from CDDB.
Automatically downloads the cover art.

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