July 1, 2007 by Santaduck.

Like many of you, I live on both sides of the fence. I’ve had Apples through the ][+ and SEs and PCs since the original 8086 and XT.

Currently I have a Peecee, specifically a Compaq laptop. However I <3 the Apple GUI.

So I wanted to share one teeny Apple-like tweak that gives me pleasure on my Peecee, a Dashboard jury-rig. If you have a Compaq, you may very well have those “One Touch” buttons along the top. I have one of these buttons set on something like Exposé. XP has a “show desktop” function, and that’s what I’ve set it to; it’s not exactly the same, but the essential gestalt gut feel of it is the same: If I’m sick of overlapping windows, I just reach for a physical button, without thinking, and they are gone. I push it again, and the windows are back.

To set it, do the following:
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April 14, 2006 by Santaduck.

I forgot to mention, we just published a XXXX-load of benchmarks on the new Intel-based iMacs and the MacBook Pro, in comparison with the Macologist staff’s machines, from an iMac G4 all the way up to a quadcore PowerMac G5. The article is HOT apparently– we’ve only had it up three days and it has gotten almost 30K (yes 30,000) unique hits. See the secret is quantity = quality =x. Haha, Actually it was such a bear to do all of these benchmarks, and coordinate the staff, I’m happy to have what we have, and just left it at that, but the FUN part is that I’ve tried to provide crystal clear instructions so that you can run all of the benchmarks yourself. I’d like to do an update soon, as Cinebench got updated (for the 3rd time since we began testing for this article: we had started with CB2003, then we had an internal Universal Binary, then they came out with the UB 9.5, and now they have some OpenGL optimizations), we also had some tips on running a compiled SciMark (rather than relying on Java’s JIT– just in time– compiling), heard about an interesting benchmark called GeekBench(MBP results here), and need to finish up some more rigs on the Photoshop benchmark. Man, the iTunes vs. QT player finding was really neat too…

Go take a look: Macologist’s Intel Mac Benchmark Smorgasbord.

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February 4, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well, Ryan Gordon had the MacNinjas testing this one for a bit, and only a few of us had access to Intel iMacs. Originally the release was just going to be the old 3369.1 PPC released glommed onto the Intel universal binary. However now it’s been released as a full-blown 3369.2 revision for PPC as well. I was also curious about OpenAL, since fellow MacNinja Petter always seems to have something interesting up his sleeve. When I asked Ryan in email, he told me: “It was rebuilt to the latest version in Subversion. Originally the PowerPC side was just going to be 3369.1 glued to the new Intel build, but the UseStencil fixes required a rebuild, and SDL had some serious changes recently, so I opted to rebuild everything so we had known quantities on both CPU architectures.”
Anyways 3369.2 does not exist on Linux or Windows, as these are Mac-specific issues. Also, the server exploit fix from Dec 2005 has also been incorporated, and even better, the Epic Mega Pack is now included with the update, which causes what would be a rather small download to now weigh in a hair short of 200 Mb. If you want to know about the 9 new maps in the Mega Pack, see BeyondUnreal’s overview. Anyways see all the download mirrors at Gordon’s site here. If you want a faster mirror, I don’t know if it’s listed yet, but Petter got a mirror up in Sweden here, and I think MGF has a link as well, but it usually just redirects to Gordon’s icculus.org site. If you’re doing a brand spanking virgin install of UT2004 on your Intel (or PPC) Mac, and the retail installer crashes on you, make sure to use Gordon’s fixed retail installer for Tiger at Macologist downloads. I don’t see a link for this file at MGF, so get it here as icculus.org will be slammed for a few days, and the file was previously in a temporary folder so who knows if it’s still there. Finally, if you want to see our preliminary benchmarks of Universal UT2004 running on Intel iMacs on a pre-release version last week, read our article here, which we wrote in collaboration with barefeats.com. It flies. Keep your eyes peeled as we’ll be working with barefeats again on another benchmarking feature with more universal binaries. w33t indeed. It’s already a good year!

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February 3, 2006 by Santaduck.

A informal contest to achieve a dual boot Intel Mac today exceeded $10000 USD in donated community prize money. Blogger Colin Nederkoorn started the contest on a whim just over a week ago on January 23, and contributions accumulated to over $2500 in one week. After the contest was “Slashdotted”, the total pot now stands in excess of $10K. The contest ends March 23, and if no winner is apparent by that deadline, the prize money will be charitably donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The rules are as follows:
1. Instructions must boot Windows XP (at least), not Vista or any other version of Windows.
2. Windows must be able to coexist with Mac OS X and each system may not interfere with the operation of the other (basically a traditional dual boot system where one OS is running at a time)
3. Your method, upon starting the computer, must offer the user to boot either OS X or Windows XP (hint: GRUB)
4. The first person to post complete instructions, including pictures of the boot process to The Forum will be the winner. Instructions will be peer reviewed once they are received and once the solution is guaranteed working, the prize money will be transferred via paypal
5. You give this website the rights to post your solution
6. If it is determined impossible to boot Windows on the Mac by March 23, 2006, all donations will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you donated prior to 2006/01/23 2:10pm CST, and you do not wish to donate to charity, I will return your money minus the paypal fee
7. You cannot use virtualization software such as Xen or VMWare

Any interested users may donate any amount $5 and above toward the prize amount through PayPal, and in return for donations over $10, a URL of the donor’s choice will be linked on the contest site. Nederkoorn has set up a new domain for the contest at windowsxp.onmac.net, with a new contest blog and forum. Open accounting of all donations are also available as an Excel file on the site.

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