Let’s start with the bad news. When I got to work today, I plugged in my iphone hoping to manually manage and add music to the phone. Unfortunately, when I tried to click on manage manually in itunes I got a message prompting me to “erase and sync” before I could even activate manual manage! The iphone did not show a disk in my finder window either! Turns out the iphone can only be managed by one computer. Unlike my old ipods of the past, this was a big let down.

My other gripe would be multitasking, I would have to disagree with Steve Jobs idea of “waiting and doing it right.” First, I have to click a button to see my running tasks, which are usually much more than expected. Next, I have to press and hold on an app to bring up a screen to close an app. Last, I have to physically press the little minus sign next to the app to close it. And you will get used to pressing little minus signs too – this is the only way to close an app. That’s right, after you are finished using an app you must click the home button and the app remains running in the background. Yes this can be good for performance of frequently used apps, but I will find more than a dozen apps running in the background when I start task manager sometimes; not good for performance!

Another thing that bugs me is the data monitoring. This problem mostly lies on At&t’s lame network and 2gb data cap, but I do feel that Apple could have done a better job integrating with the wireless provider. Being a heavy Pandora listener and Youtube viewer, I know I will easily surpass the 2gb limit if I do not monitor my data. Apple needs to have a better way of monitoring this! Since I have a brand new iphone, the ‘usage’ menu will work for now, but how will I always remember to reset it at the end of my billing cycle?! For now I have the ‘At&t myWireless’ app that actively monitors everyone on my account’s data. But should I really need an app for this? I think the answer is no. So I guess I’ll have to get used to switching back and forth from WiFi to 3g fairly often. While Apple does make this relatively simple, it does get to be a bit of a pain.

There are a few other things about the iphone being such a closed system that kind of tick me off, but I won’t go in to that now knowing that a jailbreak is just around the corner. This should solve my problems of getting in to the file system and running whichever apps I want. Well that does it with the bickering, let’s get to the good parts.

If you take those few annoyances out, there really isn’t much more to complain about. The first thing I noticed when I took the iphone out of the package was the amazing form factor. I have held and htc evo before and just don’t think it matches up against the awesome look and feel of the iphone. This thing is gorgeous! The next thing I noticed was the screen. It is the highest resolution screen on the market and really is an area where the iphone has an edge on competition, even on paper! The learning curve of the intuitive operating system was practically non-existent. It was that good. Last, one thing steve jobs wasn’t lying about was the batter life. This thing is like the energizer bunny, it will last days even with wifi turned on!

My last few thoughts about it would be that facetime really is awesome, but remember that it’s only iphone4 to iphone4 and wifi only! So enjoy it with those constraints. Another lesser-known feature would be bluetooth keyboards. The iphone supports many bt profiles and don’t forget that a keyboard can easily be connected. Also, the antenna issue is very real! This is probably a hardware issue apple will have to address with their next batch of iphones or a recall (don’t cross your fingers though).

So to recap, I think the pros on the iphone are the screen, intuitive operating system, form factor, bluetooth profiles, and battery life. The cons would be multitasking, wired syncing, and data monitoring.

Like I said earlier, a Jailbeak is just around the corner so hopefully that will open up a whole new level for a new iphone user. Until then, I hope you enjoyed my initial iphone review and I definitely encourage comments for discussion!

The hardware install was fairly straightforward. I was extra cautious as this was the first time i had ever done anything like this. The first thing I did was attach the core i7-920 cpu to the msi x86 pro-e motherboard. This wasn’t too difficult, it was easy to see how everything fit into place. I then attached my 4gb gskill ddr3 ram to the motherboard. Again, very easy. Then it was time to screw the motherboard on to the case. There were 12 screws included with the motherboard and these screws had tops that went into each other. I mistakenly thought at first that you didnt need to double up the screws – this was wrong. It turns out that you put one screw in the case, then put the mobo on it, then put one final screw on top of that. The thing that confused me was that there were 12 screws, but room for 16. I eventually figured this out and got the mobo securely in place. I then installed the PNY 1gb gts 250 video card. I had done something like this before so i easily popped in the card to the PCIe x16 spot. It was now time for connecting the 2 wd 500gb sata hdds and blu-ray the optical drive. My coolmaster 690 case made this very simple. I simply slid the drives into place. I then connected all of the red sata cables to their respective places. I wished I had a little smaller fingers when I was doing this, but i managed to weasel my cables into place. All I had left was the rosewill 1000w power supply unit. Fortunately this finally came in the mail the next day. I was kind of unsure on which way to install this at first. I knew that it was placed on the bottom of the case, but i wasnt sure which way the fan pointed. Through some research, I figure out that the fan should point through the bottom of the case because it sucks air in. I got the screws tightly into place and it was now finally time to connect everything up!
The first thing i conected was the main 24pin connecter from the psu to the mobo, then i also connected the 8pin socket near the cpu. Those were the only two places the psu connected to the motherboard. I also saw a 6pin connecter on the video card so i attached that as well. I had already connected the cpu fan, and the back fan cable easily reached the mobo, but the front fan was challenging. I had to take the fan completely off the casing and detach the cable from the clips pointing it downward. When i re-routed the cable to go upward it just barely reached the connector on the mobo. The cable is on there securely and out of the way of everything else, so i feel this is the way it was designed to be. Next was another confusing part, connecting all the power cables to the sata drives. I mistakenly started from the bottom drive and ended up inverting my connecters 180 degrees to get the placed correctly. A little common sense then told me that I should have started at the top and worked my way down! So that’s what I did, I started with my optical drive and worked my way down to the hdds. Wow, I think it’s just about time to fire her up!
So thats what I did, I worked up my nerves, made sure everything was connected securely, and clicked the power button!

And Viola, I successfully see a bios screen after a few seconds. I did it! I built my first computer!
The first thing I was advised to do was run memtest to check to see if the ram was bad. After 5 hours, I successfully made 6 passes, and confirmed the ram was good. I was in good shape! But it isn’t over yet; I still have to install os x, the goal was to make a hackintosh, wasn’t it?

My goal was to build a Mac desktop with equal or greater power than my 2008 Mac Pro I use at work. I knew there were recipes online and figured that was a good place to start. After massive amounts of googling with no results, I decided to go straight to the source. I contacted the author of old recipes to find out he was actually a very helpful and nice guy. I told him what my needs were (running web production apps) and budget ($1000) and we built the following system:

First we chose a case that wasn’t too flashy, but looked somewhat elegant. The only real requirement here was that it took ATX form factor motherboards.

Next we choose one of the fastest and highest rated CPUs availiable – Intel Core I7-920. This chip has won customer choice awards on newegg and is known to work with Mac OS X Show Leopard. It is also known to be overclocked to go ~4.0Ghz with proper cooling. However I’ll save that one for another day.

Then was one of the most important parts: finding a extensible motherboard that supported this chip and hackintosh. I am very satisfied with my choice and happy that the MSI X58 Pro-E LGA 1366 Intel X58 supports up to 24GB of ram and the new intel 6 core chips that were recently released. It has 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, 2 PCI Express x1, 2 PCI slots, 7 SATA 3Gb/s, onboard audio, onboard gigabit lan, and 6 usb 2.0 slots on the back. I think it will probably do the job LOL.

I then picked up a Rosewill 1000W power supply unit that supports the core I7.

I just chose 4 gigs of 240-Pin DDR3 RAM for now knowing that most applications, being 32bit, only support 4GB of ram.

A very important part of hackintosh systems are the video cards. I know that all GTS 250 cards are compatible so I chose one of those made by PNY. I made sure it had 2 dvi outputs for dual screens.

I also added the optional card reader for an extra $13 bucks that takes just about anything.

The last thing that I wanted on my system was an internal wifi card. I’ve heard mixed reviews about this part and know it is still somewhat experimental, but I decided to go with the DELL 1505 802.11N Wireless PCIe card from ebay. This part is optional of course but it was important to me.

All of the fans and cords come with the required parts – no need to worry there.

You may have noticed that storage and optical drives are not included in this list. For those, I have 1 SATA blu ray drive and 2 500GB SATA HDDS already lying around. I think the most important part here is just that they are SATA. All standard sata parts will work fine in a hackintosh.

So that’s it for now, I would really like to thank my awesome guide in this project – @weaksauce. Without him the project would not be possible. The only experience I had before this was installing OS X on msi wind and dell 10v netbooks. Thanks again and I can’t wait to begin setting up my rig when I receive the components next week.

Stay tuned for a up to date info on the construction of the rig and installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard!

Tour of the Site

The intent is to make this site clear and easy for the user to navigate. The navigation in the header, footer, and sidebar will stay consistent across all pages. Think of it as a backward C shape. Most of the main content will be delivered remotely by my social networks – Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. The articles and blog posts will be provided by wordpress and can be seen on the homepage, rss feed, or through an archive page. Three of the four pages in the header are fairly static and will rarely be updated. The exception being the photos page; which will be updated whenever I update whenever I add a new album to facebook. The sidebar gives links twitter, old blog posts, random photos, and the book I am now reading along with a library link to my previously read books. Last, the footer is comprised of links to my social networks, my currently bookmarked links, a repeat of navigation, hatred for ie6, and a vicious copyright notice.

Mix of Personal & Professional

I had mixed feelings of wether I was going to make this a personal or professional site. I have a good amount of knowledge about things like windows mobile cell phones, cascading style sheets, homebrew on the Wii, and computer hardware. I also have a pretty exciting life of course. However I was leaning toward the professional side at first; WordPress has great SEO and making a post about X could turn out to help a lot of people. I know I am always googling to find answers to my problems, why not contribute a little and give back. You know? I knew about the search engine benefits of wordpress, however I underestimated the sheer amount of great plugins available under this platform. They provided me with everything I would have dreamed of. This swayed me to integrate twitter and facebook – making my site personal whether I liked it or not. I was unsure of this decision at first, thinking that I had to choose or the other, but I have found that many people are able to make this work. Just keep your security settings and spam control on high!

Technology Used

Technologies used to make this site were adobe photoshop, xhtml strict, css, and the wonderful wordpress cms. The extensions it provides are amazing and saved me a lot of time and effort trying to dig through the web looking for something useful. Some of the things would just not be possible on a website today without great things like wordpress. I think it has forever changed the web and moved us in the direction of a web anyone can contrubute to. It just wasn’t possible for a intermediated level developer to have all his social feeds in one place five years ago. I also used image sprites and png 24 extensively – sorry ie6. I used css3 techniques like rgba and text-shadow.

Will I ever keep this going?

I want to try and update this as much as possible. I know talk is cheap and that most websites like these die out as quickly as the time it took to create them. Although remember, as I said earlier – even if I don’t make an actual blog post, you will still be updated. Want to see my micro updates? Just look at the writing next to the blue bird. Want to see my new photo albums? See my newest facebook photos, even the ones that I am tagged in by clicking the photos link. Also see my bookmarks at the bottom of the page provided by delicious. This is just the beginning great things to come as constant updates are a sure-thing. I already have great enhancements in mind. So remember that there is one place to keep up with clark on the web – ClarkM.com!