milliAmp

New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.

Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.

Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.

I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.

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I has been an awfully long time since I last posted here. Many things I could’ve written about, maybe I will in the next few weeks.

Anyway, this post is about Windows Vista. More specifically, installing Windows Vista Business (64bit) onto a Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa).

The Apple Bootcamp drivers that came with my laptop don’t support Windows Vista 64bit so I had to do some digging around to find the drivers that worked and get everything running smoothly.

This information is out there on the web but I found some of the instructions on exactly which driver to choose a little had to understand. Below is a list of the drivers I used to get Vista Business 64bit working on this Macbook Pro.

Video

Hardware: nVIDIA 8600M GT with 256MB RAM
Drivers: nVIDIA ForceWare X 167.62

Audio

Drivers: RealTek R190

Keyboard/Fan

Drivers: Input Remapper 1.0.04
NB: Screen backlight control is not supported on the nVIDIA card yet

Wireless

Drivers: Atheros v7.6.0.83

Ethernet

Drivers: Marvel Yukon v10.57.3.3

This information is mainly from two sources:

http://rumblingsfromdeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/12/macbook-pro-and-vista-64bit-x64-issues.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=149395

With these drivers I got a Windows Experience Index of 4.9
Processor: 5.2
RAM: 4.9
Desktop Graphics: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 5.5
Primary Hard Disk: 4.9

Steve Jobs has issued a Hot News article detailing Apple’s stance on DRM and it’s future. I’m going to go so far as to say he has laid down a challenge in full public view to the big 4 Music Distribution Companies. However I can see that his account serves only to appease the public’s wrath due to Apple not licensing it’s FairPlay DRM technology to other companies, I can’t see the big wigs in the music world even reading the article, let alone uttering more than a chuckle.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

This afternoon, Tom got me to check out a SIMBL plug-in named megazoomer. After upgrading my version of SIMBL and dropping the megazoomer bundle into its place in my Library folder, each Cocoa program I started from then on had fullscreen capability.

With the default key combination that seems borrowed from Windows (⌘ + ⏎ – similar to Alt + Enter which is full-screen/window mode toggle for apps on Windows) it sends the Application full screen.

The big deal for me was that it worked multi-monitor flawlessly even allowing 2 windows to be full screen on different monitors creating an uninterrupted workflow between the two. Now I can set up a text editor on one screen and Safari on the other at work and not have any distractions.

I rocked around to Tom’s place this evening to find his flatmate Jo’s iMac G5 Kernel Panicing on boot. So, putting on the tech hat we tried Target Disk mode (successful at accessing the drive) and resetting the NVRAM didn’t do anything so we tried to figure out what was causing it all, anyway, so we ended up in Single User Mode, force fsck’d the hard-drive which was showing tons of journal problems. Fixed a ton of those, it wasn’t able to fix everything though, booted and bingo.

Long story short it was possibly the combination of transferring 40GB of files to the harddrive over Samba filling the HDD to 1GB free and then playing a movie over said Samba connection. These are the dying words in one of the coolest Crash Logs from the Kernel I’ve seen:

Jan 10 20:29:31 localhost kernel: netsmb_dev: loaded
Jan 10 20:42:16 localhost kernel: smb_iod_sendrq: TRAN_SEND returned fatal error 57
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Unable to determine CPSProcessSerNum pid: 413 name: mplayer
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Started writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Finished writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 /Volumes/MPlayer
Jan 10 20:44:43 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:44 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          /Volumes/MPlayerOSX_8r5
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: disk1s2: device is write locked.
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!
Jan 10 20:46:27 localhost kernel: hfs: WARNING - blocks on volume Macintosh HD not allocated!