Sound on my MacOSX. Strange to say the least.

I successfully intalled iLife '06 on my home machine. Since I don't really care about the other iLife items except Garage band so that's what I installed, and it seems to work fine. But I found out that Garage band does NOT take the system Sound In and Out setting and instead go directly to take the AC97 sound in and out. For instance, my Firewire based audio interface M-Audio Firewire Solo was being recognized by the system without problem. The System Perference shows it and I set the Firewire Solo as the default audio in and out put. Yet Garage still insist on using the AC97 sound card for output, and I still need to figure out where the heck it takes input from.

On the bright side, other apps like browser takes the Firewire Solo as sound out properly. So I can use Padora to listen to music directly from my Firewire Solo. Sweet.

Unrar file on Mac

I got my iLife 06 disc archieved into a bunch of .rar files, so I need a OSX tool to put the disc back to a single .dmg file. I found this tool called UnrarX, and while the UI doesn't looking anything ultra fancy, it worked, and that's all that I care :>.

No iWork 06 for me

Damn it. iWork '06 crashed like hell on my box. Oh well, I don't have a need to use iWork anyway :-E ....

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When will Macmini Intel edition finally be released? :-S

Reading CHM file on Mac OSX

I continue find ways to move my Windows XP life style to my Mac OSX 10.4.4, and it was totally awesome.

I found a tool called Chmox that allows me to read .chm file on MacOSX. Very sweet and it works great.

Oh, and not all things are positive about my Mac experience. A while ago I was organizing the FAT32 drive, and I found dragging and dropping cause the file system to mess something up big time! I am not sure it's just the FAT32 thing or what. Luckily I have a back up in the trash can. Guess I need to proceed with care :-I . And have all my important stuff save to the web.

I just reformatted the problem FAT32 partition again. Let me observe this bad puppy for a while and see how goes.

I also found that some apps CANNOT be installed on my FAT32 partition. I am not sure if those app has to be on the bootup drive, or that they have to be in a non-FAT32 partition. However I want a central place to put all my App. Luckily the age old alias concept stilll exist in OSX 10.4.4 (I still remember the time I started using alias back in the System 7.0 days, and it was wicked :-D ) .

No plug and play on my OSX 10.4.4

I experiment a few system hang up on my OSX 10.4.4 after I unplug Firewire device and USB 2.0 device. So note-to-self: NO plug and play on my Mac OSX 10.4.4. Yeah I know, I got what I paid for.

My Apple 10.4.4 Journey continues

Another day of mess with the MacOSX 10.4.4.

I just found out that X11 was not by default installed on my machine and thus I had problem starting up OpenOffice 2.0. After reading some forum, like this page and most importantly this page, I ran the "Optional Installs" from the MacOSX 10.4.4 installation CD, under "application " checked "X11" and eventually I got OpenOffice 2.0 running.

Man and it sucked.

Although the application looks OK in generally, I was shocked that it does not support Chinese input on OSX! Chinese input was OK on Windows XP side. In fact, I am now rather use TextWrangle to edit text simply because it support Chinese. Man what a shame!

Seems like Camino runs faster than FireFox on Mac OSX

Somehow, I found Camino runs a bit faster on my Intel MacOSX 10.4.4 than FireFox.

Oh, and the Mac OSX looks much much better than Windows XP. I may stop using my XP soon :-E .

Awesome, got network going, and now working 1280x1024 graphic!

Thanks to the hints provided by wiki.osx86project.org, I can now run the MacOSX 10.4.4 at 1280x1024 resolution, and have Internet access (with some minor side effect).

- Network issue
I copied the IONetworkingFamily.kext from my office's 10.4.3 Build. Click [Authenticate] button to allow the copying. Reboot the machine, and after the MacOSX booted up, I got one error message box. But now I can use Internet. However, after I reboot, I got TWO error messagebox this time, and I had to put the IONetworkingFamily.kext again in the /System/Library/Extension folder.

So now I need to start a habit to put the IONetworkingFamily.kext in so that the next time I reboot I got a working Internet environment, which actually isn't way too bad.


- 1280 x 1024 Graphic mode
I read this site and figured out that all I need to do is put the following lines:

Graphics Mode
1280x1024x32

in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist file. Reboot, and now I have this fancy 1280 x 1024 screen. Totally awesome.


Oh, by the way, DO NOT update to 10.4.5 using either the "System Update..." or downloda the Intel 10.4.5. Either way of upgrading will render your machine to useless! So stay with the 10.4.4 and enjoy it >:-}

And my machine is too slow to enjoy any fancy screen saver and such. If I use the MacOSX side enough, I may actually buy a better graphic card that support dual output and MacOSX.

Final, my Alt key becomes the Apple key. Funky.

Best MacOSX for Windows .... so far

I just found out the best Mac OSX theme for Windows XP, and it's called Flyakite OSX. It's free and fun, so give it a try.

Want to use WordPress, but ...

I spent 2 hours trying to set up WordPress so that I can use it to publish the "Wanna Have a Mac" site with some new nice and fancy template. However, I spent so much time and still couldn't find a way to make WordPres sent me an email whenever I publish a message. So I have no choice but fall back to Blogger.com . :-I .