Below Belief

After a lot of hunting, I finally found a fix for the various issues which plague the dell mini 9 after hackintoshing to Snow Leopard using Netbook Installer 0.8.3 RC4.

The issues were:

* Sound worked from the speakers, but not via the headphone socket
* Internal microphone wasn’t available/didn’t work and consequently Skype would crash when making an outbound call (presumably expecting a mic)

Solution:

* Get the AppleHDA.kext file from this post: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html

* Open Finder. Press Ctrl + Shift + G and type /Extra
* Paste the kext file above into the Mini9Ext folder
* Run UpdateExtra (which is in the Extra folder) and click Update Extensions.

Now if you reboot you should find the Internal Mic is visible in the System Preferences Sound panel and sound works via the headphones!

Last problem is that whenyou put the Mac to sleep sound doesn’t work after the restore.

To fix this you need “SleepWatcher” a daemon that allows some control before and after sleep to kick the kext into shape. Follow the instructions here http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda.html and make sure you swap the path for the kext to /Extra/Mini9Ext/AppleHDA.kext and add “sleep 3″ like shown here: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-os-x-discussion/15380-sound-mic-working-applehda-5.html

The only minor glitch is that when no sound is playing the headphones have a periodic hiss – but when playing sound it sounds great

So sound is possible, that’s pretty much all the functions working now.

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So I read today that the Times plans to begin making “24-hour subscription” payments for access to it’s current daily edition online.

The Guardian reported it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/17/times-editor-james-harding-online-charging

The decline of newspaper economics has been well reported and I guess I’m one of newspapers’ “worst customers”. I occasionally buy a Sunday Times – almost never a daily paper – but I read the Guardian UK pretty much every day because they are “enlightened” enough to publish their full content via RSS feeds. I read these feeds on my phone – whilst travelling or otherwise in need of content – and the good thing about the Guardian feeds is they are complete (not just a synopsis, requiring a visit to the website to read the rest like most other papers) and don’t contain any advertising.

I was thinking though about the Times’ editor’s comments – that it costs money to do high quality reporting and despite the “democratisation” of journalism in the form of blogging and amateur reporting online, this will never fully replace high quality newspaper journalism for reach, depth and fact-checking. I’ve never really thought about paying for my daily news, but after his comments I figured, maybe I would be happy to pay for my Guardian (or Times) RSS feed access – a small fee per day – to go towards keeping the high quality and unbiased reporting.

After all I happily pay the BBC license fee which covers my (well used) Radio 4 Today programme daily listening, amongst others.

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Last night we joined The Infidel Boat Club (TIBC) – the drinking arm of the Girton Alumni Rowing club at their annual dinner – mainly as a warm up for Mr Beeley’s stag.

Venue was the Oxford and Cambridge club – one of those stuffy ex-Gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall which always look attractive to begin with until you find out the various archaic and idiotic rules that make them totally impractical in the 21st century. Like you have to be wearing a jacket to order at the bar, you’re not allowed to use your mobile in the building and the barman is a complete jobsworth…

http://www.oxfordandcambridgeclub.co.uk/

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Halloween is big in GG – there must have been 30 or 40 kids who descended on us over the course of the evening – all dressed up proper. And they were polite this year too. We cooked chestnuts and marshmallows on the chiminea and met our new neighbours. Was great.

Oh and we made good pumpkins.

As promised a few photos from our fab holiday in Italy – doing a photography course in Orvieto and a cookery one in Perugia

You can see them best on Flickr, but a few below too:

 

Few favourites:

More from the course itself, coming later…

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I’m enjoying messing about with my dell mini.

I had a problem though – which seems quite common – that it wouldn’t wake from sleep.

When I put it to sleep, the white light would stay on full, the screen would go off and it would refuse to wake up. The only way to wake it was to hold down the power key and reboot.

I found that it’s something to do with hibernation mode not working. So I downloaded a utility called SmartSleep, switched it to sleep only mode and then deleted the “sleepimage” file which is found in /var/vm/sleepimage

(you can do it from the utility, or by opening a terminal window and typing sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage and entering your password at the prompt).

I also have legacy USB support and USB wake support disabled in the BIOS.

And now I can put it to sleep from the main menu, by shutting the lid or using Fn – 1. And it wakes up with a quick press of the power button.

All good – hope this is useful.