« Oatmeal

After weeks of not having Bluetooth on my computer I finally figured out what was wrong today. The USB dongle was sitting on the floor…instead of, you know, being plugged into the back of the computer 🤦‍♂️

I think the days of the Hackintosh may be numbered…

The perils of running a hackintosh: my machine seems to have choked mid-update. Now I can’t boot the machine into safe or recovery modes. Trying a fresh install now, but that too seems to have gotten hung up 🤔

Life with a hackintosh…might be time to wipe everything and start new 😬

Thinking I may be slow to update to macOS 10.13 High Sierra on both my machines. Haven’t seen much talk of serious security improvements, but I am Interested in HEIF/HEVC support. I’m a wee bit worried about APFS conversion on the hackintosh, as well as EFI firmware checking and call-back.

📡 after about 10 minutes of fiddling I’ve got wifi up and running on the hackintosh! 🕺

Weird quirk of the hackintosh: I can hear power cycling through the machine if speakers are plugged in and not playing music. Every fraction of a second or so I here a tiny static click. The speakers don’t make the sound when plugged in to anything other than the hackintosh. 🐝

🔊 got audio working on the hackintosh during lunch today!

I finished setting up the Hackintosh and worked from it all day today. It. Was. Awesome. This machine is absolutely beastly in comparison to the late 2012 Mac Mini I’ve been rocking as my full-time work machine for the past few years.

The Mini was getting a wee bit long in the tooth so I have been working from my MacBook Air more often than not. I’m excited to get back to working at a proper desktop machine. I’m a bajillion times more productive, and I like having a dedicated work space—it makes it easier to walk away and stop working when the day is done.

So far running the Hackintosh (thinking of calling it a PineApple…becuase it is sort of like a mac and I’m in Maine…get it, get it?) has been a breeze. I anticipated more hoops would need to be jumped through, but so far sailing has been smooth. Tonymacx86 is a veritable wizard’s tome of helpful applications, how-to documentation and troubleshooting tips.

I also took this opportunity to reevaluate what tools I need and where.

Here is a quick list of what I’ve installed on the machine so far:

• iTerm2, a co-worker turned me on to iTerm, I’ve become addicted to its mouse support for specific tasks (e.g. clicking on links in IRC chats)
• Homebrew, because I literally don’t know how to run a mac without it
• Vim and my beloved .vimrc, of course
  • vundle.vim, my script installer of choice
  • Also installed neovim. Gonna give it a spin
• Microsoft Office Suite (because work demands that I do so). I typically use Mutt or Mail.app for email and plaintext for everything and anything else that I can
• Dropbox
• nvAlt, which I use as a programming wiki/notebook
• Adium, it may be old…neigh, ANCIENT, but I haven’t found a better IRC GUI
• Transmit, the single greatest FTP client in the UNIVERSE. @ me!
• KeePassX, because I ditched LastPass a few months ago, and haven’t looked back
• Keybase, so so so fine for managing all the .ssh stuff
• Sublimetext, because sometimes it is nice to be able to click on stuff
• Xcode, of course
• Visual Studio, again, becuase work demands it
• pgweb, for all my database-y tasks
• ImageOptim
• Firefox
• Chrome, for testing
• MAMP
• PasteBot, I started using this when the public beta was released a few months back after having never used a clipboard manager before. Life changing. World changing.
• Toggl’s desktop client, because I gotta keep track of what I work on and when
• GPG Keychain
• Node, and a couple of node packages:
  • uncss
  • livedown
  • csscomb
• weechat, for when Adium dies ☠️
• Hack Font, my favorite fixed width, powerline font

The big new thing I installed was fish, instead of my normal bash config. I’ve been reading a lot about fish lately, and like its scripting syntax…also autocomplete is pretty luscious.

I consciously didn’t install any graphics software on this machine. My thinking is twofold: a) I loathe doing graphics work, and much prefer to do it in code if I can, b) I’m going to do what graphics work I need to on my Macbook Air because I’m a lot quicker with the touchpad than a normal mouse.

…I also haven’t installed Spotify yet because I don’t have any speakers 🌽

First post from the hackintosh!

Made a little whoops that resulted in my having to reinstall the OS, but now I’m up and running. This thing is BLAZING fast. Kicks the ancient Mac mini and MacBook Air I’ve been rocking in the tush.

45 minutes into life with a hackintosh…need to reinstall the OS. Whoops! 🤦‍♂️

🍍 on y va hackintosh! 🍍

Installing Visual Studio while deciding whether to hackintosh or iMac. ⚖️